Like many of my friends and relatives, scripture study is part of my regimen. But during graduate school, my routine took new directions thanks to the many new sources I was discovering as a student of the history of Christianity. Friends have expressed interest in me sharing study approaches, and since I already use journaling to capture my thoughts and feelings, I figure it’s worth posting my regular devotional readings. I should enjoy any new conversations that might arise.

As I’m sure is the case for everyone, I live by a personal philosophy as I engage with scripture. These axioms influence my approach, which ought to be stated up front:

Truth exists and my principal goal is to discern truth.
Fearing or avoiding truth distracts.
Historical events may cascade into later events but often remain fixed in the past.
What can be established as true about the past will remain relevant in the present.
Reinventing the past through retrojection, presentism, speculation, decontextualization, or misinterpretation says more about our own biases and illusions than anything about what happened.
Willful ignorance or warping of texts is evidence of our own shortcomings and not themselves evidence of historical truth.
Ample evidence proves scripture comes to us as multiple texts developed over vast stretches of time and space by vast communities of authors and transmitters, all living among diverse settings and employing diverse languages, vernaculars, philosophies, routines, and religiosities.
What may resonate with me personally does not establish the meaning of scriptural passages, texts, or affirmations. My subjective devotions do not objectively prove anything.

The list most certainly goes on. I noticed in writing these points just now how they distill what in practice feels almost reflexive; I don’t always articulate to myself what I’m doing as I read, and it feels clarifying to write down these fundamentals.

Philosophy aside, I’m also deliberate in my methodological approaches to scripture study. Because scripture has provenance (meaning there exists a transmission history for each text from its inception to the present), the scriptures all have histories of their own, and those histories will describe influences on the composition. I dislike reading meanings into the text (an approach known as eisegesis that some regard as interpretive error) and favor drawing meanings out of the text (the approach known as exegesis). An exegetical reading will remember provenance and context in establishing subtext and meaning. When our data offer little or no information, a truthful exegesis will acknowledge our inability to arrive at a proper conclusion. Sometimes we just can’t make a robust interpretation.

So there’s the basic approach. I’ll no doubt refine the technical details as I go along, especially when analyzing sources and contextualizing a passage. But truth, provenance, context, and exegesis are the names of the game.

What does this look like in practice? Let’s take the most famous verse from the New Testament: John 3:16.

Quick Exegesis of John 3:16

Right away we must confront language: which version of the Bible will we read? Which then pushes us into source criticism: what sources does a particular version of the Bible use? Where do those sources come from? When and where were they first composed or copied? How did they survive across time for us to read them?

Accessing the Earliest Manuscripts

To answer these questions, I turn to the Novum Testamentum Graece (NTG), which is a critical edition of the New Testament that synthesizes biblical and historical scholarship at large. The print version of this is extremely technical and intimidating at first. It represents a complete record of every known manuscript of New Testament text and every textual variation between manuscripts and copies of manuscripts. The editors employ a complex labeling system to mark all those manuscripts and variations. The control text is in Greek. Browsing to John chapter 3 means learning some basic Greek, but it’s not difficult to discern “KATA IOANNHN” and navigate to the chapter and verse.

In the apparatus block below the main text, codes next to verse 16 indicate all the manuscripts that provide the passage in some form. We need to distinguish between the major categories of New Testament manuscripts to make sense of these codes: the documents themselves were preserved as papyri fragments and codices (bound pages into a volume). Codices bearing a script style of capital letters are called the uncials and those in a more cursive style are called the miniscules. Many manuscripts were prepared for public reading of scripture; these are grouped together as lectionaries. The papyri often pre-date the codices, and the uncials often pre-date the miniscules and lectionaries. When we want to read the earliest manuscript version, we should look for the earliest papyrus and compare with later versions.

In the case of John 3:16, the NTG identifies Papyrus 66, Papyrus 75, Uncial 01, Uncial 03, and Uncial 032 as the earliest manuscripts that established the verse for later copies. In other words, if we were to read the verse in these five documents, we will have exhausted the earliest forms of the text. It’s a finite set from which there will follow copies and copies of copies, a transmission history that keeps biblical studies scholars quite busy.

Provenance and Authenticity

I want to know how this verse got started and look for any issues related to its original composition. This will help me know which languages are at play and which Bible versions will help me as an English speaker read the original text accurately. Fortunately for us, a Wikipedia search for papyrus and uncial sources provides a reasonable introduction to these sources.

We learn that Papyrus 66 comes from the Bodmer Papyri discovery in 1952 and since then has been carefully kept by Bodmer’s estate, sold to Frank Hanna in 2007, and quickly donated to the Vatican Library where it remains. With a strong modern provenance, Papyrus 66 doesn’t have some of the problems of authenticity as other discoveries. (Had this introduction to the source mentioned questionable purchases and custodial transfers, which happens enough in antiquities research, we might consider the source dubious enough to ignore or treat with greater caution.)

Textual Variants among the Manuscripts

We learn that Uncial 01 refers to the Codex Sinaiticus, an important early copy of biblical texts around the 330s through 360s CE. This source was discovered in 1844 and has also enjoyed a strong modern provenance. We could search out transcriptions or digitizations of these two primary sources if we wished or refer to the NTG for any variations that are noted. Here’s the earliest Greek text:

οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον, ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν, ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ’ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

The NTG notes an insertion in later copies and manuscripts between υἱὸν(son) and τὸν (the): the word αὐτὸν (him).

At this point, we’re considering a passage with few variants, all originally produced in the Greek language. When this is the case, I prefer the interlinear version of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Greek New Testament, available for free online at sblgnt.com. This format is useful because (1) it’s produced by biblical and language scholars whose aim is to preserve the biblical text as a source, not enter theological debates about phrasing; (2) it’s formatted in an interlinear structure for English readers to follow the Greek; (3) it provides an easy apparatus for looking up Greek words and grammar.

Word Study

From the SBLGNT, I can examine each word from the Papyrus 66 and Uncial 01 composite:

Key words stand out that likely offer several options in English: egapesen/loved ; theos/God; kosmon/world; monogene/one-of-a-kind; edoken/gave; pas/everyone; pisteuon/believes; apoletai/perish; zoen/life; aionion/eternal. Consider how the intensity of the statement can hinge on which expression we bring to a single word. For example, kosmon shares a root with another Greek word, kosmos/cosmos. Without diving into the nuances of Greek concepts of kosmos, it’s enough to see how in English, our Greek-derived word “cosmos” suggests something much grander than our word “world.” There’s something going on with this passage that may offer different shades of meaning than our traditional “God so loved the world”; consider the possibility of “God so loved the cosmos” or “God so loved the universe” or “God so loved all creation.” An initial word study into a single Greek word from earliest manuscripts can open our exegesis to earlier versions and peel away later traditions.

We’re off to an interesting start. Tomorrow, I’ll take a closer look at the words of the passage and continue that study. What I already know will happen is we’ll discover how the passage appears within a larger context. To make sense of that context, we’re going to have to venture broader than just this one sentence from John 3.

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Scripture Study

Quick Exegesis of John 3:16

Accessing the Earliest Manuscripts

Provenance and Authenticity

Textual Variants among the Manuscripts

Word Study