History of the Nestle-Aland Edition In 1898 Eberhard Nestle
published the first edition of his Novum Testamentum Graece.
Based on a simple yet ingenious idea it disseminated the
insights of the textual criticism of that time through a hand
edition designed for university and school studies and for
church purposes. Nestle took the three leading scholarly
editions of the Greek New Testament at that time by Tischendorf,
Westcott/Hort and Weymouth as a basis. (After 1901 he replaced
the latter with Bernhard Weiß’s 1894/1900 edition.) Where their
textual decisions differed from each other Nestle chose for his
own text the variant which was preferred by two of the editions
included, while the variant of the third was put into the
apparatus. The text-critical apparatus remained rudimentary in
all the editions published by Eberhard Nestle. It was Eberhard
Nestle’s son Erwin who provided the 13th edition of 1927 with a
consistent critical apparatus showing evidence from manuscripts,
early translations and patristic ci