Early Bible Copies: Why You Should Care | Michael Dormandy

In this episode of Exploring the Language of Scripture, Daniel Mikkelsen is joined by Michael Dormandy—a minister, New Testament scholar, and specialist in early Christian manuscripts—for a rich and engaging conversation on the transmission of Scripture, the power of the original languages, and the first complete Bibles.

Drawing from his work on the earliest full New Testament manuscripts—known as pandects—Michael reflects on the value of biblical languages for personal faith, the complexity of textual variation, and how Greek can illuminate key passages like Romans 9:5 and Romans 8:28. He also addresses common misconceptions about the manuscript tradition and why early copies still matter deeply for the Church today.

Whether you're curious about how we got the New Testament, or interested in the theological weight of reading Scripture in Greek, this episode offers a compelling case for understanding the Bible’s history as part of our life of discipleship.

📢 Season 2 Announcement:
This episode marks the finale of Season 1. Season 2 begins on Wednesday 13 August 2025, with 24 new conversations released every other Wednesday.
In the meantime, stay tuned for clips and highlights from across the season.

✍️ If there’s something you’d like covered in the next season, let me know in the comments.

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🎯 Chapters:
00:00 – Welcome to the Season Finale
01:38 – Meet Michael Dormandy: Scholar, Minister, Manuscript Expert
03:42 – A Classical Path to Biblical Languages
08:03 – How Greek and Hebrew Opened Up Scripture
10:37 – Greek Helps Reckoning with Romans 9:5 for Yourself
20:03 – “When I Am Weak, Then I Am Able”: Dunamis and the Gospel
22:50 – Does God Work All Things or Do All Things Work? (Romans 8:28)
33:18 – Pandects and Majuscules: The First Complete Bibles
34:59 – Why These Four Ancient Bibles Still Matter
38:49 – Textual Foundations: What the Manuscripts Can—and Can’t—Tell Us
45:58 – Two Common Misconceptions About Early Bibles
49:39 – Comparing Manuscript Quality: Early vs. Later Texts
56:58 – Rethinking Scribal Habits: A Case for New Methods
01:06:58 – How Ancient Texts Strengthen Everyday Faith

🎵 Music Credits:
Music from #Uppbeat
🔗 https://uppbeat.io/t/all-good-folks/aspire

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Podcast Keywords:
biblical languages, New Testament, Old Testament, Christ, bible study,  Relationship with God, learn biblical languages, Biblical Theology, Christianity, Covenants, New covenant, old covenant, language acquisition, Biblical Greek, Biblical Hebrew.

