The Man Who Rebuilt the Greek New Testament From Scratch w/ Dr. Dirk Jongkind

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today we have on Dr. Dirk Jongkind. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Not bad at all.

Johnny Ova: E for effort, right? It's an absolute privilege to have you on today, and again, thank you for taking your time. I know our audience is going to be blessed by our conversation.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: I'm very pleased to be here, and always keen to talk about things I love.

Johnny Ova: Perfect. Dr. Jongkind, most people in your field follow a pretty traditional academic path. In studying you, I found you were growing tropical flowers in greenhouses in the Netherlands. What is it about the Bible that was so magnetic that you walked away from that life to chase it?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Well, actually, I was a flower grower because I liked studying my Bible so much. I was a dropout from a psychology degree, and then I joined my father at the flower nursery, the family business. That gave me plenty of time to study Scripture. I got involved on Sundays in preaching and leading Bible studies and all that. At a certain point that part of my life just took over from the flower nursery, and I had to sell up and go full time into study. It turned out that was actually my real calling.

Johnny Ova: That's awesome. And you landed at Cambridge, and pretty quickly you found yourself face to face with some of the oldest biblical manuscripts on the planet. Was there a specific moment early on where the weight of what you were working with hit you, like, wow, I have these old manuscripts right here?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Yes, although it started when I was a very early teenager. I was 13 years old, and in high school I got Latin and Greek, so my parents gave me a Greek New Testament for my birthday. In the lower margin were all sorts of strange letters and digits, which indicated certain Greek manuscripts. That planted a question in my head: the printed text of the Greek New Testament actually has a history in manuscripts. So as a 13-year-old I read up a little about what manuscripts were like, with limited understanding then, but the question was planted. When I went back to studies after my flower nursery time, I really went back to that question. Coming to Cambridge, you go to the library and there are those manuscripts, and you get them on your desk and get so close to that history. You can feel and touch it. Then you go to the British Library, and some of those manuscripts are on display there. So it all became very real and very approachable, because you're so physically close to them, and that takes away the fear.

Johnny Ova: You are a phenomenal teacher. I've watched some of your YouTube videos, and I'm excited to open up our conversation. Our audience is made up of a wide variety of people. We have newer Christians who like the study of the Word of God, and seasoned Christians who love the dialogue and discussion. So let's start basic. For people who have never heard of Tyndale House, paint us a picture. What is this place, who is there, and what makes it one of the most important biblical research centers in the world?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: We go back to the story of evangelicalism in the United Kingdom in the 20th century. In the first half of the 20th century, many enthusiastic young Christians went to university to study Bible and theology, and all they were taught was the by-then standard critical approach to the New Testament. Critical not in the sense of positively building something up, but more deconstructing the truth of Scripture. As a result people lost their faith, or became ineffective, or were just puzzled. During the Second World War a number of people came together, because life continues during world wars as well, and said, we must do something about this. They bought a house in Cambridge, close to the university, and made it into a study and living community. People who came to study would live together, encourage one another, and seriously wrestle with the questions thrown at them within the academy. That led to Tyndale House as a research center for biblical studies. It started in 1944.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: With the help of people like F. F. Bruce, a well-known scholar of the 20th century, who donated most of his library, which became the core of the Tyndale House library, it grew. It was closely connected to the Christian student movement, the UCCF, and over the decades it grew in its scholarship. We do some scholarship ourselves, and we host many people engaged in serious scholarly study of the Old and New Testaments. Nowadays we're 80 years old or a bit older, and at the moment we're building a new library, because you need to stay up to date. The first library was 50 or 60 years old. We see that God has given us a very specific function within the wider landscape of Christianity, and that is to provide a safe haven to do serious scholarship at the highest academic level. With that we hope to serve the church worldwide.

Johnny Ova: I had no idea that's how Tyndale House got started. That's interesting, because I often come across people who have built up some things in their faith that need to be deconstructed, and it highlights the importance of a true biblical foundation and understanding of the Word of God. But I can see the damage when you're in such a critical, negative environment toward the Bible. It's fascinating how Tyndale House was built to encourage genuine study. I think that should be the heart of many Christians today.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: In practice it means that some of our staff also teach within the Faculty of Divinity at the university. I'm a fellow at one of the colleges and I teach within the faculty, and there are others as well. So in that sense we also participate in the academic life here in Cambridge and more widely.

