Editio Critica Maior (ECM) is a critical edition of the Greek New Testament being produced by the Institut für neutestamentliche Textforschung (Eng. "Institute for New Testament Textual Research")—which is famous, for example, for the Novum Testamentum Graece (or Nestle-Aland)—in collaboration with other international institutes.
The Editio Critica Maior project is supported by the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. It is to be completed by the year 2030.
The ECM is a documentation of the expressions of Christian faith communities as they transmitted the New Testament in time through Greek manuscripts, translations, and ancient citations in the first 1,000 years of New Testament transmission. The difference between earlier and later readings is shown by the concept of 'direction' in the ECM, with the earliest expression of the Christian readings printed in the main text.[1]
The Coherence Based Genealogical Method (CBGM) is the method being used to construct the ECM. The CBGM has two components, pregenealogical coherence and genealogical coherence. Pregenealogical coherence is a text-critical method which uses computer tools to compare the places of variation New Testament Witnesses to determine if the readings are related. Then, critical principles are applied by a textual scholar to make a decision on the directionality of the reading itself. Places where the direction cannot be determined, or split readings, are indicated by a diamond in the text. The ECM is the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament to include a 1) systematic assessment of witnesses, 2) a mature consideration of those witnesses, 3) a reconstruction of the oldest form of the recoverable text, or initial text, 4) a complete and systematic apparatus, and 5) a full explanation and justification of its methodology and conclusions.[1]
The recent editions of Nestle-Aland (the 28th edition), and the Greek New Testament of the United Bible Societies (the 5th edition), follow the text of the ECM for the Catholic epistles.[2]