David Charles Parker

OBE The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry, rewarding valuable service in a wide range of useful activities. It comprises five classes of awards across both civil and military divisions, the most senior two o ...

(born 1953) was the

Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology is a senior chair in theology at the University of Birmingham. It was founded in 1940 and was named for Edward Cadbury who helped fund the setting up of the university's theological department. The chair has bee ...

(2005-2017) and the Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the Department of Theology and Religion,

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...

. His interests include New Testament

textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may rang ...

and Greek and Latin

palaeography Palaeography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, UK) or paleography (American and British English spelling differences#ae and oe, US) (ultimately from , , 'old', and , , 'to write') is the study and academic disciplin ...

Quotes

Commenting on the text of the Greek New Testament, he said:

The text is changing. Every time that I make an edition of the Greek New Testament, or anybody does, we change the wording. We are maybe trying to get back to the oldest possible form but, paradoxically, we are creating a new one. Every translation is different, every reading is different, and although there’s been a tradition in parts of Protestant Christianity to say there is a definitive single form of the text, the fact is you can never find it. There is never ever a final form of the text.BBC Radio 4 programme "The Oldest Bible"
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Regarding a textual change in

Codex Sinaiticus The Codex Sinaiticus (; Shelfmark: London, British Library, Add MS 43725), also called the Sinai Bible, is a fourth-century Christian manuscript of a Greek Bible, containing the majority of the Greek Old Testament, including the deuterocanonica ...

There is also a fascinating place in the codex in the
Sermon on the Mount The Sermon on the Mount ( anglicized from the Matthean Vulgate Latin section title: ) is a collection of sayings spoken by Jesus of Nazareth found in the Gospel of Matthew (chapters 5, 6, and 7). that emphasizes his moral teachings. It is th ...
where we can see a change to the text altering the attitude to anger. Jesus says the person who is angry with his brother deserves judgement. But there is a variation on that. If you look at the page in Codex Sinaiticus you will see that somebody’s added a little word in the margin in Greek which changes it to “the person who is angry with his brother without good reason deserves judgement,” and there you’ve got two very different views of Christian life.

In consideration of the challenges of biblical text reconstruction, D. C. Parker said:

There is a sense in which there is no such thing as either the New Testament or the Gospels. What is available to us is a number of reconstructions of some or all of the documents classified as belonging to the New Testament - some of these reconstructions are manuscripts, say P75 or Codex Vaticanus; others are printed texts like Nestle-Aland. Textual criticism makes it clear that the text is in a sense inaccessible to us. The fact that the recovery of the original text is a task that remains beyond all of us sets a question mark against any claim that we can in any sense 'possess' the text literally or metaphorically.

Works

Books

* - translated with an introduction and notes * * * * * * * * * * * *

Edited by

Journal articles

* * * * * * - review article *

References

External links

*
''Vetus Latina Iohannes. The Manuscripts in Electronic Transcriptions''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Parker, David C. British biblical scholars British theologians 1953 births Academics of the University of Birmingham New Testament scholars Officers of the Order of the British Empire Fellows of the British Academy Living people