Transcript

0:00

I do want also to sort of push back against the idea that the NIV or the ESV has arrived on our bookshelves as if it was emailed to the publishers from God and then printed. That's not the case. I felt you couldn't really talk about the authority of scripture or try to live your life believing scripture or encourage others to do the same without kind of understanding where it had come from. In your book, building a book of books, you focus on these early preserved whole Bible manuscripts. Why did you decide to do that? We don't have, it's worth saying this out loud I think, because it's often kind of unsaid and forgotten therefore, we don't actually have any of the original papyrus and parchment whatever on which the New Testament was written. What would you say that of misconceptions about like maybe scholars and laypeople have about these early complete Bibles? um I think about these early complete Bibles specifically... Welcome back to another episode of Exploring the Language of Scripture, brought to you by NT Greek Tutoring, the place for personalized Greek learning in your spare time. I'm your host, Daniel Mikkelsen, the founder of NT Greek Tutoring and a PhD candidate in New Testament and Christian origins at the University of Edinburgh. And this podcast exists to make gems from biblical studies accessible to everyday Christians and show how the biblical languages opens up scripture. Our aim is to increase your love for God and his words, so you become more joyful witness for his mission. And... This episode is going to be the last one of the season. I will be saying a little bit more about what that means and when the second season will be starting at end of the episode. But without further ado, today I'm very honored to be joined by Michael Dormandy. Michael is a senior scientist at the Department of Biblical and Historical Theology at the University of Innsbruck. Before he arrived at Innsbruck, he was the lecturer at the Anglican Seminary, Ribbon College in Cuddesdon I've probably mispronounced that city. em But, and then he was an associate member of the Faculty of Theology at University of Oxford. Michael holds a PhD in theology from the University of Cambridge. And prior to that, he studied classics and theology at Oxford. In his PhD, he examines the earliest manuscript that contains the whole Bible. And this work has been published under the title Building a Book of Books. textual characteristics of the early Greek Majuscal Pandects, em which we will be talking much more about later in this episode. So you're interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the oldest preserved Bibles and what that means and how we can read scripture and then stick around for that. And I'm personally very excited to discuss this in more detail. Michael has also published several articles on textual criticism and New Testament exegesis, and he is also an ordained Anglican minister. And I personally had the honor of overlapping with Michael at Tyndale House and get to know him there for a few months as he finished up his PhD studies and I started my MPhil studies in Cambridge. Yet we still had some great conversations and stimulating environment there at Tyndale House and some Hebrew readings I can remember. Yeah. And so it's a great honor to have you on the podcast today, Michael. Welcome here. Thank you so much. It is lovely to see you again online after quite a long time and really excited about this conversation. So thank you for having me. Yeah, the honor is mine, the pleasure is mine and it's great to see you again. Anything else you want to add before we jump into some questions? think, yeah, keen to start the conversation. Sure. So how did you get into the study of the biblical languages? Thank you. from as far back as I can remember, my father was a uh massive enthusiast for history, not least the ancient world. And it was always part of the sort of fabric of our childhood, that it was one of dad's great interests and passions. He was a medical doctor by profession, but in his retirement, which was most of my life, retired from work when I was about five years old. In his retirement, he wrote books, including academic books that were critically successful about history, mainly of science and culture. so I've kind of, my kind of interest in history in the ancient world has always been nurtured very strongly by my family. I was also very fortunate. I went to a school where ancient languages were not only offered, but encouraged and extremely well taught. I had Latin from age 11, brilliant teachers. And then at the age of 13, I had the chance to choose to either add Greek to the Latin or a second modern language or sort of social studies, politics. And Dad told me, I think, very good advice that he said, Michael, you can always learn about politics or social studies by just reading the news, but you'll never get a chance to learn Greek again, probably. So why don't you pick Greek? So I did. And I loved Latin and Greek in school. They had all the interest and the great stories and kind of human interest of history or literature. But you didn't have to write many essays in exam conditions. You just had to do translations, I found much easier. So loved the subjects in school. And also in school, I really got into kind of performing public speaking, being in front of a crowd and talking. And as I was coming to the end of school and starting university, I got invited on a Christian summer camp and went to a really inspiring church as an undergraduate. And there was a Christian union in my school and things. And I sort of had those three really blossoming passions, ancient things and ancient languages. sort of public speaking in front of a crowd and the Christian gospel. basically they came together into the work I now do as a theologian and as a minister. I'm very aware how many kind of opportunities I've had and it's how fortunate I am in that. very thankful for that. yeah, so I've, and then Hebrew came quite a lot later. Hebrew came, I sort of... started really, when I was like a lay assistant or an apprentice working for a church, there was an assistant minister who's a very enthusiastic, he braised and we kind of did language work together and then carried on in seminary. yeah. Yeah, very good. Yeah, that's exciting that you had the opportunity from an early age to engage with these languages. Yeah, so, yeah, it's not that you can't learn them later, but there is, yeah, it's a privilege to get to know them early. Absolutely. yeah, absolutely. And it's something which I would, I hope, you know, any child that wants to has the opportunity to learn these things and engage with them. Hmm, absolutely. Yeah, I was talking to, I don't know if you know Seth Postel, who's a messianic Jew, he's a Hebrew scholar. Yeah, he said that like, Jewish children are normally encouraged to learn the languages in their like, so they were learning, they learn Hebrew in when they are going as children, basically. So, so he was like saying, like, what about if that was the thing we did in in there? in the in in your children's church or children's yeah be, could be fantastic. Absolutely. mean, I, I'm sure, you know, how to run schools and education is way above my pay grade and not the topic of this podcast, but I am certainly very fortunate. I not only had the opportunities to learn biblical languages in school, but had really amazing teachers. And my family were always enormously supportive. They never said once, have you possibly considered doing something slightly more practical, Michael? Why not choose economics or something for your A-level subjects? But they never bat an eye at Latin and Greek. good. So how are you experiencing, experienced learning or knowing the biblical languages has opened up scripture for you? I think there's a quite nice illustration used by Jeremy Duff, the writer of the Greek textbook, which I've used quite a lot with students over the years. And he says that reading the Bible in its original languages is a bit like going to a sports game live in the stadium, as opposed to seeing it on TV. the score is the same, of course. What actually happens is the same. final result is the same and everything is the same. But your experience of it has a freshness and a vividness and a directness, which is almost inexpressible. You're just kind of literally there when it's happening, as opposed to kind of watching a simulation, a relay of it happening somewhere else, not even necessarily alive. I think that's quite a nice illustration. