Last night someone asked me about my very first book.  My answer wasn’t what they were hoping for; the book was not an insightful discussion of Jesus or the Gospels or how we got the Bible for a general audience.  It was my published dissertation, a work of scholarship on the Greek manuscript tradition of the NT written for the six people in the world who would care.

But it’s kind of an interesting story anyway, in part because it deals with the fundamental issue of how scholars try to decide what the authors of the NT originally wrote.  It went at the issue in a highly specific and detailed way, that one probably would not think of off the bat.  I talked about it on the blog many years ago, and will devote to it three posts again.

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I have talked about Bruce Metzger, my mentor in graduate school, for both my Master’s degree and my PhD,  a number of times on the blog.

When I entered my PhD program at Princeton Theological Seminary, I knew already that I wanted to specialize in the study of the Greek manuscript tradition of the New Testament. I went to Princeton Seminary because because Metzger was the country’s leading expert in this field, and one could argue the leading expert in the world (some Germans would contest the point!).

While doing my Master’s thesis for Metzger I read widely in the secondary literature on textual criticism, and came to be highly influenced by a scholar named Gordon Fee. Fee is an interesting and important figure. As it turns out, he is a very committed Pentecostal Christian, who preaches and evangelizes. But when he’s not doing that, he’s doing scholarship, and he’s an amazing scholar. He is also the author of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth and Discovering Biblical Equality, among other works. At the time of my master’s work, he was one of the top textual critics in the country, right behind Metzger (the generation, or so, behind him).

One of the things Fee had worked on was

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