The Hebrew New Testament
In order better to reach Jews with the whole Word of God, the Society is pleased to be producing with its Ginsburg Old Testament an edition of the Hebrew New Testament which is based upon the Greek Received Text.
Christians throughout the ages have sought to bring the Jews to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, and one major way of doing this has been through the production of the New Testament in Hebrew. The New Testament, unlike the Old Testament, was originally written in Greek. Therefore, for Jewish readers to have a New Testament in Hebrew, it would need to be translated from the Greek. This task was undertaken on various occasions. The first printed portion of the New Testament in Hebrew was an imperfect edition of Matthew's Gospel in 1537, with the first complete New Testament, translated by Hutter, being printed in 1599.
A variety of other editions of the Hebrew New Testament appeared in print through the next three centuries. In 1886 the Society published an edition of the Hebrew New Testament which was begun by Isaac Salkinson and completed by C. D. Ginsburg. This edition, in an idiomatic type of Hebrew and prepared from a critical form of Greek text, continued to be circulated by the Society until the 1960s.
The British and Foreign Bible Society in 1873 commissioned Franz Delitzsch to prepare a translation of the New Testament in Hebrew. This translation, completed in 1877, was in a more literal style and was also made from the critical text of the Greek New Testament. The next year, at the request of the BFBS, Delitzsch revised this translation in order to bring it into conformity to the Textus Receptus.
In the Society's desire to see the Scriptures produced in faithful and accurate editions, in 1963 the Rev. Terence Brown, then Secretary of the Society, advised the Committee of the Society that the currently-circulated Ginsburg-Salkinson Hebrew New Testament was still in conformity to the critical text, whereas the Delitzsch Hebrew was Textus Receptus based. Thus, it was decided that the Society would cease publication of the Ginsburg-Salkinson and begin publication of the Delitzsch. We continue to do so to this day, and it is this Delitzsch New Testament which will complete our Hebrew Bible.