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes money to go see a live sports performance. uh And many people who really like sport go through their whole lives without doing so. Many people only do so occasionally, but it can be a really rewarding and exciting experience. yeah, I like that illustration from Jeremy Duff. think reading the Bible in its original language is like having any conversation, with someone in their own language brings directness and it brings vividness. Hmm. I think that I actually really like that illustration. Yeah, I think that that I'm very fond of cycling and there is something about the atmosphere. You might get a an overview when you watch it on TV that you don't get when you're there, but you don't get the excitement and and and that's who and if you can get like a spot next to the finish line you get to see the event when it culminates. Absolutely, absolutely. I don't watch much sport myself, so it's not a great illustration for me personally, but I think it does capture something very um real about how it works, I think. Yeah, I think it's spot on. Thank you for that illustration. Do you have any sort of like specific examples where you saw something in the original that you did not see in a translation or something, saw something anew? Yeah, thank you. I knew you were going to ask me this question, so I thought of a few examples and there are some, I thought of a few different kinds of examples. So an interesting one where there is a kind of doctrinal theological point, which it's just really quite hard to properly understand the debate without exposure to some Greek is Romans 9.5. And this verse is important because... it's a huge and really important area of New Testament study is Pauline Christology. right? In what sense is Jesus God for Paul? Yeah, we say when we preach, we say Jesus is God and I agree with that. think that's true. Absolutely. But did Paul really think that? And there's a huge range of arguments for and against and more subtle positions than just yes or no, of course. And quite an important part of this is does Paul ever actually called Jesus God? Paul has lots of interesting titles for Jesus. calls him Christ. He calls him Lord a lot of the times, really important. Does he ever actually use the Greek word theos, meaning God, as in theology, for Jesus? And there's a few possible examples. there's Titus to our God and savior, Jesus Christ. again, according to some sort of more kind critical scholars, Titus may not have been written by Paul directly. So Romans 9.5 is really important. It's an example in the absolutely, definitely nobody argues ever about it written by Paul letters that of Paul using the word God to describe Jesus. But it's actually not clear because it depends where the sentence starts or ends. It depends on things like that. So different translations go a different way. the The NRSV, which is a kind of, I suppose, standard English language, academic Bible, kind of standard Bible use in lot of Anglican churches, the NRSV kind of lands in the middle and tries to be ambiguous, but ends up with this slightly sort of odd sounding sentence. So the NRSV says, to them, that's to the Jews, to them belong the patriarchs and from them, according to the flesh comes the Messiah who is overall, comma, God blessed forever. So It kind of leans towards saying Jesus God. The ESV and the kind of the evangelical translations, the ESV and the NRSV are a bit stronger. So the ESV says, them belong the patriarchs and from them, to them belong the patriarchs and from their race, according to the flesh is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen. NIV is similar. A couple of other translations, say the RSV, the kind of old version of the NRSV. and the German Einheit Subesetzung, which is on the wall behind me, they say, paraphrasing slightly, um They say basically, to them belong the patriarchs and from them according to the flesh comes the Messiah who is over all. Full stop, may God be blessed forever. it hinges on how you divide the sentence. It hinges on whether or not you say, uh from the Jews come the patriarchs, from the Jews comes the Christ who is God. Or does it say, from the Jews comes the patriarchs, from the Jews come the Christ. Full stop, God be blessed forever. If you only have the translations, what you end up doing is reading as many translations as you can, and you have to decide which is right. And it's very difficult actually. So um it's really impossible to come to your own mind on that question without reading the Greek. Of course, you can read lots of commentators, read lots of scholarship, but to come to your own decision that you can stand on your own two feet, because you've looked at the data yourself, I think you basically need original languages. You don't need original languages to know that Jesus is God or to believe that Jesus is God, but you need original languages to be able to stand on your own two feet that you've looked at the data yourself, I think. um Lots of important things I trust other experts on. I understand how, I've no idea how this technology by which I'm talking to you works. I trust the brilliant technologists uh who've devised it, but it's important that at least some people have themselves looked at the data, the original data, in order to make a good decision on that. That's one example. I've got a couple more examples if we have time, if you feel the listeners are interested. uh maybe you could just dive in. I'd like to hear another example. So if you just like briefly without like going deep into this discussion, oh how do you see the syntax? You could potentially read it in Greek and then like just pack, unpack why this is actually saying that Jesus is God. Okay, so how it, I'm just turning up, how it kind of literally Word for word goes... is starting from verse four. So they are Israelites from whom is the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law and the worship and the promises. There ends verse four, verse five. From them sort of is in square brackets the patriarchs and from them, so in square brackets comes the Christ according to the flesh. And here we either have to say comma, who, the Christ according to the flesh, comma, who is overall God, blessed forever, amen. Or we have to say something like, from them comes the Christ according to the flesh, full stop, God who is overall be blessed forever. The earliest Greek manuscripts that we have have minimal punctuation, we can't, so punctuation would clear it up, really. But the earliest magnitudes we have have minimal punctuation. The punctuation is a kind of modern editors. A modern editor's guess would be too harsh, but modern editors' decision, modern editors' reconstruction. um So I think I'm not entirely sure personally where I land on this particular verse. I definitely think that when we say Jesus is God, Paul would absolutely agree with what we mean by that. I think according to Paul, Jesus fully shares in the identity of the one God of Israel, the creator of the world, the one who rescued Israel from Egypt. I absolutely think that Paul would have believed in that. does he intend to call Jesus by the name God here? I think absolute certainty is impossible. And I think the sort of the... Exegetical arguments in terms of what's going on in the verse for and against are... Yeah, could go either way, really. Hmm. Yeah, I personally think that the way the construct of the participle here and then Theos without an article makes it clunky if it's not related to the participle, the Theos. Yeah, I think that's reasonable. suppose, I think the sort of The exegetical, syntactical, what's going on in the sentence structure arguments probably favor, yes, Paul does mean to call Jesus God. Hmm. My sort of push back against that view would be why does Paul not use the word God for Jesus more often? Normally in Paul, theos seems to mean who we now call with our kind of like post-patristic Trinitarian language God the Father. I think that's normally what theos means in Paul. it's a kind of, it's an exception to the way he normally uses language. uh And of course people use language in odd ways all the time. I use different words for different things all the time, but people normally follow a particular way of talking, people normally talk in a particular way which they tend to stick to. And it would be an exception to how he uses language if he's uh literally calling Jesus God here. Yeah, yeah, and think it's based on the syntax of the verses itself, it seems more plausible that he is using an exception here, I think. Yeah. I don't think Paul's whole Christology turns on this verse, but I think it is important and therefore I think it's worth digging into. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I also think that the Kurios theology is very important here as well. Especially if you look at the Septuagint and like the Hebrew, how is the Septuagint with like translating the name of God and how and also quotations and other things that's applied to Jesus and other things like that. So it's not like one verse will solve all the problems. Yeah. So, well, yeah, it's a fascinating example. And I think you are spot on that this one's very hard to discern outside of having an understanding of Greek syntax. Yeah, Yeah, so another example. Yeah, so another one just I thought be interesting to give one from something I've been reading really recently just for myself in the Bible, which is I've been going through two Corinthians and To Corinthians 11 and 12, the so-called fool speech, think, is a really powerful and moving passage about why as Christians we can face the reality of our weakness, which I certainly feel I'm doing in a number of ways at the moment. And in the last verse of the of the full speech in 2 Corinthians 12 verse 10, Paul says, therefore uh I rejoice in weaknesses, in insults, uh in being in need, in persecution, in straightened circumstances because of Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong. And the word for strong is dunatos. It means kind of able to do things. It doesn't mean strong in the sense of like, kind of strong. It means capable. It means able. It means sort of being in a position to do something. And I think we experience our weakness in all the things we're worried about whether or not we can do them. There are lots of things at the moment which I'm worried about whether or not I can do this thing. And this verse seems to be saying that we find our ability to cope with life's challenges in our weakness because in our weakness, in the previous verse, the power of Christ rests upon us. This is in the whole context of the thorn in the flesh, or you could even say the spike in the flesh. Paul's been given this thing which he describes as a thorn or a spike in his flesh. Nobody knows exactly what this is, but he had some suffering, some problem, maybe some whole collection of sufferings, troubles, difficulties, which are kind of pressing deep into him. Hmm. He says he prayed