In this episode of the Deconstructionist Podcast, host John Williamson sits down with Dr. Garrick Allen to delve into his groundbreaking book, Words Are Not Enough: Paratexts, Manuscripts, and the Real New Testament. Discover the fascinating journey of how early biblical texts evolved through centuries of meticulous manual transcription, revealing the rich history behind the Gospels.
Join us as Dr. Allen shares insights from his research, exploring topics such as the early Christian manuscripts, the influence of Eusebius of Caesarea, and the significance of paratexts in shaping how we read the Bible today. Gain a deeper understanding of the Bible's transformation from ancient manuscripts to the bound volumes we know today.
Don't miss this enlightening conversation about the intricate dynamics of textual transmission and the vibrant world of biblical manuscripts.
Garrick V. Allen is professor of divinity and biblical criticism at the University of Glasgow. He has written dozens of academic articles, popular pieces, and multiple award-winning monographs, including The Book of Revelation and Early Jewish Textual Culture, which won a Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise, and Manuscripts of the Book of Revelation, which won the Paul J. Achtemeier Award for New Testament Scholarship.
(Select) Publications: Manuscripts of the Book of Revelation: New Philology, Paratexts, Reception; Son of God: Divine Sonship in Jewish and Christian Antiquity; Words Are Not Enough: Paratexts, Manuscripts, and the Real New Testament.
Guest Links:
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BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/garrickvallen.bsky.social
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Instagram: @forrestclaymusic
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This episode of The Deconstructionists Podcast was edited, mixed, and produced by John Williamson
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00:00:00 --> 00:00:11 Music.
00:00:10 --> 00:00:14 Welcome to the Deconstructionist Podcast. I'm your host, John Williamson,
00:00:14 --> 00:00:19 and we are back this week with a brand new episode and a brand new guest, Dr.
00:00:19 --> 00:00:22 Garrick Allen, to talk about his brand new book, Words Are Not Enough,
00:00:23 --> 00:00:25 Paratexts, Manuscripts, and the Real New Testament.
00:00:26 --> 00:00:30 But before we jump into that, if you enjoyed this show, please consider rating,
00:00:30 --> 00:00:34 reviewing, and subscribing so you don't miss out on a single new episode and sharing with a friend.
00:00:34 --> 00:00:38 We're an independent podcast, and that's the way that we get out to new people.
00:00:38 --> 00:00:42 You can also keep up on everything that we're doing here by checking out our
00:00:42 --> 00:00:47 website, www.thedeconstructionist.org, where we have our blog,
00:00:48 --> 00:00:49 social media links, and all of
00:00:49 --> 00:00:53 our back catalog of episodes that you can stream directly from the site.
00:00:53 --> 00:00:55 With that being said, let's get to it.
00:00:55 --> 00:00:58 Here's my guest, Garrick Freakin' Allen.
00:00:59 --> 00:01:08 Music.
00:01:08 --> 00:01:11 All right. Excited to have my guest on this week, Eric Allen.
00:01:11 --> 00:01:14 Thank you so much for spending some time with me today. Happy to be here.
00:01:15 --> 00:01:18 Absolutely. So you're broadcasting live from one of my favorite countries,
00:01:18 --> 00:01:20 if not my favorite country.
00:01:20 --> 00:01:24 And I'm not just saying that because my grandfather was born in Scotland, but you are in Glasgow.
00:01:25 --> 00:01:30 That's right. Best city in Scotland. Man, yeah, so I definitely make note of
00:01:30 --> 00:01:32 that, Adam. We have to go there next time.
00:01:32 --> 00:01:36 But we were talking before we started recording.
00:01:36 --> 00:01:40 You've got a pretty cool journey in terms of other places you've been prior to landing in Glasgow.
00:01:40 --> 00:01:43 So tell people a little bit about yourself, your background,
00:01:43 --> 00:01:45 and sort of how you ended up in Glasgow.
00:01:46 --> 00:01:47 Yeah, absolutely. No, I'm from
00:01:47 --> 00:01:50 Seattle originally. As you can tell from my accent, I'm not at Glaswegian.
00:01:50 --> 00:01:55 So from Seattle originally, studied there, went to graduate school, St.
00:01:55 --> 00:01:58 Andrews, So I spent a few years on the east coast of Scotland and then kind
00:01:58 --> 00:02:02 of did the post-doc world tour for a while and spent some time in Germany,
00:02:02 --> 00:02:07 Ireland, and now we're back in Scotland. So it's a good spot to be.
00:02:07 --> 00:02:11 It's really dark this time of year. So there's nothing to do but go to the library and go to the pub.
00:02:11 --> 00:02:16 And it's a good life. As I say, I could think of way worse places to go.
00:02:19 --> 00:02:22 So tell people a little bit about, hang on, as I reach for the book here,
00:02:23 --> 00:02:27 words are not enough. paratexts manuscripts in the real new testament what ultimately
00:02:27 --> 00:02:29 inspired you to write a book on this particular topic,
00:02:30 --> 00:02:34 Yeah, I mean, a few things. So, you know, we're running a number of big research
00:02:34 --> 00:02:37 projects in Glasgow right now that focus on the New Testament's manuscripts
00:02:37 --> 00:02:42 in a number of different directions, more sort of technical scholarly stuff.
