This is the second edition, co-published in Halle and London in 1796 and 1806, of Griesbach's two-volume Novum Testamentum Graece, which first appeared in 1774–1775. A professor of the New Testament at the University of Jena in Germany, Griesbach is regarded as one of the founding fathers of modern textual criticism of the Bible. Griesbach's pioneering theory was to group different versions of New Testament texts into three families - Western, Alexandrian, and Constantinopolitan - based on a set of fifteen criteria. He set out these rules in an important addition to the Latin Prolegomena of Volume 1 of the second edition. Volume 1 contains the complete gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.