three times for God to take it away. And God said, my grace is sufficient for you because my power, that's that do not toss route again, my power, my ability to do things is completed, is brought to fulfillment in your weakness. And therefore, because of all that, Paul can say, when I'm weak, then I'm strong. Yeah, yes, yes. It's a very powerful pun intended em example. And I think it's important to understand that the word power in English is not the same necessarily connotations as it has in Greek. The ability. I am able. I think that that's like it makes very good sense here that it's that Paul is saying that I'm able he's not saying that I am I'm a Greek God or something like that. exactly. It's not power in a negative sense. It's not power in the way dictators are powerful. It's simply ability to do things. know, the kind of power that any flourishing human being should have and should want for themselves. We often experience ourselves not having that. But Paul says we can find the ability to flourish amid the challenges of life as we trust in the grace and the power of Jesus. Yes, yeah amen to that. And you said you had another example, might. Yeah, I thought it'd interesting to give one kind of text critical example, just looking ahead to the second part of our conversation to the thesis. many of your listeners will be aware of this, but some of them won't. um We don't have, it's worth saying this out loud, I think, because it's often kind of unsaid and forgotten, therefore. We don't actually have any of the original Papyrus parchment, whatever, on which the New Testament was written. So, you know, the actual thing on which John or his secretary, or whatever it was, wrote the words, in the beginning was the word, or Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος That was lost, you know, centuries, millennia ago. The autograph is the technical name for it. Like, you know, a film star's autograph is something they sign with their own hand. The autograph of an ancient text is the thing that comes from the author's own hand or from the hand of the person he's dictated to. So we do not have these autographs and therefore we have to reconstruct what the biblical authors originally wrote by comparing a whole range of different surviving manuscripts. And they sometimes disagree and therefore we cannot ever be completely certain. One example of a verse where there's a small degree of uncertainty is Romans 8.28, a very famous verse. I'll just again read it all through for you. yeah, for we know that for those who love God, he works all things for good. That'd be one way to translate it. It's unclear if there are two words for God or not. Some manuscripts have two words for God, some manuscripts have one. If there is only one word for God, it probably means basically this, for we know that all things work together for those who love God. All things are the subject of the verb of working, right? All things are doing the working, yeah? all things kind of by themselves work together for good. That's if there's only one word for God. If there's two words for God, it changes somewhat. If there's two words for God, it goes something like this. For we know that for those who love God, God works all things for good. Yeah? So God is actually working all things for good. It's not all things work together by themselves for good, it's God works all things together for good. This is a really, in some ways, really encouraging verse pastorally and personally, because whatever bad is going on in our lives, we know either that there is some good purpose in it or that God is bringing things to some good purpose. It's also a really difficult pastoral verse, a verse which is very important not to use out of context because it can be so kind of hurtful and destructive to tell someone who's in a really tragic situation, you know. Don't worry, God's going to work it for good. Well, that's not going to help someone. It's going to really hurt someone who's in a really difficult kind of grieving situation. And we must use this verse very carefully. But part of using this verse very carefully is understanding it, I think. And I argue in my thesis that at least probably there are these two words for God. So it's not that all things will kind of somehow inclined towards a good conclusion, it's that God actively will be working all things to good, however difficult that may seem at the time. But probably also really important to say in the context of this verse that another aspect of using this verse carefully and appropriately is what does good mean? What is the good to which God is driving? Mm. things. It's not us necessarily having what we want, it's not us sort feeling happy, it's not everything working out happily ever after. It's us being made more like Christ, both now and eternally. So I think it's quite encouraging to know that that second word for God is there and that all things are not just sort of somehow inclining by themselves in a positive direction, but God is actively driving all things to some good outcome. yeah, I think it's a good example. Actually, Craig Blomberg brought it up early on in an earlier episode. And he's actually, doesn't, it didn't bring up the textual variant, but he said that like συνεργέω (sunergeō) is an intransitive verb, it cannot take any object. So therefore we have to take, we have to take πάντα (panta) as an instrumental. By all things. So who does he think the subject is then? then he says that we need to understand that that is God. So you technically agree. So it's very interesting that he does that. I think it's Moseo Silva in his big book, the New International Dictionary of Theology and Exegesis, he says that there are two options. We can have either subject, like, panther can be the subject, or it can be God. either understood he doesn't bring the texture variant into it, which is quite interesting because it is one of the papyri's that I can see here, that that's, which is P46 has it, has an extra ὁ θεός (ho theos) em which is interesting. do Alexanderinus and Vaticanus. So it's actually quite a lot of evidence for it. which is really interesting. Which we will get into what that means in a little bit. I think it is interesting also that if it's corrected, and I think Craig is correct, is that this intransitive, like it cannot be like God works in all things, but for good is that it has to be understood like God by all things or in all things. maybe in temporal, maybe the best ones here. Yes, throughout all things, whatever happens, yeah. Yes, and Craig also says that that gives a much more realistic understanding of what God is doing in our lives with all the suffering we might encounter. Yes, so there's at least two questions there. uh What's the subject? So what's doing the working? Is it God, as Craig and I think, or is it the things themselves? And then if you think it's God, what are the τὰ πάντα (ta panta)? What are the all things doing in the sentence? Are they the object? you know, just like, you know, I lift the cup, God works the things for good. Or is it more as Craig suggests, God works without the direct object. God just generally works through in all things. And I think both those points are helpful because I theologically and pastorally, I sort of want to, and there's always a fundamental paradox here. I want to affirm that God's in control. Like, God's omnipotent. Nothing's ever bigger than God. No problem is ever bigger than God. But I don't want to say the terribly sad things that happen in our lives, the natural disasters, the serious illnesses, the evil done by people. I don't ever want to say that's good. I'm even nervous about language like tool in God's hands. I'm quite nervous about that language. Mm. And therefore I think the sort of saying that certainly the bad things themselves don't do anything good. God does good things. Secondly, God doesn't directly use the bad things. I'd much rather say that God is always working for good in and through whatever is happening. Yeah, it makes sense. I think that it's a very complex discussion because there many things, you if you want to have like a whole doctrine, like a whole Pauline theology on this, we need to take much more than this one verse into account. And also like a biblical, if you want a full biblical doctrine of this, it becomes even more complex because there are some Old Testament texts where... where God is explicitly using like, like, for example, Joseph's narrative is very important. Like, or they intended it for evil, but I used it for good. Yeah, indeed. Now I think we want to bring in lots of different passages. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I think it's very important because I think it often misunderstood this verse and also sometimes, and I think as you already pointed out, it's sometimes used with very little pastoral care. It's like... Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and that is very unfortunate and a lot of people have got hurt because it's been used like, it's everything is just gonna work out well. it's like, course, with God's intent, it's still like, that's not what you need to hear when you're suffering. No. And that's, don't, I'm not sure that that's exactly what Paul is saying here. If we, if, if Craig is correct it's intersting and I think he probably is, he is a very seasoned scholar, that there's probably, it would be complicated to take this out as like, it is God that is using things to work it for good. Eschatologically, like, like, ultimately, in the Restored Creation, which is an important theme of Roman 8 itself, which I'll be talking more about in my thesis, but then we will get off track. Yeah, well, maybe we should sague into talking about early manuscripts then. In the subtitle of your book, the subtitle is Early Greek Majuscules and Pandacts. mentioned, what does that actually mean? What does what is What is a Pandact? It's a good question. So, pandect is a, well, majuscule is basically the opposite of miniscule. there are, in the ancient world, there are kind of two ways of writing a Latin or Greek manuscript. You either use what we call block capitals, that is majuscule, or you use kind of joined up small letters, cursive, or what it's called miniscule. A miniscule is kind of only really used. Miniscule replaces majuscule for literature. So in the ninth century, it becomes much quicker to write in miniscule. And it's also very pretty to look at, but it's quite difficult to read if you're not used to it. So our earlier manuscripts are named by the technical word majuscule. So it just means in capital letters. And in practice, it would mean probably from kind of the earlier period. And PANDECT is a book which contains all of a collection. the early Greek majuscule PANDECT are the early in this context means before about five, six hundred. and Greek means in Greek obviously, majuscul means in these sort of capital letters, and pandec means these manuscripts, I argue at least, originally contained the whole of the Bible in Greek, so the Septuagint and the New Testament. And that's quite rare in antiquity, know, we have pandect Bibles all the time, know, here's one of mine, it's got all of both Testaments between these covers, but In antiquity, they seem to have been very rare. We've only got these four that have survived. So yeah, um that's why they're a significant group. Hmm, interesting. Yeah. And, and in your book, you're talking about four of these pandacts, which is the earliest surviving we have. Can you give a brief overview of what they are and why they're important to us? So there's, the first is Codex Sinaiticus, which is called Aleph or 01 in kind of abbreviations in the apparatus. That's now, most of it's in London in the British Library. There's a little few bits of it in St. Petersburg, a little bit of it in Leipzig in Germany, and some of it's still in, I believe in St. Catherine's Monastery itself on the Sinai Peninsula. And that's got, New Testament survives very well, not absolutely every verse, but it survives very well. And quite a lot of the Septuagint, and especially the Wisdom literature survives in Sinaiticus. Alexandrinus, which is A or O2 in the abbreviations, that's also in the British Library. in London. Again, bar a few little bits that are missing, like beginning in Matthew, most of the New Testament and the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint, is there. Then Codex Vaticanus or O3 or B, that's in the Vatican Library. And again, there's a few bits which have been supplemented by later hand, but most of both Testaments survives completely in that. Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are both digitized online for free. Codexanticus.org or Google Codex Vaticanus Vatican Library and you can see the whole of it online. Alexandrinus, the New Testament used to be completely online digitized. I think that the British Library had some problems with their website. So it's not anymore, I don't think, but hopefully they're bringing it back. And then the fourth is what's called the Codex Ephraimiae Rescriptus. which is in uh Paris in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and that is basically the New Testament and most of the wisdom literature in the Old Testament in the Septuagint survives. Codex Ephraimiae is interesting because this is the challenge of working on it. The technical word is it's been palimpsized. In other words, somebody wrote over it. So somebody found this thing quite a long time after it was originally written, decided we don't need this anymore, but this person, he or she really wanted to copy the Greek translation of some poems by St Ephraimiae the Syrian, whose feast day was two days before we recording this. Somebody wanted to copy these poems of Ephraimiae the Syrian and they couldn't find any paper. And like you or me, we'll sometimes print something on the back of something we don't need anymore. This person decided to literally copy Ephraimiae the Syrian over the top of this biblical manuscript. And the undertext, which is the bit we're much more interested in now, because at least I was much more interested in, biblical scholars are much more interested in, has become therefore very difficult to read. A guy called Florian Fleck in the 19th century decided to try and improve the situation by pouring a chemical called Jobertine Tincture. I've no idea what that chemical is or what it does, but he decided to haul this over the codex in an attempt to kind of lift the underwriting to the top. With, I think, degree of success, some bits of codex Ephraimiae the underwriting is very easy to read. You literally have to read, absolutely literally read between the lines. And sometimes that's quite easy, other times rather more difficult. And that was a part of the interest of working with Ephraimiae. So yes, so in summary, the four are Sireneticus, Alexandrinus, Vaticanus and Ephraemi. Yeah. And in your book, Building a Book of Books, you focus on these early preserved whole Bible manuscripts. Well, why did you decide to do that? Sorry to interrupt the episode, but if you're enjoying the content, please consider subscribing and leaving a like. It really helps the algorithm and helps the podcast grow. Thank you for your support and now back to the episode. in your book, Building a Book of Books, you focus on these early preserved whole Bible manuscripts. Well, why did you decide to do that? So uh I was in uh seminary or theological college... at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford a little over 10 years ago now, and really enjoying it and wanting very much to do as much more formal study as I could and thinking about kind of what area of theology to go into, what to specialize in and For lots of reasons, I was drawn to textual criticism. It seemed a way to bring together my language training and also my other interests. I wanted to understand how the Bible works and why and how it is what it is at a fundamental level. I felt you couldn't really talk about the authority of Scripture or try to live your life believing Scripture or encourage others to do the same without kind of understanding where it had come from. And so I... as my masters progressed and began my doctoral application, I was looking for text critical topics. Text criticism, by the way, simply means basically the study of biblical manuscripts. That's a simple way to define it. It's a very kind of It is an unhelpful term really because people think, well, you know, a film critic says, all these films are rubbish. You know, if you get a newspaper and you read their film critic or their restaurant critic page, they're people who amuse their readers by saying how terrible these films and restaurants are. I am not saying how terrible the biblical text is. It's very important and it's often misunderstood. Text criticism is basically working with biblical manuscripts both to learn about what the Bible texts originally said and why and also about the people who produce the manuscripts. yes, I was drawn to this sort of sub-discipline, this kind of subject within a subject of theology called text criticism for those reasons. And having been drawn to text criticism, I then had to decide, okay, well, what am I going to do more precisely in that area? And dialoguing, I had a brilliant supervisor, Dirk Jongkind, I'm very thankful for his support of me. And I... I of began to realize, I think, I thought these manuscripts were, given how early they are and how important everyone seems to they are, they're not actually that thoroughly researched. mean, there was few monographs on Sinaiticus. So Sinaiticus was quite well studied. So Dirk had written his own thesis on Sinaiticus, a few other good books on Sinaiticus. There was one thesis that had been done recently, another Edinburgh thesis, in fact, like your own on Alexandrinus. Andrew Smith had done his thesis on Alexandrinus. There wasn't really much on Vaticanus. Jesse Grenz, who was in the year below me in my thesis, started to work after me on Vaticanus. And there was one thesis from really quite a long time ago, Robert Lyon, from sometime mid 20th century, so really quite a long time ago, on Ephraimiae. I wanted to look at all of them together. kind of see their kind of significance as a group. I wanted also to do something that emphasized their unity because, say, for example, a lot of the work on Sinaiticus have been trying to say, have been trying to argue about how many scribes there were, which scribe copied which bit, comparing the way they'd formed letters to say, well, were they a scribal team of three or four? Who did what? I thought it was much more important to emphasize the unity and say, look, yes, these guys were individuals, guys gender neutral, we've no idea if they were men or women, we know they were ancient scribes, were both male and female ancient scribes. These people were working they were individuals but they were working as a team and they were trying very hard to work together because you have to really study the manuscript carefully to discern differences in how different bits appear. So wanted to look at them as a unity. I was also really drawn to the idea of manuscripts that contain both testaments. So yeah, that was kind of how I ended up being drawn to the pandects. Hmm. Yeah, very interesting. I think that's very important. Just want to pause one thing in here is that we actually did an episode with my friend, Conrad Elmelund, on what textual criticism is. So if people, want to know that in more detail, they can go back and watch that over. em So, yeah, but we actually talk about high and lower criticism. And if you want to know what that means, then you can go watch that episode. m Yeah, yeah, I think it is Elijah Hixson's edited volume there is an article on earlier is not always better. So but why are these four manuscripts important to the reconstruction of the New Testament in particular? Yeah, absolutely earlier is not always better, right? And I think that's quite important. On the other hand, probably our starting assumption other things being equal should be earlier might well be better. again, just asking listeners to remember the idea that we don't have the original bits of parchment or papyrus or whatever on which the Bible was written. We work out, we try to work out. what the authors originally wrote by comparing lots of different manuscripts and trying to work out what the earliest form of the text at the very top of the tree was. And obviously, if you've got a manuscript from the year 400 and a manuscript from the year 1400, there are a thousand more years for mistakes to creep in in the one from 1400. So our kind of starting before we do any research assumption should be probably earlier is quite likely to be other things be all good. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that the manuscript from 1400 has been extremely reliably copied consistently over those many centuries. and therefore it preserves very accurately what Paul or John or Matthew or whoever it is originally wrote. On the other hand, that manuscript from only 400, that might only be a few centuries after the time of the New Testament, but a few centuries is more than enough time for mistakes to creep in if the scribes are incompetent. So absolutely earlier is not always better. And I did not assume these manuscripts were were always right in fact part of the whole point of my thesis was to question that assumption to make no assumptions about the inherent reliability of these manuscripts just because they're famous or because they belong to some so-called text type or whatever but but to kind of to not make those assumptions I argue at the end of the thesis that I think actually um these pandects should be very important to our reconstruction of the earliest form of the text Quite how important and valuable they are varies through the canon. So in John, Vaticanus and Ephraimiae, I've argued kind of particularly reliable tradings of the text. Vaticanus less important in Romans since it's... I looked at sample chapters, sorry, John, Romans, Revelation and two Septuagint Old Testament books. So Sirach, to go from something from the Apocrypha, and Judges. look at the New Testament, I concluded that Vaticanus and Ephraimiae are more reliable in John, Vaticanus less reliable in Romans, all of them except for Vaticanus which doesn't exist for Revelation, all of them are less and less reliable in Revelation but particularly Sinaiticus. So they vary quite a lot throughout the biblical canon is one answer to your question. Mm. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that it's important to like put that in here because yeah, that I think you — I did skim through some of your introduction before this is and I think you criticized that people have criticized Westcort and Hort to rely too much on Vaticanus and Sinaiticus in their sort of like, their eclectic text without further ado. So. I think many scholars, many commentators have their favorite manuscripts, which they default to perhaps without reflection. And part of the point of my thesis was to sit back and say, OK, yes, these manuscripts are old. Yes, they're beautiful. Yes, they're famous. How important actually are they in reconstructing the initial text? And my answer was very important, but we can't assume that. Yeah. Yes. the importance varies with different parts of the canon. Hmm, yes. And I think that's, that's very important point. And also, like when you, I think I want to add in, for example, when you read these manuscripts, and you, for example, read, like, a completely irrelevant, or maybe not canonic document from in Majuscule script. So these are beautifully well — you can tell that this is like someone who was very meticulous in their work, whereas for example, If you look at Majuscle from the third century [BC] from from Oxyrhynchus about a garlic farmer, it's almost impossible to read because it's like just scribbled down really quickly. There's no one else that needs to read it. But if we have a read with Paul Foster, we had to go through it like audit an advanced Greek course. But we were reading through I think with the Gospel of Peter and that's not as easy to read as Alexandrinus, for example. in terms of like how well or how much care the scribes are taken to write things down. I guess my question is that does that the quality of the manuscript also has anything to bear up on like the quality of the text? Again, that's a good question. And again, I think it is of course possible to copy something very untidily, but very accurately. So, you know, I could really quickly copy a page out of a book today. And if I was in hurry, my handwriting would be very ugly, but the actual copy might still be accurate. It's also possible to copy very beautifully with your handwriting, but make many many mistakes, especially if perhaps you're concentrating on the aesthetic appearance. I think it is important but we should be slow drawing conclusions about it. Something else I get into in the thesis is is it possible that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus were made in response to imperial commission? So there's a passage in Eusebius of Caesarea when Eusebius at least arguably records the Emperor Constantine commanding Eusebius to make him 50 Bibles for the new churches of the city of Constantinople. Does this actually mean 50 Bibles? it mean 50 Gospel books or something else is open to debate? I argued for 50 Bibles in my thesis and I think it is I'm not sure I want to say likely, very plausible, if not likely, that the Sinaiticus is one of these. Can't be certain, of course. In general, we should be very wary of saying that any particular artifact is the same particular artifact as is mentioned in a historical source. know, extreme example, but it's often said that, all the little pieces of wood which are supposed to be bits of Christ's cross. If you assemble them all together in one place you'd have enough not simply to make a cross but Noah's Ark. um And this is an example of how we should be very slow to say that a particular object is the same as an object that belonged to historical person. I think Sionicus may be an exception to this for various reasons. I think Sionicus very plausibly was one of these 50 Bibles that Eusebius at least started to make in response to this commission for Constantine. And that may be why its aesthetic appearance is very beautiful because it was made for an emperor. It may also be why certain parts of it at least have various mistakes and errors because it was copied in a hurry because it was extremely exorbitant demand for a group of scribes to produce 50 copies of all the Christian scriptures and so uh Eusebius and his team worked as quickly as they could. But that is somewhat speculative but it's at least plausible. Hmm. Yeah, it's also very expensive to make a book that was that large. Yeah, because parchment is not cheap. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are you would you say that of misconceptions about, like maybe scholars and lay people have about these early complete Bibles? I think about these early complete Bible specifically... not many people have heard of them. I think about the whole, you know, that the history and manuscripts of the Bible in general, I think there's a bit of a cliche this, but two extremes and wisdom lies somewhere in the middle, think. one extreme will be the kind of Dan Brown Da Vinci Code extreme, which is that the whole Christian faith was made up 500 years after Christ or 300 years after Christ and there's no... What we have as the Bible was actually written a long time after the Apostles. There's very little evidence for that and indeed uh what we can know of Reconstruction of the text does suggest a degree of textual stability going back at least as far as our manuscripts go to say to sort of the... second century, depending on exactly how you reckon it. And on the other hand, I do want to also push back against the idea that the NIV or the ESV has arrived on our bookshelves as if it was emailed to the publishers from God and then printed. And that's not the case. We only have... modern language Bibles and indeed we only have modern editions of the Bible in its original languages because scholars have worked hard to reconstruct as best they can what the earliest form of the text said and complete certainty is impossible. The illustration I rather like to use is I have no idea exactly how many hairs I have on my head. I've no idea the height or the mass of each individual hair on my head. But I do know that my hair is black, least largely getting grayer every day, but my hair is least largely black. And I know when I need to cut it. So actually, you can know the important things about something whilst there is uncertainty about many of the details. There are a huge number of places in the New Testament where there's variation between manuscripts and we're not sure what the individual authors actually wrote, but the vast, vast majority of those are minor in the extreme, they're spelling differences, their differences of grammar or syntax, which are so subtle it's kind of hard to reproduce them in English translation, unnecessary to reproduce them in English translation. Yes, there are some manuscript variations with theological relevance.