00:02:42 --> 00:02:45 But I was really interested in using the manuscripts,
00:02:46 --> 00:02:49 as a way to think about what the Bible is,
00:02:49 --> 00:02:55 what defines it from the very first time it was composed to a Bible you pick
00:02:55 --> 00:03:02 up on the shelf and to think about what's so important about this text by looking
00:03:02 --> 00:03:06 at how other people in the past have produced, read, transmitted,
00:03:07 --> 00:03:13 moved this text from the first century on to us. So there's a lot of rich material there.
00:03:13 --> 00:03:19 It's the most widespread, widely transmitted ancient text from antiquity,
00:03:19 --> 00:03:25 over 5 manuscripts, and we've really only begun to explore what this sort
00:03:25 --> 00:03:27 of set of material has to offer for us.
00:03:28 --> 00:03:32 Yeah, and that's a great place to start. So my first initial question is because
00:03:32 --> 00:03:35 I think, you know, a lot of the people listening are laymen, just like myself.
00:03:35 --> 00:03:39 And so there's not, there's a lot of things that we have assumptions about in
00:03:39 --> 00:03:42 terms of things that we think that we know, right, about the New Testament.
00:03:42 --> 00:03:46 And the first misconception, obviously, is the fact that this thing fell out
00:03:46 --> 00:03:50 of the sky in a fully formed book, and that's not the case.
00:03:50 --> 00:03:53 So start off about, start off talking about like what do
00:03:53 --> 00:03:56 we actually know for cert about the new test and in
00:03:56 --> 00:04:00 terms of things that we can we can say for relative
00:04:00 --> 00:04:03 certainty versus what we don't know at this point yeah absolutely
00:04:03 --> 00:04:06 i mean i think that's right when you think about the new test when we think
00:04:06 --> 00:04:10 of or the bible more generally a sort of disembodied perfect text floating around
00:04:10 --> 00:04:14 just waiting to be put in a printed book you can buy at barnes and noble but
00:04:14 --> 00:04:17 actually like when you look at the manuscripts i think the one thing that really
00:04:17 --> 00:04:23 strikes you and the one thing that is always certain is an element of change and flux,
00:04:23 --> 00:04:27 whether that has to do with the Greek text of the New Testament,
00:04:27 --> 00:04:30 which changes in small-scale ways from manuscript to manuscript.
00:04:30 --> 00:04:34 These are hand-made objects. And also, the material they're made on,
00:04:34 --> 00:04:38 the size of the manuscript, which books are in there, in what order.
00:04:39 --> 00:04:43 And then, you know, this book really explores paratext, which is all the things
00:04:43 --> 00:04:48 around the biblical text that are always in the manuscripts alongside it and
00:04:48 --> 00:04:51 that are framing our reading experiences.
00:04:52 --> 00:04:57 So the thing that I think I take for granted is that the Bible is in a state of change.
00:04:58 --> 00:05:04 It's a process, not a finished, complete work that you can buy at the bookshop,
00:05:04 --> 00:05:08 although that's one instantiation of this tradition.
00:05:08 --> 00:05:13 So for me, the manuscripts really point up the fact that the Bibles that we
00:05:13 --> 00:05:19 can pick up today are a pretty new phenomenon in history of bible reading and
00:05:19 --> 00:05:24 we can see how other people of the past have engaged these texts in the same way,
00:05:24 --> 00:05:29 yeah i i should point out that you've already angered so many people by saying.
00:05:30 --> 00:05:34 You know yeah i mean can i can i just say like you know i don't a change doesn't
00:05:34 --> 00:05:40 mean corrupt it doesn't mean bad you know we tend to think like in our age of
00:05:40 --> 00:05:43 like printed books where you can print the same book a million times exactly
00:05:43 --> 00:05:45 the same we tend to think of change.
00:05:46 --> 00:05:51 As problematic for the things that are really important but in the ancient world
00:05:51 --> 00:05:55 when you have to hand make the parchment and paper you want to use.
00:05:55 --> 00:05:58 You had to make the ink and make your quills and do these sorts of things.
00:05:59 --> 00:06:03 Like change is central to the things that people care for most.
00:06:03 --> 00:06:06 It's like a garden. If you didn't change your garden, it would die.
00:06:06 --> 00:06:10 If you didn't tend it, move things around, put things in the right place,
00:06:10 --> 00:06:11 you wouldn't get anything from it.
00:06:12 --> 00:06:17 The Bible is the same way. People tend to it and it changes because it's important
00:06:17 --> 00:06:19 to these communities from the first century onward.
00:06:20 --> 00:06:24 So it's actually a sort of counterintuitive thing to the narrative of the Bible
00:06:24 --> 00:06:27 as a sort of unchanging, perfect word of God.
00:06:27 --> 00:06:32 Yes, in some way, but also, you know, if you don't have people engaging with
00:06:32 --> 00:06:35 this text, it disappears. So this is why I think change is a good thing.
