Research

My research centers both on the manuscript witnesses to early Christian texts and on the field of digital humanities.

Manuscript Page with Ornate Heading

Doctoral Research: Family 0150

I am in the final stages of writing up my thesis at the University of Edinburgh towards a PhD in New Testament and Early Christianity. The topic of my thesis concerns a small group of manuscripts whose Gregory-Aland designations are 0150, 1506, and 2110. I have argued that these three manuscripts are not only a family with remarkable textual affinity, but also the best representation of the text of Paul available to John of Damascus.

The manuscripts of Family 0150 are catenae, which are manuscripts that contain a "chain" of excerpts from various sources. In this case, it appears that John of Damascus selected extracts from John Chrysostom and perhaps other early Christian writers, compressed the language, and produced an edition that alternates between the scholia (the commentary extracts) and the lemma (the biblical text).

I have demonstrated through transcription, collation, and analysis, that

  1. the manuscripts are undoubtedly a "family" in the technical sense of the word as it is used in textual criticism,
  2. and that the reconstructed text of the family archetype is not closely related to the Byzantine text form, rather, it appears to be a form of the text popular in the 6–8th centuries—hundreds of years before the emergence of a "Majority Text" of Paul.