This is the third and final post I’ll do on my dissertation on the Gospel quotations in the writings of Didymus the Blind, advised by the great New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger.

Different dissertation advisors have different approaches to supervising a dissertation. Some are extremely hands on, to the point of working over every thought and every sentence. Not too many are like that, because if they were, they would never do anything else with their life. Plus, the idea is for the student to figure it out and get good at it. That takes some trial and error. Other advisors go for the big picture and like to talk over the big ideas. Others basically don’t give a rip how the dissertation is coming along – they want to see it at the end, and when it’s done, they’ll tell the student whether it’s good enough or not. Others … well, there are lots of other approaches.

Metzger took an approach that other students may have found frustrating, but that was absolutely perfect for me.  He basically let me do my own thing.  He would graciously read the chapters as I gave them to him.  He would answer any questions I had.  He would indicate where I made grammatical (and related) mistakes (he could spot a misplaced semicolon from twelve pages away).   And he did not get very involved in the whole process.  As I said, that approach could be frustrating for students who wanted a lot of guidance.   But I was very independent minded and really wanted just to get on with it without interference.  So Metzger was perfect.

Metzger retired part way through my dissertation (Princeton Seminary had a mandatory retirement age of 70 at the time), and my official advisor was then David Adams, whom I’ve mentioned before.  He was not a textual critic, but we had worked closely over the years and he was happy to take it on.  Metzger was allowed to stay on the committee, and he was the one, really, who was behind it all.

I will talk about the dissertation defense in my next post.  On the dissertation itself: the first chapter was a methodological discussion of how to classify Greek manuscripts.  When I had defended the dissertation, I separated off this first chapter and published it as an article in an academic journal.   The rest of it I published as my first book Didymus the Blind and the Text of the Gospels.  Not the kind of book you want to read in your spare time, trust me.  But an important milestone for me.

 How it got published is interesting in its way.  I mentioned Gordon Fee in my last post, as the one from whom I had learned so much about analyzing the writings of church fathers for their text of the NT.  He is also the author of How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth and Discovering Biblical Equality, among other works. Fee had said on a couple of occasions in his various articles that someone needed to start a book series in which each volume would be dedicated to a different church father and his text of the New Testament, which would cite (in Greek) every quotation in the church Father, indicate how these quotations matched up with leading manuscripts of the New Testament, provide a statistical analysis of the relationship of this witness to all the others, and draw historical conclusions.  That, of course, is exactly what I did for Didymus.  And so, while I was still writing my dissertation, I wrote Fee a letter and told him that I thought a book series was a great idea.  He should start it and be the editor.  And my volume on Didymus could be the first book in the series.  He thought it was a great idea, and so that’s what we did.

Fee and I later collaborated to do another book, with my friend Mike Holmes (Metzger’s second to last student; I was his last), in the series, on The Text of the Fourth Gospel in the Writings of Origen.  Metzger wrote the Foreward.   After Fee had edited the book series for a few years, I took over from him, and edited it myself for six years.  Today it is edited by one of my former students who also published his dissertation in it.  And so it goes.