00:06:36 --> 00:06:39 Excellent thank you for uh thank you for covering i sure i do
00:06:39 --> 00:06:42 i mean that is a real thing that that i find that we
00:06:42 --> 00:06:45 fight against specifically in the western world is this notion
00:06:45 --> 00:06:50 that it is is perfect unchanging and has always been in the form that we know
00:06:50 --> 00:06:55 it in today which is not the case and you mentioned manuscripts so talk a little
00:06:55 --> 00:06:59 bit about that because i do think it's important to note like how far back do
00:06:59 --> 00:07:03 we go do we have original manuscripts like the very first,
00:07:04 --> 00:07:06 writings, or do we not? If only.
00:07:07 --> 00:07:12 No, we don't. The earliest copies go back pretty early to the 2nd and 3rd century.
00:07:12 --> 00:07:15 There's fragmentary papyrus copies from garbage dumps in Egypt,
00:07:16 --> 00:07:17 mostly, founded in the 19th century.
00:07:17 --> 00:07:22 The earliest copy of Paul's letters that we know of is just across the Irish
00:07:22 --> 00:07:26 Sea in Dublin at the Chester Beatty Library, and so they're quite close by.
00:07:26 --> 00:07:31 So we can go back pretty far, and there is a lot of consistency in the tradition.
00:07:31 --> 00:07:36 There's no huge, large-scale changes There's no big corruptions in the tradition,
00:07:36 --> 00:07:41 but there's this series of small-scale sort of tending changes to these things.
00:07:41 --> 00:07:48 So the manuscripts we have date from, as I said, the 2nd on the early side through
00:07:48 --> 00:07:50 to the 19th and 20th century, like
00:07:50 --> 00:07:54 very late copies of printed editions of things we find at monasteries.
00:07:54 --> 00:07:58 But the vast majority of stuff that we have for the Greek New Testament is medieval.
00:07:58 --> 00:08:04 There's a handful of 4th and 5th century full Bible codexes in Greek that are
00:08:04 --> 00:08:06 very unusual and very cool.
00:08:06 --> 00:08:11 Two are in London, one's in the Vatican, one's in Paris. So they're all fairly close by.
00:08:11 --> 00:08:15 But we have a sort of gap from the 6th to the 9th century.
00:08:15 --> 00:08:19 There's not that much material, and then you see an explosion of what we have thereafter.
00:08:19 --> 00:08:24 So it's spotty at the early stages, but you can get a fairly good picture of
00:08:24 --> 00:08:29 the sorts of things that people are doing with the New Testament at a fairly early stage.
00:08:30 --> 00:08:33 And and talk a little bit too about the fact that obviously
00:08:33 --> 00:08:36 this is and you make we'll talk more about this obviously you talk
00:08:36 --> 00:08:39 about this in the book as well is the fact that as you've
00:08:39 --> 00:08:44 mentioned that the fully formed bound version is a real relatively new concept
00:08:44 --> 00:08:49 brought on advancements in technology and printing before that you know how
00:08:49 --> 00:08:53 were people getting their their bible fix essentially at that point yep i mean
00:08:53 --> 00:08:58 so there's three or four full bible codices from the fourth and fifth century, as I mentioned.
00:08:58 --> 00:09:02 And they have all of the Old Testament in Greek, all of the New Testament in
00:09:02 --> 00:09:05 Greek, but in all different orders of the books.
00:09:05 --> 00:09:08 And then a couple of them have other texts at the end, Clementine literature,
00:09:09 --> 00:09:11 the Epistle of Barnabas, and these sorts of things.
00:09:11 --> 00:09:15 So even at this early stage, things are moving around quite a bit,
00:09:15 --> 00:09:19 and these are highly unusual in the big picture of things.
00:09:19 --> 00:09:24 But most of the time, people are engaging biblical texts in smaller collections.
00:09:25 --> 00:09:28 So there's a lot of gospel books that are just Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
00:09:28 --> 00:09:32 There's a lot of what we call apostolos manuscripts, which is Acts.
00:09:33 --> 00:09:35 The Catholic epistles, and then Paul's letters thereafter.
00:09:36 --> 00:09:40 Revelation's kind of, it's out there doing its own thing, sometimes with these
00:09:40 --> 00:09:42 things, sometimes not, very spotty.
00:09:42 --> 00:09:45 But in the Greek tradition, it tends to be these smaller collections.
00:09:46 --> 00:09:51 I mean, of the over 5 Greek manuscripts we have, only around 50 of them
00:09:51 --> 00:09:54 were designed to have all 27 books of the New Testament.
00:09:54 --> 00:09:58 And only three or four of those have them in the order that we would recognize
00:09:58 --> 00:10:01 when we pick an English Bible off a bookshelf today.
00:10:01 --> 00:10:04 So people are engaging these things in different contexts, doing different things
00:10:04 --> 00:10:08 with them, often hearing them in liturgy or in church services,
00:10:08 --> 00:10:13 as opposed to sort of private reading a biblical text. That's a very modern phenomenon.
