Society of Biblical Literature: Texts and Resources

Not Open Access, but worthy of note. SBL Members have access after signing in:

Society of Biblical Literature: Texts and Resources

Biblical scholars are fundamentally indebted to the work of text-critics. Texts and resources for this work are available to SBL members on this page, and SBL is grateful to the partnership with the German Bible Society that makes these available. 

Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies - This is an excellent collection of online versions of lexica for languages related to biblical studies. Though these are not necessarily the most current lexica, they represent tremendously important works and are an outstanding resource for working in the languages of biblical studies, including biblical and rabbinnic Hebrew, Aramaic, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic.

 

Textual Resources from the German Bible Society

The decades-long commitment of the German Bible Society has produced the staples that have nourished generations of biblical scholars and translators. The booklet Textual Research on the Bible highlights this work. Through a partnership with the German Bible Society, the reading texts (upper texts, without critical apparatus) of four editions are available to SBL members in several formats for download and personal use.

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia   Complete PDF Text without Apparatus Individual book pdfs Online text via GBS iFrame	UBS Greek New Testament Complete PDF Text without Apparatus Individual book pdfs Online text via GBS iFrame
Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam  Complete PDF Text without Apparatus Individual book pdfs Online text via GBS iFrame	Septuaginta Complete PDF Text without Apparatus Individual book pdfs Online text via GBS iFrame

About the German Bible Society

Textual Resources from the Society of Biblical Literature:

The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition, edited by Michael W. Holmes (SBLGNT)*

SBL in association with Logos Bible Software offers a new, critically edited Greek New Testament in electronic and print formats. See more information on the relationship between the SBLGNT and the UBS and Nestle-Aland texts below.

The text of the SBLGNT has been encoded in a Unicode-compliant font so users can exchange files easily without having to secure a special Greek font. Users may use SBLGreek or any other Unicode font that supports the full range of Greek characters. 

• The SBLGNT edition is freely available for download here.
• The print edition of the SBLGNT can be purchased directly from SBL.

* A Note Regarding the Relationship between the SBLGNT and the NA and UBS Texts
 

The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (SBLGNT) is not a standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament; rather, it is a critically edited edition. Instead of its apparatus recording variants readings among manuscripts, it records differences in other published editions of the Greek New Testament. In so doing, the SBLGNT is a "reading edition" that alerts readers to text-critical issues.

With regard to its text, the Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (SBLGNT) stands as an alternative to, for example, the NA26-27 and UBS3-4-5 editions (identical since 1975). Given that all these editions in different ways trace their roots back to the influential edition and methods of Westcott & Hort, it is no surprise that they present a similar text in many respects. In the more than 540 places where the SBLGNT differs from the others, however, the differences are generally due to the circumstance that the SBLGNT reflects a somewhat different approach to textual criticism, particularly with regard to the history of the transmission of the text, than that followed by the editorial committee responsible for the NA26-27 and UBS3-4-5 texts (to the extent that that approach is exhibited in the Textual Commentary edited by Bruce M. Metzger on behalf of the editorial committee and in the Alands’ volume on The Text of the New Testament), and therefore sometimes reaches a different assessment of the evidence.

With respect to its apparatus, the SBLGNT stands in a complementary relationship to the apparatuses presented respectively by the NA26-27 and UBS3-4-5 editions. The future format of a critical apparatus is likely to be electronic and linked to online manuscript evidence. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to invest resources in this type of limited apparatus of manuscript evidence. It would be inappropriate, however, to leave the reader of the SBLGNT with no guide to the places where the manuscript tradition exhibits noteworthy variation. So a decision was reached to present an apparatus displaying the textual decisions of five editions of the Greek NT. This apparatus informs the reader of the presence of selected textual variants, concisely indicates how representative editions have handled the matter, and alerts the reader of the need to consult a fuller apparatus—such as those presented in the NA and UBS editions—for more information about the variants and the evidence supporting them.