Johnny Ova: I love it. So when we get to the Bible, here's something most Christians never even think about. When they open their Bible, there is a Greek text behind every word of the New Testament. Can you explain what a critical edition of the Greek New Testament is, and why it matters for every translation people hold in their hands?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: For most of the last 20 centuries since the New Testament was written, it was copied by hand on manuscripts of papyrus or parchment, using the copying methods of the time. That means there were no spaces between words. Early on they did not use accents or breathings, and only limited paragraphing. So when we want to print a Greek New Testament nowadays, we add something to the text. We add chapters and verse numbers, which are relatively recent innovations of the last 500 years or so. We are consistent with accents, and we add some punctuation, all to help the reader read better. But in an edition you don't only add something. You must also choose which words to print.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: In the course of copying, people make copying errors. Sometimes people copied a Bible manuscript for use in the liturgy of the church, and old-fashioned words were replaced with more modern words. Or when the apostle Paul uses one of his very intricate grammatical constructions, it was made slightly simpler so it would be easier to understand when read out in church. All those things affected the copying of the Greek text. In a modern critical edition we print the wording we think is the closest possible reconstruction of what the original authors actually wrote. That comes down to studying the history of the manuscripts, studying the grammar and the development of the language, and studying how people copy a text. What sorts of errors do people make, and what sorts of errors don't they make? Do they make systematic changes or not? All those questions go into a critical edition. It is our best effort to reconstruct the exact, precise wording of the original.

Johnny Ova: Even what you just said is going to surprise some people when it comes to translation. A common pushback many Christians face is, how can we trust the Bible if people are copying it like this, with possible errors? What would your answer be?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Every act of communication is a matter of circling in on the original intention of the speaker. When somebody is listening to me, they probably won't hear every individual word, but they will try to get the gist of what I'm saying. If a plane flies over or there's traffic noise, some of the words may be drowned out, but people will still get more or less what is being said. Why? Because we use the sum total of what is said to reconstruct the mental image of what Dirk Jongkind is saying. Reading a text is the same process. That is why the Bible works well in translation. By reading a text, we get the gist and reconstruct the image of what is being said.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Of course, and here comes the use of reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek, the more precise access we have to the original wording, the more precisely we can zoom in on the details. For some purposes an English translation is not the best way to study the Bible. If you want to use all the details of grammar or spelling, an English translation won't help you. It's the same with studying the Greek text. There are scholars like me interested in the differences between Luke and Matthew in how they construct sentences, because they come from different backgrounds. That's a grammar question. We want to know the details with the highest precision possible, and then it is important to worry about things like word order, which you cannot really translate. So the overall reliability of the New Testament does not change because we can't see every precise detail. Communication works regardless of knowing the fine details of the text. It's a question of spiraling in to the center, and the further you need to spiral in, the more precise your text needs to be.

Johnny Ova: For our listeners, keep in the back of your mind that the original text may not even have a good English word for what's actually being said, as Dr. Jongkind said. You have to grab the content. Now, I know that for decades the scholarly world relied on the Nestle-Aland edition as the standard Greek text. It's been the foundation since the mid-20th century. So after all this time, what made you and your team look at that and say, we need to rebuild this from the ground up?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: In part it was because the Nestle-Aland series was regarded by many people as the Greek New Testament, as if no difference of opinion were possible, which is a problem in itself. Up to around 1973 or 1974, that text was actually the result of comparing three Greek New Testaments published in the 19th century. So it was not even based directly on the manuscripts. It was based on a comparison of three published New Testaments. It was only with the 26th edition that they really went back and said, we need to check every word fresh from the manuscripts and see how it works. In the 1990s and early 2000s, some new methods were used, and there were people like me who had some question marks about the method. That made us realize it is good to have an alternative text, relying on the old manuscripts and on a very old-fashioned method, to stand next to the current Nestle-Aland series.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: When we at Tyndale House decided to work on this project, the first people we informed were the people behind the Nestle-Aland project. I know them from conferences, we work together, and so they were the first to know, to keep the lines of communication as open as possible. Relations are very cordial, even though at some points we do different things and at some points we disagree with one another. But that's fine.