00:10:14 --> 00:10:18 So, you know, how you use the Bible, what works it's connected to,
00:10:19 --> 00:10:22 you know, what other markers, markings are around the edges of the manuscript
00:10:22 --> 00:10:26 and on the front and the back changes how people engage with these things.
00:10:26 --> 00:10:30 So, you know, when you look at the manuscripts, you see our modern Bibles are
00:10:30 --> 00:10:35 very cool because we kind of have it all there, but they're also very anomalous in some ways.
00:10:35 --> 00:10:38 Yeah and talk a little bit about like what what can
00:10:38 --> 00:10:41 we learn what can we take away from the fact that uh you
00:10:41 --> 00:10:44 know that that stat that you just gave just in
00:10:44 --> 00:10:48 terms of like how these were sort of bunched or grouped together uh you know
00:10:48 --> 00:10:51 in terms of the writings what does that tell us about early christians and sort
00:10:51 --> 00:10:57 of how you know like how they viewed these sacred texts yeah i mean i think
00:10:57 --> 00:11:01 these keys the earliest christians who wrote these traditions and the earliest
00:11:01 --> 00:11:03 people who collected them and put them into groups,
00:11:04 --> 00:11:07 you know, collected Paul's letters into a corpus and gave them titles and did
00:11:07 --> 00:11:09 all this stuff and passed them on.
00:11:09 --> 00:11:12 You know, I think these texts are hugely important for these communities.
00:11:12 --> 00:11:15 The fact that there are so many manuscripts and that they're so diverse,
00:11:15 --> 00:11:16 I think, speaks to that reality.
00:11:16 --> 00:11:20 But it shows that people are continually grappling with.
00:11:21 --> 00:11:25 What these texts are for, what their import is, what we do with them,
00:11:25 --> 00:11:29 the technologies of book production change and enable people to do new things
00:11:29 --> 00:11:35 with the biblical text, to arrange them in new ways, to create cross-references between them.
00:11:35 --> 00:11:40 And they actually created very interesting pathways for reading that we don't
00:11:40 --> 00:11:41 have in our modern Bibles.
00:11:41 --> 00:11:45 So you get glimpses at the things that people are doing, but there's this constant
00:11:45 --> 00:11:48 negotiation between this biblical text,
00:11:48 --> 00:11:53 which is, I think, central and important and viewed as revelatory and I think
00:11:53 --> 00:11:57 an important tradition for almost every Christian community in existence.
00:11:57 --> 00:12:03 But people are continually wrestling with these traditions and what to do with
00:12:03 --> 00:12:08 them, how to frame the interpretation, how to help people understand them,
00:12:08 --> 00:12:13 how to have people a guideline into this really complicated set of texts.
00:12:13 --> 00:12:16 Yeah it it is really interesting like there are a lot of things you
00:12:16 --> 00:12:19 point out throughout the book that you know just not things i
00:12:19 --> 00:12:22 would have necessarily considered before before we get into that starting
00:12:22 --> 00:12:25 at the beginning you talk about the materiality of
00:12:25 --> 00:12:28 the bible you say how a book is made says something about its
00:12:28 --> 00:12:32 text and what we should do with it tell folks what you mean by that yeah i mean
00:12:32 --> 00:12:38 if you go to a book a bookshop you can scan the shelves and you can see a cheap
00:12:38 --> 00:12:41 paperback a little paperback book and know okay it's probably going to be about
00:12:41 --> 00:12:45 20 bucks i could pick this up, it's not going to be a big monument on my shelf.
00:12:45 --> 00:12:49 It's just be something I read. But if you go and pick, you know,
00:12:49 --> 00:12:54 spend $100 on a big, hardbound, leather-bound family Bible with all the bells
00:12:54 --> 00:12:59 and whistles and these things, it's going to be an important artifact in your family.
00:12:59 --> 00:13:02 It's going to be something maybe you pass down from generation to generation.
00:13:02 --> 00:13:08 It's going to be something you use to remember the key parts of your family's life or whatever.
00:13:08 --> 00:13:12 But the way a book is made communicates certain things to us.
00:13:12 --> 00:13:18 So, you know, you can spot a dictionary by the notches in the forend of the paper.
00:13:18 --> 00:13:23 You can spot, I don't know, I'm just looking at my bookshelf here,
00:13:23 --> 00:13:27 a lexicon by how big it is and the hardback nature and these sorts of things.
00:13:28 --> 00:13:34 So the materials tell us something. And the same is true of the manuscripts that you see.
00:13:34 --> 00:13:38 If it's really fine parchment and very clear writing and wide margins.
00:13:38 --> 00:13:43 You know, it's meant for some sort of monumental purpose, maybe a very wealthy
00:13:43 --> 00:13:44 patron or something like this.
00:13:44 --> 00:13:49 And then you see these really chicken scratchy cursive hard to read scripts
00:13:49 --> 00:13:52 on parchment that has a bunch of holes in it,
00:13:53 --> 00:13:58 which may just be for a local community or a group of people who are reading
00:13:58 --> 00:14:00 these for their own sustenance or whatever.
00:14:00 --> 00:14:05 But the manuscripts are really varied even more than a modern bookshop.
