verse-per-line format prepared by Alan Bunning 2/2/07.
The first text from Eberhard Nestle was prepared in 1898 and was not much of an eclectic text as he simply took the majority reading between the texts of Westcott & Hort, Tischendorf and Weymouth. In subsequent editions, the text of Bernhard Weiss was substituted for the Weymouth text. The 13th edition was prepared under the supervision of Nestle's son Erwin Nestle and for the first time included a true critical apparatus, although limited and sporadic. Up through the 25th edition, the text continued to be slightly revised, and the critical apparatus was expanded as more manuscripts were added and later checked against the some of the original manuscripts by Kurt Aland. The 26th edition in 1979 was the first to be produced under the supervision of Kurt Aland essentially resulting in a new book. The critical apparatus was radically revised and made convenient to use with witnesses cited from an extensive set of papyri, uncials, and minuscules -- about 20 witnesses for each reading. Except for differences such accents, punctuation, and paragraph divisions, the text was supposed to be identical to the United Bible Societies 3rd edition of which Aland was one of several editors on a committee. The Nestle-Aland 27th edition text represents minor corrections to the previous edition and its text is supposed to be identical to the United Bible Societies 4th edition. The Nestle-Aland text represents an eclectic form of textual criticism which follows an editorial committee's choice of variant readings found in all known manuscripts and text types. Similar to the Westcott & Hort text, this critical text primarily aligns itself with earliest "Alexandrian" texts such as codex Vaticanus and codex Sinaiticus in opposition to the Byzantine textform, although it does include a smattering of selected Byzantine readings. The Nestle-Aland texts have provided the basis for most modern Bible versions such as the NASB and the NIV and the corresponding UBS text is commonly used by missionary societies when translating texts into foreign languages.
The following texts were normalized and then compared to each other. All differences between them were resolved with Nestle-Aland 27th printed text to create the master text.
In the process comparing these texts, the UBS4 text was also examined which contained 9 alterations when compared to the Nestle-Aland 27th text. Although they are claimed to be identical, it is apparently not widely know that there are minor textual differences between the corresponding United Bible Societies and Nestle-Aland texts.
The versification of the Nestle-Aland 27th text does not exactly follow any one particular standard. The UBS 3rd Corrected edition which is similar states in its Introduction, p. xi: "The verse divisions…with a few exceptions, are identical with the verse divisions first introduced by Stephanus in his 1551 edition of the Greek New Testament, and are widely adopted in modern editions." The analyzed texts all employed various verse divisions and some alternative divisions were specified with the Online Bible text in the form (c-v). Wherever the analyzed texts differed in verse divisions, the versification of Nestle-Aland's published text was followed. Verses absent from the text: Matt 17:21, 18:11, 23:14, Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46, 11:26, 15:28, Luke 17:36, 23:17, John 5:4, Acts 8:37, 5:34, 19:41, 24:7, 28:29, Rom. 16:24.
Aland, Kurt, et al. eds. The Greek New Testament. 4th revised edition. Stuttgart, Germany: United Bible Societies, 1994.
Aland, Kurt, et al. eds. Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. 27th edition. Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1999.
Broman, Vincent. Nestle-Aland 26th/27th edition. "Plain Unix format". http://users.mstar2.net/broman/na26-l.zip, accessed 24 October 2003.
BibleDatabase. Greek NT (Nestle-Aland 26th Edition). Extracted from BibleDatabase program module. http://bibledatabase.net/prt/b_greek_ubs3.exe, accessed 4 March 2007.
Center for Computer Analysis of Texts, University of Pennsylvania. United Bible Societies 1992 3rd Ed. "Greek NT (NA26) Morphologically Parsed Line per Word". The Unbound Bible, Biola University, ftp://unboundftp.biola.edu/pub/CCAT_Parsed_NA26.zip, accessed 25 October 2003.
The Unbound Bible, Biola University. Greek NT (Nestle-Aland 26th). ftp://unboundftp.biola.edu/pub/greekNT_UBS3.zip, accessed 24 October 2003.
Robinson, Maurice A. Ph.D. 1881 Westcott-Hort Greek Text. "With variant readings from the UBS 3-4/Nestle 26-27 editions". Extracted from Online Bible program module, dated 12 July 2003.
Tauber, James. CCAT MorphGNT, version 5.08, derived from Center for Computer Analysis of Texts, University of Pennsylvania. http://morphgnt.org/projects/ccat-morphgnt/ccat-tauber-morphgnt-v5_08.zip, accessed 2 February, 2007.