This work is a companion volume to the fourth edition of the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament (UBS4), published by the German Bible Society on behalf of the United Bible Societies early in 1993. It also makes a great companion to the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible, which contains the critical apparatus of the NA27 Novum Testamentum Graece, and to Comfort & Barrett's Text of the Earliest New Testament Greek Manuscripts.One of the chief purposes of the commentary is to set forth the reasons that led the Committee, or a majority of the members of the Committee, to adopt certain variant readings for inclusion in the text and to relegate certain other readings to the apparatus. On the basis of a record of the voting of the Committee, as well as, for most sessions, more or less full notes of the discussions that preceded the voting, the present writer has sought to frame and express concisely (a) the main problem or problems involved in each set of variants and (b) the Committee's evaluation and resolution of those problems.

Bruce Manning Metzger (1914-2007) was the George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was the author of hundreds of articles on Bible translation, textual criticism, the Hebrew Bible, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament. He published numerous books, including The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content; The Text of the New Testament; Manuscripts of the Greek Bible; A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament; Lexical Aids for Students of New Testament Greek; and The Canon of the New Testament. He was the general editor of the New Testament Tools and Studies series, The Reader's Digest Bible, and The Oxford Companion to the Bible and was on the editorial boards of the International Greek New Testament Project, the United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, and the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).