00:14:06 --> 00:14:10 You know the physicality of the book the way it smells you
00:14:10 --> 00:14:13 know the way it feels you can see people's fingerprints
00:14:13 --> 00:14:16 on the parchment you can see candle wax
00:14:16 --> 00:14:19 drippings where people have been reading in the evening you can
00:14:19 --> 00:14:22 smell the incense come off some manuscripts that were
00:14:22 --> 00:14:25 used in churches and being in the physical presence
00:14:25 --> 00:14:28 of these things really i don't know it gets me
00:14:28 --> 00:14:30 excited anyway so yeah i mean the way
00:14:30 --> 00:14:33 you describe it it feels like there's so much character to to
00:14:33 --> 00:14:36 these versions of the text than sort of
00:14:36 --> 00:14:40 the sterile version that's the millionth printed.
00:14:40 --> 00:14:44 Off copy or whatever we get from you know like you said the barnes and noble
00:14:44 --> 00:14:48 it feels like there's a lot more character and a lot more lived experience sort
00:14:48 --> 00:14:54 of in the text that's right yeah no i i agree completely when you view the bible
00:14:54 --> 00:14:59 as either an immaterial perfect text out there that we can grab somehow,
00:15:00 --> 00:15:03 or as just the book that you have in front of you,
00:15:03 --> 00:15:10 you lose all of this access to thousands of anonymous people who left the only
00:15:10 --> 00:15:15 imprint of their existence on the pages of these books.
00:15:16 --> 00:15:20 So you lose this sort of empathetic perspective that you're part of a broader
00:15:20 --> 00:15:25 history of people reading, grappling with, engaging these texts for various reasons.
00:15:26 --> 00:15:29 Yeah for sure so one of the one of the
00:15:29 --> 00:15:31 words i want you to find for folks because we're going to talk a lot about it
00:15:31 --> 00:15:36 obviously it's a core theme of the book is this word paratext yeah for the listeners
00:15:36 --> 00:15:40 what that is and what that tells many scripts that make up the new testament
00:15:40 --> 00:15:47 yep yeah so i mean paratexts are at least in my mind everything that you find in a book
00:15:48 --> 00:15:53 beyond the main text itself so when you pick up a modern book it's full of paratext
00:15:53 --> 00:15:56 all the legal material at the front, the title pages,
00:15:56 --> 00:16:00 titles, subtitles, footnotes, page numbers.
00:16:01 --> 00:16:06 Indices, bibliography, any of these sorts of things that you would see in any
00:16:06 --> 00:16:08 sort of book you would pick up today.
00:16:08 --> 00:16:17 And the manuscripts have a really rich, diverse set of paratex attached to each
00:16:17 --> 00:16:21 work in different ways that do different things to people as you read.
00:16:21 --> 00:16:25 And so these, I mean, to begin to describe the vastness of the New Testament's
00:16:25 --> 00:16:29 paratextuality and its manuscript is a big lift.
00:16:29 --> 00:16:34 But I guess a good corollary is when you see, pick up a modern English Bible,
00:16:34 --> 00:16:39 full of paratexts, prefaces, tables of contents, page numbers,
00:16:40 --> 00:16:43 subtitles, chapter and verse divisions.
00:16:43 --> 00:16:48 All of these sorts of things were not written by the authors of these texts.
00:16:48 --> 00:16:53 None of these things go back to Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, or whoever.
00:16:54 --> 00:16:57 These are the products of tradition of usually, but not always,
00:16:58 --> 00:17:03 anonymous people who have worked to organize the Bible in some way to create
00:17:03 --> 00:17:05 modes of interpretation that
00:17:05 --> 00:17:10 people can engage with to help people make sense of their sacred texts.
00:17:10 --> 00:17:14 So paratexts are everywhere, whether you're looking at manuscripts,
00:17:14 --> 00:17:17 printed books, online text, digital texts, whatever.
00:17:18 --> 00:17:21 But the manuscripts have a particularly rich tradition that we really don't
00:17:21 --> 00:17:25 have access to when we're looking at modern Bibles.
00:17:25 --> 00:17:30 So I wanted to explore some of these traditions and to see how it helps us think
00:17:30 --> 00:17:33 about what the Bible is and how we can approach it.
00:17:34 --> 00:17:37 Yeah, that's such an interesting point that I had not considered before,
00:17:38 --> 00:17:42 is just this idea that the very earliest versions of these texts would have
00:17:42 --> 00:17:47 been constructed in a very different way, which would have made it more difficult to read.
00:17:47 --> 00:17:51 And there was a lot of work over a long period of time by a lot of,
00:17:51 --> 00:17:55 as you said, nameless people who kind of put it into more of a digestible form
00:17:55 --> 00:17:57 with chapters and verses and stuff like that.
00:17:57 --> 00:18:04 So talk a little bit about that. In specific, you talk about this guy named Eusebius of Caesarea.
00:18:04 --> 00:18:08 And why is his commentary so important understanding like sort of the modern
00:18:08 --> 00:18:11 or like even the early christian history.