Johnny Ova: Such is life. In checking out your background and watching some of your work, one of the most fascinating things you've uncovered is that the scribes who copied Sinaiticus were not identical robots. They had different handwriting, different spelling habits, different levels of accuracy. Can you walk us through some of what stood out to you, and what these ancient copyists reveal about how the Bible was physically produced in ancient times?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: You mentioned Sinaiticus, and of course all your audience knows exactly what you're talking about. But just to make sure we all agree: Codex Sinaiticus is a big Greek Bible, probably written in the fourth century, and it is the oldest manuscript that has the complete Greek New Testament in it. Every book, every chapter, every paragraph. It is missing a few verses, but it's basically all there. It's kept in the British Library, so if you study in Cambridge it's convenient to choose that manuscript for your work. In the 1930s it came to London because it was bought from Russia, from Stalin. Stalin needed hard cash, so the British bought it for 100,000 pounds or thereabouts. Some people at the British Library then published a study on it and said there were three scribes working on this manuscript. We can distinguish them by their handwriting, and there may be other differences between them as well.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: That's where I jumped in, about 60 years later. Okay, what are those other differences? And it turned out that not every one of these three scribes was as good a copyist as the others. There was one very good copyist. He rarely made silly errors, and his spelling is very good. Spelling is not always easy. We have spell check, but without spell check my writing would be horrible. So their spelling was not always good, but this was a very good scribe, clearly very well trained, who knew what he was doing. Even when he corrects his own work, because you make errors when you're copying, his corrections are always spot on. Then there was one scribe who, luckily enough, did not work on the New Testament but on parts of the Old Testament. He could not spell for toffee. It is really quite horrid what he is doing. He may have been copying from a very good manuscript, but what he actually produced is problematic. And then there was one scribe who was reasonably okay once you understand his particular weaknesses, and he copied most of the New Testament.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: By looking at differences in what these scribes produced, you get an idea of their abilities and their particular habits. Some have spelling habits, some have habits in correcting the text, and all of those make interesting differences. There are some books in the Old Testament, and part of the New Testament as well, where one scribe did the first half of a book and another did the second half, so you can compare the two halves, which is great fun. There are a couple of places in the New Testament where the top scribe took out some pages of the mediocre one and replaced them with pages he had written himself, clearly to correct some major error. That gives you wonderful material to study. You learn about what can go wrong at the final level of copying. Normally, when you see a copying error, you don't know whether it was inherited from previous generations of manuscripts or introduced by the last scribe in that long chain of copying.

Johnny Ova: Man, that is fascinating. I won't ask a million questions because of our time, but I've got some questions on the scribes. I know the dominant theory was that manuscripts like Sinaiticus were produced by dictation, with one person reading aloud while multiple scribes copied at the same time, and your research challenged that. How? And I want to know more about the copying process. What is a day in the life of a scribe? Are they checking in from nine to five, getting their feather and ink out and writing as people read? Are there people around them checking their work?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: What I learned from Codex Sinaiticus is that there are a variety of mechanisms at work. One thing is that we don't really know their immediate context. If the previous evening the monks all had a very heated discussion about a particular topic, and the next morning they start copying and their mind wanders a little, something of the previous night's debate may seep through because they were slightly distracted. It may have happened. Sometimes we see that their mind is wandering. There's a place in the Psalms about the birds that dwell in the rocks. The word for feathers would be pteron, and that is very close to petron, the plural of rock. Only the second and third letters are swapped. So it's the birds that live in the rocks, but the scribe was not paying attention and wrote that the birds live in their feathers. Feathers and birds, it's not a far-fetched error to make.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Sometimes a scribe copied the same passage twice, simply because he jumped back. That's another inattentive thing. Sometimes instead of writing Jesus, a scribe writes Lord Jesus Christ. It's a forgivable error, but it's still an error. But the most fun things happen in writing a big, complete Bible, where one scribe had already started the next book while the previous scribe was still copying the book before. They calculated at which column on which page the next book would start. That's fine if you calculate correctly, but in this case they were two columns off. They miscalculated. So toward the end of the previous scribe's work, you see him make a desperate attempt to fill out the text. He starts to write fewer lines per column and stretches out his letters to make up the space. There was too much space. In the end he didn't quite manage. He gained back two or three columns, but there were still a few empty columns. That shows a certain inexperience in writing such a big book.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Another thing: in the Old Testament, Codex Sinaiticus has the book of 1 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees. It has 1 Maccabees, and then the next heading is 4 Maccabees. It makes you wonder where 2 and 3 Maccabees are. There is clearly no gap in the manuscript. They didn't have them or had no access to them. So it was in some sense a bit of an experimental project. That helps us understand something else. We are used to complete books bound together, but bookbinding technology was developing in the earliest centuries. In the first century it would have been impossible to have a single book containing the whole New Testament, let alone the whole Bible, because the technology had not developed well. It's probably only in the second half of the third century that it first became possible to have a book big enough to contain the whole Old and New Testament between two covers. So Codex Sinaiticus is part of the earliest generations where one physical book could contain the whole Bible. Before that you would have a multi-volume Bible: a manuscript of the Gospels, a manuscript of Acts and the general epistles, a manuscript of all Paul's letters, each a different physical volume.

