Farm Boy to Biblical Scholar

Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of my teachers talking about the stories of the Bible. My childhood was in many ways wonderfully idyllic. We had a beef-cattle farm of around sixty acres, my paternal grandparents had an adjoining dairy farm of one-hundred-and-forty acres, and my maternal grandparents had a nearby muck farm of about twenty acres (upon which onions were grown). I was surrounded by family, so kind and nurturing in innumerable ways.

The reading and study of the Bible was a core component of our daily lives, especially, but not only, every Sunday and every Wednesday. We took the text seriously, and we took the practice of religion seriously as well. We shared certain basic assumptions about the nature of the biblical text, including about the authorship of some biblical books and even about the time-frame for the writing of the various books of the Bible. And the belief that the text was in some fashion from God, or of God, was present.

Rigidity and dogmatism, however, were not part of my world, then or now. I do not ever remember hearing the words “infallibility” or “inerrancy” during my youth. Perhaps they were used, perhaps they weren’t, but I am confident that the usage of such terms was not predominant or even common.

No one in my ancestry had attended college. My father once told me that “we come from a long line of farmers,” and this was indeed the case. But for a number of reasons, especially because I wanted to study the Bible deeply, in its original languages, I wanted to go to college. I earned my undergraduate degree at a small, rigorous, religious college in Michigan.

During my time there, I poured over the text of the Bible, and my first foreign language was Hellenistic Greek, which I learned there. Not long after that, at a theological seminary in Tennessee, I learned Hebrew and Aramaic as part of a master’s degree.

The Torah and the Gospels Are Anonymous

During these early years, as I read the text of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament closely, often in the original languages, I began to notice things that were in the text, but that I hadn’t noticed or known before. And I also began to notice things that weren’t in the text, but which I had previously thought were there. The texts of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament were themselves refining and transforming my views of them.

For example, I had grown up with the assumption that the Torah itself stated that it was written by Moses. Along these same lines, it had been my prior sense that the ascriptions of the authorship of the four New Testament gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were anchored in these gospels themselves, or someplace else in the New Testament.

But during close and careful readings of the text of the Torah, I began to realize that the Torah itself does not ascribe the authorship of most or all of the Torah to Moses. In fact, references to him writing anything are few and far between, and he is primarily referred to in the third person (more than 600 times), rather than the first person. Similarly, during close and careful readings of the gospels, I realized that the canonical gospels are anonymous.^[1]

Noticing the Bible’s “Footnotes”

During my youth, I had thought that all manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, and all manuscripts of the Greek New Testament were, for all practical purposes, mostly or nearly identical. Indeed, I had heard people say that those copying the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament through the centuries were very careful, and proofread with absolute precision, near perfection. And I had also heard during my youth that no scribe or copyist of a biblical manuscript would ever have changed a text intentionally for any reason. Period.^[2]

But as I poured over the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, my eyes were often drawn to the bottoms of the pages of my Hebrew and Greek Bibles, something I learned were called “textual variants”—that is, different readings in the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. They were considerably more numerous, and some of them more significant and consequential, than I had thought.

The second edition of Bruce Metzger’s masterful volume on New Testament textual criticism was my first real encounter with this field, and it was particularly formative for me.^[3] Soon I was also reading Kyle McCarter’s wonderful handbook on textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, and after that Emanuel Tov’s tremendous volumes on the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint.^[4]

Textual Variants

Based on manuscript data in works such as these, my understandings of textual transmission, the weighting of textual variants, unintentional and intentional changes to the text, and some of the bases of differences in modern translations, became much more nuanced, descriptive, refined, and accurate. I came to learn, for example, (for the Hebrew Bible, on the basis of the Qumran evidence and the Septuagint, and for the New Testament, the great uncials) that:

• Elyon (“God most high”) divided the world into nations (Deut 32:8-9) on the basis of the number of “the sons of the God(s),” not on the basis of the number of “the sons of Israel”;^[5]
• Goliath’s height (1 Sam 17:4) was “4 cubits and a span,” not “6 cubits and a span” (i.e., he was ca. 6’ 6”, not 9’ 6”);^[6]
• The story about an “angel stirring the water” at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:4) was not in the oldest and best manuscripts of the New Testament (e.g., this verse is absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, two of our best early uncials); and
• Neither was the longer ending of the gospel of Mark (16:9–20) in the oldest and best New Testament manuscripts.^[7]

In essence, textual criticism of the extant manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament were refining my own views, correcting earlier misconceptions.^[8]

Is the Bible Sui Generis in the Ancient Near East?

The literature of the ancient Near East has also been formative in refining my views of the Bible (defined broadly). For example, during my youth, I had understood the Bible to be sui generis, utterly unique, not indebted to surrounding cultures for any of its emphases, content, or statements.

The phrase “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” is quoted in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:38), drawn, of course, from the Pentateuch itself (Exod 21:24; Lev 24:20; Deut 19:21). But this same basic law (lex talionis) and phrasing is found centuries earlier than the time of Moses, for example, in the Laws of Hammurabi (§196), from the 18^th century B.C.E.^[9]

Similar statements can be made about the goring ox laws of the Bible (Exod 21:28–32) and the ancient Near East (e.g., the Laws of Hammurabi §§250–252), among other things.^[10] These sorts of parallels between the Bible and earlier texts from the world of the Bible were also formative for me, refining the ways in which I understood the text. That is, I came to see that the authors of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were very much a part of broader ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultural contexts, and so in order to understand the Bible more fully, I realized that I would need to cultivate my knowledge of those cultures and languages, from Akkadian, Phoenician, and Ugaritic, to Latin, Sahidic Coptic, and beyond.

A Pilgrimage of Change

This pilgrimage of mine is certainly not unique to me. But it does reveal something about the way in which the texts of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament themselves, knowledge about their transmission through the centuries (i.e., the copying), and knowledge about the world from which these texts hailed, have all combined to refine and nuance my understanding of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. The pilgrimage continues, and I am grateful for that.