00:18:12 --> 00:18:16 I mean, the sort of cradle of paratextual play with the New Testament is in
00:18:16 --> 00:18:21 Caesarea in the third and fourth century with the work of Origen on the Old
00:18:21 --> 00:18:23 Testament and Eusebius on the New Testament.
00:18:23 --> 00:18:28 These guys do a lot, just voluminous writings, church histories,
00:18:28 --> 00:18:32 interpretive tracts, commentaries, all these sorts of things.
00:18:32 --> 00:18:37 But one of the most important things that Eusebius did was create something
00:18:37 --> 00:18:40 called the canon table system for the Gospels.
00:18:41 --> 00:18:45 So Eusebius knew something that anyone who has ever read the New Testament knows
00:18:45 --> 00:18:47 is that there are four Gospels right at the beginning.
00:18:47 --> 00:18:54 They're all pretty similar, but there's a lot of differences among them too. So this is a problem.
00:18:54 --> 00:18:55 So how do you handle this?
00:18:56 --> 00:19:01 What Eusebius did is he created way before the modern chapter and verses that
00:19:01 --> 00:19:06 we know existed, the first system that enabled you to find your place in the Gospels.
00:19:07 --> 00:19:10 So instead of having 24 chapters in Matthew,
00:19:10 --> 00:19:15 he had 200 and some, splitting the text into really small units,
00:19:15 --> 00:19:20 doing this for each of the four Gospels, and then creating a set of tables at
00:19:20 --> 00:19:25 the front of the Gospel book that you could go see where that number had parallels
00:19:25 --> 00:19:29 in Matthew or in Mark, Luke, or John, or what have you.
00:19:30 --> 00:19:37 Table 1 is instances where Eusebius thinks that all the Gospels have pretty much the same passage.
00:19:37 --> 00:19:41 Table 2 is where it's Matthew, Mark, and Luke alone.
00:19:41 --> 00:19:44 And all the way down to Table 10, where it's all the passages that the Gospels
00:19:44 --> 00:19:46 have only to themselves.
00:19:46 --> 00:19:49 So you can trace the really complicated...
00:19:51 --> 00:19:54 Relationships between the gospels without breaking up
00:19:54 --> 00:19:57 their texts or their narratives you can still read them straight across
00:19:57 --> 00:20:02 one at a time or you can read them in this really hypertextual way where you're
00:20:02 --> 00:20:05 looking at the margins finding a number going to a table going to a different
00:20:05 --> 00:20:09 gospel and then you have like both sections open as you hold the big chunk in
00:20:09 --> 00:20:13 the middle in your hand and you can flip back and forth and look at the passages
00:20:13 --> 00:20:16 and compare them so he kind of puts it all on display.
00:20:18 --> 00:20:23 Here's all their differences and all their glory. To Eusebius,
00:20:23 --> 00:20:26 he thinks they end up saying the same thing, more or less, not very surprising.
00:20:26 --> 00:20:31 But he created this really powerful tool for comparison that really has never
00:20:31 --> 00:20:36 been duplicated in our modern Bibles that really have nothing like this.
00:20:36 --> 00:20:41 And this system appears in nearly every gospel manuscript we have.
00:20:41 --> 00:20:43 It's ubiquitous. You can't escape it.
00:20:43 --> 00:20:47 So it's funny today when you pick up the Gospels, you sometimes have subtitles
00:20:47 --> 00:20:50 with parallels written by modern editors,
00:20:50 --> 00:20:57 but it's really just like vague ghost of what UCB has done in this really interesting
00:20:57 --> 00:21:03 way that really helps us to do a lot of cool interpretive things and to think
00:21:03 --> 00:21:05 about the Gospels and their interrelationships in new ways.
00:21:06 --> 00:21:10 And to acknowledge the reality that these things do differ, but when you put
00:21:10 --> 00:21:12 them in a conversation, and you can do some things with them.
00:21:13 --> 00:21:17 Yeah, and it immediately brings to mind the scholarship that's been done on,
00:21:17 --> 00:21:22 you know, the similarities in regards to a possible common document that some
00:21:22 --> 00:21:25 of the gospel writers sort of pulled from the, you know, Gospel of Q or,
00:21:25 --> 00:21:27 you know, or what have you.
00:21:27 --> 00:21:31 So it's kind of interesting because that was very, very early on, obviously, Eusebius.
00:21:32 --> 00:21:34 Absolutely. Yeah, it's very early. It's early fourth century.
00:21:34 --> 00:21:39 I mean, Eusebius then, some of his other writings often appear in the margins
00:21:39 --> 00:21:42 of gospel manuscripts at particularly problematic passages.
00:21:42 --> 00:21:47 So one of them is the Easter morning narratives in each of the Gospels.
00:21:47 --> 00:21:51 They each give a slightly different description of what day it was,
00:21:51 --> 00:21:55 what morning it was, what time it was, who was there at the tomb,
00:21:55 --> 00:21:57 these sorts of differences.
00:21:57 --> 00:22:01 And often in some of these manuscripts that have commentary in the margins,
00:22:01 --> 00:22:04 Eusebius' text is there to say, well, when you look at this one,
00:22:04 --> 00:22:07 it's this, but they actually mean this, and they actually all kind of fit together.