Johnny Ova: Is there something you saw that genuinely surprised you or changed how you saw a particular text? Anything that pops out to you?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Now you're putting me on the spot. One thing that surprised me: when I grew up, I had to learn the books of the Bible by heart. In the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts. And what's the next book after Acts? Romans. But in the majority of the manuscripts I saw, the first book after Acts was James, then 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, and then Jude. Only after Jude would you continue with Romans and the others. That surprised me. At first I thought, gosh, is that a way of making Paul less important by putting him further down in the canon? But that can't really have been the reason. And it is surprisingly consistent that Acts is followed by James and the others, not immediately by Paul.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: So I started asking what the possible reasons for such a fixed combination could be. When you read the book of Acts, the first half deals with the other apostles, with Peter and John going to the temple and so on, and James becomes a big leader of the church. Only in the second half of Acts do we get the travels of Paul the apostle. So having Acts immediately followed by James, Peter, John and Jude actually makes sense, because in the story of Acts they come before what then happens with Paul. So when we printed the Tyndale House edition of the Greek New Testament, we changed the traditional order and put James and the others immediately after Acts. Sometimes that has led to confusion. Initially even I was often confused: where did we put Romans?

Johnny Ova: At least you got Romans in there. All right, let's go to some passages that keep pastors like myself up at night: the last 12 verses of Mark, the woman caught in adultery in John, the angel and the bloody sweat in Luke 22. Your team had to make calls on these. You don't have to go through every one, but walk us through how you handled them and what Christians should understand about these texts.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: First of all, the three problems you mentioned are probably three of the four biggest problems in the text. The good news is these have been problems for the last 1,600 years. It's interesting that with all the manuscript discoveries, the number of big problems has not increased whatsoever. It's still the same problems as there have always been. They're limited, we know what they are, and they've been studied and talked about for 1,600 years. The biggest, in terms of the number of words involved, are the last verses of Mark and the story of the woman caught in adultery. With the ending of the Gospel of Mark, there are actually only two manuscripts of Mark that leave out those last 12 verses. But those two are the two oldest manuscripts we have of Mark.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Then there are the discussions in the church fathers. Eusebius, who lived in the first half of the fourth century, maybe even before our two oldest manuscripts, already discusses the problem. He says most of the manuscripts finish with what we call Mark 16:8: "They did not say anything to anyone, for they were afraid." End of the Gospel. Eusebius says most manuscripts finish there, but some also add these words, and then comes the long ending. So he knew about the problem, and he says most manuscripts do not have the long ending. Then there are many medieval manuscripts with a note in the margin saying the following verses are absent in the oldest manuscripts. So it's a well-discussed problem, even though only two manuscripts leave out the long ending of Mark. In the Tyndale House edition we put that note from the medieval manuscripts into the Greek New Testament too. It basically says, in the oldest manuscripts the following verses do not exist, but in many the following is also found. And then we give the long ending.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: The thing is, if you put a knife to my throat and say, did Mark write those verses, yes or no, I would probably say probably not, but I would be 55, 45. That's because I can imagine a scenario in which those verses are part of the original Gospel. I don't think it happened, but I cannot exclude it. The scenario would be this. Traditionally, the Gospel of Mark gives us the preaching of Peter, so what we have in the first 16 chapters is Peter's voice. The conclusion of the Gospel is clearly written in a different voice from the main body. Could that have been Mark's own voice at that point? There is a clear distinction between the two. I don't think it is, but it may have been the case. I am very traditional in my understanding of the New Testament.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: So, traditionally, it's Peter's voice. We also have two letters in the name of Peter, 1 Peter and 2 Peter, and they are written in slightly different voices. The Greek of 1 Peter is rather different in structure from the Greek of 2 Peter. It may have to do with the secretary or the assistants used in writing. Those differences don't mean Peter cannot have been responsible for both, but something differed between them. If that is true for 1 and 2 Peter, why can't it have been the case for the body of Mark and the ending of Mark? Because I cannot exclude this scenario logically or historically, I'm sitting a little on the fence, though I think the long ending was written afterward.

