The Marc mu l t i l i n g u e Pro j e c t 5 within one centre as the years advance, to the extent that the Gospel text read in Alexandria in 200 AD differs from that read there in 350 AD. The same may be said of Caesarea or Antioch. The evolution of the Greek text is a fact that needs to be recognised and reacted to. This project allows that developing tradition to be readily recognised in a distinctive visual presentation. If each major text-type can be defined with variations from those traditions in allied manuscripts then research into the history of the text can be facilitated. That help is offered by the presentation of the evidence in the Marc multilingue project. For those whose task it is to edit a critical printed edition of the text the multifaceted evidence can be daunting. An editor (or, more probably in view of the mass of material, an editorial committee) not only has to decide which manuscripts to use but then to read, compare and evaluate them, before attempting to establish the supposed original text. Finally the editors have to display in an apparatus those alternative, ‘seconda- ry’, readings deemed important or significant. These dilemmas are well known. Printed editions of the Greek New Testament give us a text that does not exist in any one extant manuscript witness, and probably never ex- isted in any one manuscript –even the autograph– of the particular text being established. All printed testaments are recent editorial creations. Most printed editions of the Greek New Testament are clones of either (a) Westcott and Hort, the title to whose edition of 1881 was, significantly, The New Testament in the Original Greek (implying of course that their edition reproduced the original Greek New Testament, not that it was an edited form of the New Testament in its original tongue), or (b) the TR, such as The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text4. Either the text is close to (a) the (combined) witness of Codex Sinaiticus (‫)10 א‬ and Codex Vaticanus (B 03), or (b) Erasmus’ edition of 1516. No critical edition merely reproduces as its New Testament the entire text of any one particular manuscript. The Textus Receptus, as its name was meant to suggest, was an edi- tion that was ‘acceptable (to all readers)’, to quote from the preface to the Elzevir edition of 1633. The Nestle text, as a representative of Westcott and Hort redivivus, was at one time promoted as a new TR, and actively advertised as a so-called standard text, as close as possible to the sup- posed original. The recent reprinting of the 27th. edition of the Nestle text in 1993 is less dogmatic: it now presents itself realistically in its 4 Z.C. Hodges and A.L. Farstad, The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text (Nashville, Camden and New York, 21985).