00:22:07 --> 00:22:13 So, you know, his influence is, you know, determined what people did with the
00:22:13 --> 00:22:16 Gospels for over a thousand years.
00:22:16 --> 00:22:21 And our modern Bibles really don't really obscure that reality.
00:22:21 --> 00:22:26 And when you look at what he does and how the system works, it's complicated for sure.
00:22:26 --> 00:22:32 But once you get a hang of it, it's not so mystifying. you can do some very
00:22:32 --> 00:22:33 different things than we do.
00:22:33 --> 00:22:38 I think our Bibles today tend to encourage us to read each of these narratives
00:22:38 --> 00:22:40 like it's a novel from front to back.
00:22:41 --> 00:22:44 But for Eusebius, they're meant that you can read them that way.
00:22:44 --> 00:22:45 The system enables you to.
00:22:45 --> 00:22:52 But it also really encourages you to be flipping back and forth constantly to
00:22:52 --> 00:22:56 read all the Gospels in conversation with one another and all their weirdness.
00:22:56 --> 00:22:58 This is what he's trying to get people to do.
00:22:59 --> 00:23:02 Yeah, that's absolutely fascinating. And again, it goes back to your sort of
00:23:02 --> 00:23:06 central point that there are all these different things that sort of you take
00:23:06 --> 00:23:11 for granted or don't even potentially notice in the modern Bible that really
00:23:11 --> 00:23:15 influence the ways in which you read the Bible and understand the Bible.
00:23:15 --> 00:23:20 And so, you know, you talked about this system, you know, within early Christianity
00:23:20 --> 00:23:24 that's trying to make sense of it and trying to make it more easily, easy to reference.
00:23:24 --> 00:23:29 You also talk about the role of the preface, which is a common literary tool
00:23:29 --> 00:23:32 in most books, I would say.
00:23:32 --> 00:23:36 And so talk about how prefaces direct our limited attention resources,
00:23:36 --> 00:23:40 as you say. How are prefaces used in such a way within the New Testament?
00:23:41 --> 00:23:45 Yeah, no, great question. I mean, the thing about paratexts,
00:23:45 --> 00:23:49 I'll say at the start is these things are hidden in plain sight.
00:23:49 --> 00:23:56 I mean, we often take them for granted, skip over them, don't even clock that
00:23:56 --> 00:23:59 we're reading something that's sort of set off from the main text itself.
00:23:59 --> 00:24:02 So once you see them, you can't unsee them.
00:24:03 --> 00:24:07 So this is how I kind of, one of the ways I got into thinking about this.
00:24:07 --> 00:24:10 But I mean, in terms of prefaces, I mean, if you picked up, and one thing I
00:24:10 --> 00:24:13 talk about in the book is the Schofield Reference Bible.
00:24:13 --> 00:24:18 It's this 19th century dispensationalist, very conservative evangelical,
00:24:19 --> 00:24:22 annotated Bible created by this ex-Confederate soldier.
00:24:23 --> 00:24:29 Very interesting fellow. But I mean, it's the best-selling book at Oxford University
00:24:29 --> 00:24:32 Press history still today, thanks to its American audience.
00:24:32 --> 00:24:36 But what Schofield does is creates this nested set of prefaces,
00:24:36 --> 00:24:41 like a preface on what the Bible is as a whole story, and then one for the Old
00:24:41 --> 00:24:45 Testament and the New Testament, one for each of the subsections of the Gospels
00:24:45 --> 00:24:47 and Paul's letters, and then a preface for each work itself,
00:24:48 --> 00:24:49 Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
00:24:49 --> 00:24:56 And it's just this really oppressive, prescriptive way of thinking about what
00:24:56 --> 00:24:59 the Bible is, how these collections work, what they do, and so on.
00:25:01 --> 00:25:04 And you find similar things in the manuscript, less prescriptive,
00:25:04 --> 00:25:08 but the prefaces point out particular things about the work that once you read
00:25:08 --> 00:25:12 carefully, as you're reading, you begin to see these things more clearly.
00:25:13 --> 00:25:18 I think the best example is there's a set of paratexts called the Euthalian
00:25:18 --> 00:25:21 Apparatus, which most New Testament scholars have never even heard of.
00:25:21 --> 00:25:26 It's very rarefied stuff, even if it's in nearly every manuscript of Acts,
00:25:26 --> 00:25:29 the Catholic Epistles, Paul's letters that we have. So it's everywhere.
00:25:29 --> 00:25:35 But it has a preface to Acts that gives you like one sentence on the narrative,
00:25:35 --> 00:25:37 like it's about the early church and Paul.
00:25:37 --> 00:25:43 But then you get two lists. You get a list of apostles and disciples and characters in the book.
00:25:44 --> 00:25:47 And then you get a list of miracles that happen in Acts, which you don't tend
00:25:47 --> 00:25:49 to think of Acts as a place where miracles occur.
00:25:50 --> 00:25:53 But once you start reading the work with these lists in mind,
00:25:53 --> 00:25:59 you're keyed on for particular characters and their inner relationships,
00:25:59 --> 00:26:03 where they come from, how they interact with Paul and whoever else he's traveling with.
