Wilbur Gingrich’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (1957). The fourth German edition formed the basis for William F. This is more teamwork, for the responsible editors, Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, were assisted by scholars of the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung at Münster, especially by Viktor Reichmann. The fifth edition (1958) represents the crowning point of Bauer’s work, and, in spite of the many accretions in the previous editions, it could be justly described as “verbessert und stark vermehrt”.Īfter Bauer’s death in 1960, a sixth edition, “völlig neu bearbeitet”, appeared in 1988. This was an immense task, undertaken by one man in an age when no electronic retrieval devices were available and printed word indexes to individual texts were scarce.

For that edition, Bauer had undertaken a systematic search of much of Greek literature, from Homer down to the Byzantine period, for parallels that could explain NT usage and help to define the semantics of the NT vocabulary.

Bauer introduced such material in the second edition, and still more in the third, but it is with the fourth edition (1952) that a more decisive step forward is taken. Although, unlike his predecessors, Preuschen had included the vocabulary of the apostolic fathers for comparisons with NT Greek, he did not exploit the papyrus texts and other linguistic material that had become available in the last decades of the nineteenth century. When this second edition was completed in 1928, the pretentious epithet Vollständiges had disappeared from the title, but Wörterbuch had supplanted the more modest Handwörterbuch, and it is as “Bauer’s Wörterbuch” that this lexicon, in its successive editions, has become known to generations of classicists and New Testament (henceforth: NT) scholars starting with the third edition (1937), it had only Bauer’s name on the title page.Īlready the second edition could claim completeness with more right than Preuschen’s original lexicon.

It all started, you may say, in 1920 when the Göttingen professor Walter Bauer was entrusted with the task of preparing a new edition of Erwin Preuschen’s Vollständiges griechisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur, which had appeared in 1910. This is a book with a history, as the copious information on its title page indicates.

Sas university edition parallels