So my example of Romans 8: 55:01

28 is a good example of that. That is important. That is a manuscript variation of some significance. But there is no evidence of any kind of Dan Brown style conspiracy to conceal these. uh In a sense, anybody can look at the evidence. Anybody who has the time and the opportunities can learn the languages and indeed can look at these manuscripts themselves often, certainly look at data gathered from them and make their own decisions. I think there's, uh I want to kind of push against two misconceptions. One is the kind of Dan Brown misconception that we can know nothing and it's all made up in the fourth century. The other is what I may slightly inaccurately call the fundamentalist misconception, which is that there is no possibility of uncertainty about anything in the words that are in the Bible. Yeah, I think it's reasonable to push back against either of those, because I think we can know with very high certainty what original language or original manuscript contained. yeah, sometimes it is a little bit more of a theological thing, but in most cases it's not. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I want to circle back a little bit onto the quality of these manuscripts. So how does they compare to like, we have some earlier manuscripts, but most of them are fragments and not complete books. And then we have later manuscripts. How do they compare quality wise? We did talk a little bit about it. Good question.... So I've not done a detailed sort of comparative study of the pandects against the papyri or the kind of later miniscules, but I've argued that they are important in our textual reconstruction and that they are very accurate. And I think if you want to know what the first writer of the New Testament originally wrote, then you want to look at all the evidence you can, but you certainly want to look at the pandects very carefully. That would be how I'd answer that. Yeah, I think that's good. Maybe we should talk a little bit about your approach because you do argue that it's a different approach to other approaches to textual evidence and why you decided to do so. Yes, so there's this thing called scribal habits, which textual critics are very interested in. A scribal habit is what sort of mistakes, what sort of changes, what sort of things do scribes typically do? And if we could know that with certainty, we'd be after the races as textual critics, we'd be doing very well because if we knew what kind of changes scribes typically did, we'd be able to see what changes the scribes made and distinguish that from the original authors. Unfortunately, discerning scribal habits is actually quite difficult. not necessarily difficult, but it's controversial how to do it. And there was a very influential methodology proposed by a guy called Colwell. and really promoted, argued, defended and applied very significantly by James Royce. And whilst that method is important and useful, I actually want to kind of say not necessarily it's wrong, but that other methods ought to have a day out. We ought to use other methods as well. And Royce's big thing was what are called singular readings. other words, reading which only occurs in one manuscript of all the manuscripts we have. Royce argued that if a reading only ever occurs in only one manuscript, so many thousands of New Testament manuscripts which there are, if a reading only occurs once, almost certainly it was done by the scribe of that manuscript. So that is almost certainly a reading created by the scribe, therefore that is a clue to scribal habits. So what Royce did with a number of texts and with number of bits of the New Testament, is he looked at all the scribal readings he could find, all the singular readings he could find, all the readings that were unique in the whole, in all the manuscripts everywhere, and he tried to build a profile of scribal habits from that. And the problem with that, I think, is firstly, is that singular readings are not necessarily scribal readings. not all the singular readings will be created by the scribe of that manuscript. Some will have been inherited copied faithfully from the manuscript they were copying from and also not all readings created by the scribe will be singular. So looking at both of those in turn firstly not all singular readings will be created by the scribe of that manuscript. Some might have been copied faithfully so um if it's If a scribe makes a change, say in that Romans 8.28 example, say a scribe forgets or misses out the second word for God and writes the first only one word for God, and another scribe copies that mistake, that mistake might be unique in the whole tradition, but it still might have been produced by faithful copying. And we have evidence this happened because Sinaiticus in 1 Thessalonians 2, the scribe writes a whole several lines twice, clearly by accident, clearly a mistake, clearly... And this double copying, ditography is the technical word is, it contains two singulars. In other words, the scribe not only copies a whole lot of text twice, he or she reproduces her own unique mistakes in that second copying, which suggests to me very strongly... that the mistakes were in the exemplar, were in the manuscript the scribe was copying from. So when the scribe does that big double copying, he or she includes these mistakes. So these mistakes, he or she clearly didn't make them up. They clearly came from the manuscript he was copying from. So unique mistakes, unique readings, singular readings, are not necessarily created by the scribe. They can be inherited. Moreover, Not all readings that scribes create, not all mistakes scribes make will be singular readings or unique readings and in fact almost definitionally many of them won't be. Scribble habits will be almost definitionally not unique because if they're habits lots of scribes will do them. a really good example of this. When I was working on this, when I was kind of writing this chapter, I was in my first year teaching undergraduate New Testament Greek to students in Cambridge while I was doing my PhD. And I would set them little tests each week just to keep them on their toes, make sure they were kind of learning the material. if your listeners have done any Greek before, will know Greek has little marks you write over the beginning of words called breathings, which tell you whether or not to sound an H sound. And it's very easy to forget these because especially the smooth breathings because they don't actually make much difference. You can argue they're not really very important and it's very easy to forget them. And sometimes two of my students would forget the breathing in the same place in the test. And the kind of Roycean methodology would say these two students have both made a mistake, both made the same mistake. They cannot have both made that same mistake independently. There must be some sort of relationship. They must have either both copied from the same source or copied from each other. And therefore, I report them to the dean of their college or something for copying, for cheating, for plagiarism. Of course, I didn't do that, right? I just realized, as I already knew, that beginning Greek students just forget breathings all the time. It's something people do. It is a writer's habit. And therefore, I think we want to kind of push back on this connection between uh singular readings, unique readings, and scribal habits. I go into that in a bit more detail in my introductory chapter. in my bibliography there's a quite good article by a very good article by my external examiner Holger Strothwolf in in Münster who who kind of argues in that direction so and alternative to Reuss's method is is method developed by Barbara Aland and her doctoral student Kyung-Sik Min and Min and Aland they analyze drivable habits by they take a published critical text you know they take something like this, Nestle-Aland 28th edition. Sorry, the front covers come off, but Nestle-Aland's 28th edition. And they compare a manuscript to that. And they say, okay, well, if there's a variant from Nestle-Aland 28, it must be a mistake. And so we'll use that to build up a profile that describes mistakes. The problem with that, I think, is that it's kind of circular argument, yeah, because this Nestle-Aland 28 was edited with certain beliefs, certain, not assumptions without evidence, but certain assumptions about how scribes work. So if you want to investigate how scribes work, you mustn't assume that Nestle-Aland is right. So my own method, which is basically I make my own critical decision at every variation unit. And if the manuscripts vary from that, I consider that to be a scribal change. My method is somewhat idiosyncratic. and certainly not perfect, but I think having the methodological discussion is very important because I think the, particularly in Anglophone scholarship, Royce and his method has reigned as king for quite a number of decades now, and it is a very important method, very influential method, very useful method, it can produce some extremely helpful, though they produce many excellent theses. However, I think it does have problems And I think it's time to rather than write yet another thesis, which use Royce's method to do to look at something no one's ever looked at before using Royce. I want to say, okay, I want to write a thesis which is which is trying to have the methodological conversation as well as simply applying the methods to a different area. I hope that makes sense to listeners. yeah, yeah. And what is the benefit of like having that more sort of idiosyncratic method to use your own word? I think it was very important to me, as I say, to shake up the conversation on scribal habits and to say, it's impossible, of course, to know exactly what reading was created by a scribe and what reading was faithfully copied. If the only way to do that would be to have a time machine. And if we had that, we could all go home and as textual critics and do something far more useful with our lives. But We can't have that certainty. And I think as many possible kind of methods on the table, as much of a conversation as we can have about the pros and cons of each method is going to be really useful and really important, I think. And I think it's interesting. I the Reuss method has become very dominant in the Anglophone world. In the German-speaking world, which is probably the major other, German is probably not the only other language in which biblical and patristic biblical textual critical research is published, but one the other major one probably, you know, that there would be stuff being published in French, Italian, Spanish, but the two big ones are probably English and German. The in German speaking scholarship, probably Royce does not dominate so significantly, Aland and Min's method is more influential, but I felt having a bit of a having a bit of a conversation, starting a bit of a conversation, and perhaps challenging the dominance of Royce in the English speaking world. again, I don't want to... Royce is a brilliant scholar. His method is very important, very useful, and very widely received. A couple of times I met him, he's been enormously helpful and kind to me personally. I wanna keep undermining that. This is not a kind of polemic, but um I did want to shake up the conversation a little bit, I think. And I think, for example, Gregory King, who's a doctoral student in Vienna now, he's doing some really interesting work looking at harmonization. He's also, that's just an example of how uh the conversation is evolving, I hope. Hmm. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. But maybe come to the time in the podcast where, where it's where we might want to talk about what, can we apply this? What have you been talking about to, to the listeners and viewers of this conversation? How can they apply this to their everyday lives with Christ and walk with Christ? Thank you, it's a fantastic question of course and I think In a sense we've been talking about that a lot of points through the conversation So all well certainly I think all