00:26:03 --> 00:26:07 And then the miracles, the thing the apostles do, the things that happened to
00:26:07 --> 00:26:12 Paul on his shipwreck journey and his call on the Damascus road and all these sorts of things.
00:26:12 --> 00:26:16 So it reframes what you're reading and it draws your attention to those things
00:26:16 --> 00:26:18 that it wants you to focus on for whatever reason.
00:26:18 --> 00:26:22 This one doesn't tell us why it wants us to focus on that but that's what it
00:26:22 --> 00:26:29 is so you know any preface for any modern bible i mean functions function similarly
00:26:29 --> 00:26:34 like the a chapter on the green bible which i really i really want to like.
00:26:34 --> 00:26:41 And what this bible does is it prints any text having to do with creation or
00:26:41 --> 00:26:47 creation care in green ink you know to draw your attention to environmental issues it's very 2009.
00:26:48 --> 00:26:52 Idea but the green ink is fine
00:26:52 --> 00:26:56 and nice and interesting and a fun play on like the red text for jesus's words
00:26:56 --> 00:27:04 and so on but it has like 150 pages of prefaces essays from christian environmentalists
00:27:04 --> 00:27:09 and famous theologians and previous guests on this podcast who try to,
00:27:10 --> 00:27:16 attune people to you know christians requirement to care for the earth as a
00:27:16 --> 00:27:19 way of caring for the poor in creation and so on.
00:27:20 --> 00:27:23 So, you know, prefaces can go a bit awry sometimes, go a bit over the top,
00:27:23 --> 00:27:28 but it's, you know, a useful tool that is really broadly distributed throughout the manuscripts.
00:27:28 --> 00:27:31 There are dozens and dozens and dozens of different prefaces for the Gospels,
00:27:31 --> 00:27:36 for example, a few different ones for Revelation, but these things are almost
00:27:36 --> 00:27:38 always a part of the manuscripts that we see.
00:27:39 --> 00:27:43 These are like ingrained parts of what makes the Bible the Bible,
00:27:43 --> 00:27:44 of a make scripture, scripture.
00:27:45 --> 00:27:48 And one of the things I try to argue is that it's these paratexts,
00:27:48 --> 00:27:54 all these things around the text itself that organize these works into scriptural texts.
00:27:55 --> 00:27:57 Without paratexts, there is no Bible.
00:27:57 --> 00:28:01 Yeah, I remember that line that's literally in the book. That's my only good
00:28:01 --> 00:28:03 line. That's my only good line.
00:28:04 --> 00:28:09 There's some great lines in this book. So listeners, go ahead and grab a copy.
00:28:09 --> 00:28:13 But talk about, so on the one hand, we've got the prefaces that kind of set
00:28:13 --> 00:28:16 you up, point you in certain directions.
00:28:16 --> 00:28:19 There's also the role of prologues as well.
00:28:20 --> 00:28:25 Yep, absolutely. So there's like a hierarchy of prologues and prefaces.
00:28:26 --> 00:28:29 It's hard to, the Greek uses different words for the prologos,
00:28:29 --> 00:28:30 so it's a Greek word for sure.
00:28:30 --> 00:28:35 But like the Euthalian system, again, for example, is this set of lists and
00:28:35 --> 00:28:39 prefaces and prologues to Acts, the Catholic Epistles, and Paul's letters.
00:28:39 --> 00:28:43 There are prologues, one for Acts, one for the Catholic Epistles,
00:28:43 --> 00:28:45 and one for Paul's letters.
00:28:46 --> 00:28:49 And not surprisingly, the ones for Paul's letters is really long.
00:28:49 --> 00:28:53 Gives you a lot of detail about the books, who sent them to where,
00:28:53 --> 00:28:58 from which place, when Paul was in prison, what the content of each of the books is.
00:28:58 --> 00:29:03 And the Catholic Epistles one is like 80% of dedication to a patron and two
00:29:03 --> 00:29:05 lines on the Catholic Epistles.
00:29:05 --> 00:29:09 So, you know, the prologues, these ones aren't super exciting,
00:29:09 --> 00:29:14 but they do show that even in the ancient world, in late antiquity,
00:29:14 --> 00:29:16 in the medieval world, in the Byzantine world,
00:29:16 --> 00:29:21 people still give way more attention to Paul's letters than they do to the Catholic
00:29:21 --> 00:29:24 epistles, to poor 1, 2, 3 John, 1, 2 Peter,
00:29:24 --> 00:29:27 James and Jude, and to Acts even.
00:29:27 --> 00:29:31 The Acts prologue is basically just a summary of what Paul does in there,
00:29:32 --> 00:29:35 in the book. So everything is still really oriented toward Paul.
00:29:35 --> 00:29:41 So you can still see some of the things that we would, with the trends in Bible
00:29:41 --> 00:29:43 reading that exists today, go way back.
00:29:43 --> 00:29:46 Like we're part of a much bigger story in this regard.
00:29:47 --> 00:34:45 Music.
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