Yesterday I started answering the question of how I moved on from doing research principally on New Testament textual criticism to do other things, mainly involving different aspects of the literature and history of Christianity in the first three centuries CE.   I pointed out there that my training/education was actually not in textual criticism, but mainly in the exegesis (and theology) of the New Testament, and on various aspects of the history of earliest Christianity (from the historical Jesus to the formation of the canon to early heresy and orthodoxy etc.).

But even though that was my *training*, my principal interest all along had been textual criticism, figuring out what the original wording of the New Testament in Greek was (verse by verse by verse), and seeing both how and why the text had been changed by scribes over the years.  This was an interest that was generated very early on in my academic career.  In fact, before I had an academic career.  Before I or anyone else could have imagined I’d have an academic career.  It was an interest I developed in my very first year out of high school, as a first-year student at Moody Bible Institute.

As you might imagine, at Moody we had a heavy dose of Bible courses.  As we used to say, “Moody Bible Institute, where Bible is our middle name.”  And so already at the outset …

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