J. Randal Matheny

A great deal of debate has occurred over the question of "literal" translation as opposed to the "dynamic equivalence" approach that the NIV and most modern translations employ. This is the effort to translate the thought rather than give a word for word rendering. The fact is that there is no such thing as translating word for word from one language into another. The KJV does not do it. The ASV does not do it. There are many examples of dynamic equivalency in these and all versions. Translations will necessarily involve some paraphrase. I have worked enough with translators in preaching in foreign lands to understand this reality.

He stole my thunder. :)

This is a browsable, Web-based interface to the Greek New Testament (GNT). It has several distinguishing features.

• Unlike packages such as ``Logos'', you don't need to install it: if you are reading this page using any graphical web browser (e.g. Netscape or Internet Explorer), you can browse the GNT.

• You don't need any Greek fonts. The text is rendered as images (GIF files), normally one for each verse. This gives you good-quality text - much better than several widely-used installable fonts - with no effort on your part.

• Subject to the limitations imposed by limited bandwidth, the system is fast. Several levels of cacheing are employed, on both server and client. Consequently, in most circumstances only a few kilobytes of data need to be transferred for each request. The worst case is requesting a complete chapter for the first time (e.g. John 1 is sent as a 110 kbyte data stream), but even this causes only a short delay in most cases. Because of the cacheing, speed tends to increase as you use the system.

• The system does not use JavaScript, Java, client-side image maps, or any other recent enhancement to HTML or browser technology. I'm by no means averse to using new features - I'm not a ``technophobe'' - but there are severe and often unacknowledged problems of incompatibility and inefficiency which I wanted especially to avoid in this project. For example, client-side image maps would seem to be ideal for implementing selection; but this feature proved to be unacceptably slow, at any rate on the browser on which I tested it.

• There is a search facility. You can search for a given word; for a word occurring close to another given word; for a word with a given root (base or lemma); and you can limit the search by grammatical category. Examples:
  • Find all perfect imperatives. (There are 4 of them.)
  • Find all plural forms of a particular word.

  The search facility is fast, simple and self-explanatory.

• You specify Greek input by typing a Latin transliteration on the keyboard

This site is also hosted here, which may become the principal URL for it:

http://www.kimmitt.co.uk/gnt/gnt.html

This is the most updated Greek text I've found on the Internet. The NA text is in it's 27th edition, last I heard, which is the edition I have, so the online edition is very recent compared to most texts found on Bible study sites.