three of those examples we looked at near the beginning in different ways Romans 9: 1:07:32

5 divinity of Christ to Corinthians 12 and and you know God will equip us God will enable us

for the challenge we face day by day and then Romans 8: 1:07:44

28 God doesn't ever see or call our sufferings as good, but God does work through our sufferings for good. And also what we've been saying about, we want to absolutely reject the kind of Dan Brown extreme, you know, the Bible was all made up centuries later, but also I think reject the kind of the sort of the fundamentalist extreme, the Bible arrived, was emailed to us from God in exactly the form we have it in the New International Version or the English Standard Version. I think one more thing I'd say, which we've not talked about so much, but it's worth mentioning now, is the fact that these pandects bind together the Greek New Testament to the Septuagint. In other words, they bind together both Testaments in Greek. And that, think, is a really important part of early Christian biblical hermeneutics. So really quite early on in the second century, there's a guy called Marcion who tries to say that we should split the testaments apart basically and say that the reason why there's so much evil and suffering in the world according to Marcion is because the world was not made by the loving God of the New Testament it was made by a bad God the creator God is a bad God and he's the God behind the Old Testament and the reason why there's so many problems in the world is was made by the bad God and the good news is the good God the New Testament God is going to redeem the world That's problematic on many levels. It's of course, in modern terms, very anti-Semitic, not least. And the early Christians, least the of the proto-orthodox, as we call them early Christians, really strongly resisted this. So people like Irenaeus, people like Tertullian, people I've kind of been working a lot on in the last two years, when I've not been doing so much textual criticism, they really argue against that idea that we can separate the Testaments. And indeed, we can separate God into a kind of bad creator and a good redeemer. I think reading the Bible as one story, as one big story running throughout is a really helpful, important thing to do as Christians. Big stories, I think, kind of bit of partly how we're wired as people. film series like Star Wars or Books at the Lord of the Rings are quite popular because they tell one big story through lots of episodes, lots of parts, lots of different styles and tones. And I think the Bible is like that. And I think if therefore we want to understand the Bible, read it as one book. It's very important. Many scholars are reading the New Testament in the light of things like it's Roman context or Greek Stoic philosophy. And all those things are really important, really helpful. But I think I want to say that the primary context for reading and interpreting scripture theologically is scripture itself. And we see that in a very almost physical way in these manuscripts. When in the fourth century uh the scribes that made Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, et cetera, wanted to create a manuscript which had the New Testament and its context, they didn't copy a book of Greek Stoic philosophy or Roman literature or whatever and bind that with the New Testament. They copy the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, and bound that with the New Testament. Of course, all those other contexts are important. I've done a couple of bits of published work on documentary, Greek documentary papyri, so kind of Greek everyday documents as a context for reading the New Testament. I think Roman imperial literature really important as context for the New Testament, but I think theologically, perhaps spiritually and we could say pastorally, that the main context for reading the New Testament is the Old Testament and vice versa. That's why in traditional churches there'll be a reading from both testaments at every service. m So think that's how I'd answer that question in addition to what we've already said. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful way of like ending and talking about this. Yeah, because I think... I've definitely learned a lot from Seth Postell like reading the Torah as narrative and how that's then interpreted by the prophets and then how that's then picked up the same methodology is picked up by the New Testament authors. And I think this is just another way of like looking into the same question. Like saying, how did they then collect them in the manuscripts? How did they do with the Greek? Is that they all believed that we that let that God inspired it all. At least inspiration was an important factor in this, that they believed that this was from God. thank you for joining me on the podcast, Michael. Been lovely to talk to you and really enjoying your podcast. Keep going. Keep up the good work. It's fantastic to see some of your episodes. Thank you. Yeah, thank you and God bless and to you guys. I will see you in the next one. But before you go, thank you so much for joining me for the first season of Exploring Language of Scripture. I've enjoyed hosting these conversations, I've learned a lot, and I hope that they have deepened your love for the Scriptures and for Christ. The second season will start on the 13th of August, and it will also include 24 episodes which will be posted on every other Wednesday, just as usual. In the meantime, I will be posting highlights and clips from the former episodes on YouTube, so stay tuned for that. and please feel free to share your favorite episode with someone who might benefit from it if you're not already done so. And if you want me to cover something specific in the coming season, please let me know your suggestions in the comments below and I will see what I can do about it. I'm also planning to opening up a few spots for one-on-one Greek tutoring soon. So if you're interested in learning to read the New Testament in an original language by yourself and learning with me, then You can find the link to the waiting list in the comments below or in the show notes. Otherwise, thank you for watching and I will be seeing you in August for season 2.