Johnny Ova: Interesting information. I've got one more deep question for you before we wrap up, and again, I cannot thank you enough for your time. This has been such a fascinating conversation, Dr. Jongkind. You wrote something that I know is going to cause our listeners to stop and think. You said, "To say that God inspired the words of the New Testament does not mean that God is therefore under an obligation to preserve for us each and every detail." For the person hearing this whose stomach drops, explain this for us. What do you mean by this statement?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: This was a statement in the context of people who say the opposite: because God inspired Scripture, every word of Scripture has come to us unchanged and we know every detail of it. If that is the case, you need to choose a particular version or manuscript, and that is where differences kick in. Or you say, as some people have, that if God inspired Scripture but we now see differences between manuscripts, you must conclude that God perhaps did not inspire the original, because he did not bother to preserve everything for us. The way I thought through this question is this. In the Old Testament, in the days of King Josiah, the scroll of the Book of the Law was rediscovered in the temple. Josiah had given the command to clean out the temple, and they discovered the Book of the Law, the master copy of the law. From then on the people of Israel again had access to the Word of God, which they had lacked a few years before.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: That told me that even though God had given the law, he allowed historical situations in which the people of God did not have immediate access to the law of God, because it lay forgotten in the back of the temple. If that is true for the Old Testament, it tells us that in the theology of the Bible, the inspiration of Scripture, the God-givenness of Scripture, is one thing, and the preservation and faithful handing down of Scripture is another. One does not follow immediately from the other. Now, if we look at what we actually have, we have quite abundant access to the original wording. It's possible to see some very peculiar spellings in Paul, which are clearly Paul's own, where he uses a phi rather than a pi. That's weird and interesting, and you cannot translate it, but it shows you the level of detail we have access to. So God has given us an abundantly rich access to the original. But it is not because God put himself under an obligation to do so. It is an act of his grace, which he has given us to enjoy and to live from.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: That's roughly what I intended with that quote: God has not put himself under an obligation to give us a text that is correct in its tiniest detail. And let's face it, the biggest problems you and I and biblical scholars face when we read the New Testament or the Old Testament and come across very difficult passages are quite often not the details of the wording or the differences between manuscripts. It's actually what these words mean, and how they function within the book. The exegesis of those words often causes us much bigger problems than the shape or order of the words.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Jongkind, you've had a wonderful journey, from growing flowers in the greenhouse to handling these manuscripts and rebuilding the Greek New Testament. My final question: looking back on the entire arc of your life, how has this work, these manuscripts, these ancient words, shaped your own faith?

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: It has shaped my faith in rather unexpected ways. First of all, it has just deepened my love for Scripture and my love for the author of Scripture. I haven't come across problems that have undermined my faith. I have come across problems that put me in my place as someone with only limited understanding and limited knowledge. That's what I have learned. Second, I have seen that the big storylines of Scripture are often so beautifully reflected in the tiniest details of Scripture. It's not that the tiniest details tell a different story from the bigger things. The tiniest details emphasize and add color and relief to the big story, which is absolutely wonderful to see. That shows you what a treasure store Scripture is. You dive into the details and you see those beautiful illustrations of the big truths about the grace and love of God. It has shown me that it is really worthwhile, if you have the opportunity, to dive deep into Scripture, to learn the original languages, live with them, and discover how beautifully God has crafted his Word.

Johnny Ova: I love it. What a wonderful discussion today. Dr. Dirk Jongkind, I appreciate your time. Just a really amazing, fascinating conversation.

Dr. Dirk Jongkind: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to have this talk with you.