 Well hello everyone, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. Today we are spanning many miles and have Vince Byler on. You're all the way over in Cambridge in the United Kingdom. So why don't you introduce yourself and tell us how did you end up living and working there at Cambridge? I'm here to say that like all things one thing leads to another. I didn't try to end up here. It just sort of happened I suppose. Probably the medium-length answer is that I have a lot to thank. I have Cliff Schrock and Steve Russell to thank I suppose for being here. I was teaching a class at SMBI because of Cliff Schrock he decided to take a chance on this 32 year old person. Why I don't know but there I was and I was teaching a class. He told me to teach a class called Old Testament Survey. Now I enjoyed the Old Testament and I felt like I knew factually quite a bit about it you know from what the King James Version said but not a whole lot more than that. I was happily teaching the class where I was preparing to teach the class and I asked Steve Russell who had been my teacher of roughly the same subject at Faith Builders what books he uses to teach it by now and he told me about a book by Paul Borkman entitled Genesis the story we haven't heard and this Paul Borkman Christian man teaches he I think he has a degree in English literature and he teaches the bible as literature and what's the story of the bible when you read it through the eyes of through a literary perspective and this has been sort of a more recent approach from the 1980s onward in in biblical studies that they've been doing this some some teachers of literature have been doing this and so Paul Borkman was basically piggybacking off of their ideas and saying hey look this isn't this neat if you read the bible as literature it's actually really brilliant stuff you know and not just as moral advice or you know whatever the usual readings we give to it not that they were wrong or that he's contradicting those but just saying what else is going on here and that was just so interesting to me completely opened my eyes to certain things that I just really hadn't paid attention to before and because I was forced to teach it I could have read the book and not been that effective but because I was forced to teach it I was then very interested in what it had to say and what the biblical Hebrew was because there's a lot of there's a lot of fun things happening like if you read the Gettysburg address that Lincoln said let's imagine translate that to another language if you know another language translate into that language would it have the same power in that language as it has in English so I mean Gettysburg address starts four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this constant innovation and goes on and it's it's sort of a neat little summary of some of the the founding fathers and Lincoln's interpretation of founding fathers views and things like that but not to digress there too far things like just notice how it starts out four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth like he's using all these these words that begin with the letter f and and it's it's an artful like if you unpack it it's sort of an artful way of saying something he could have said you know 80 years ago 80 some years ago our our the founding fathers did something but the way he did it alliterated in an in an artistic way that went beyond just the simple message the simple content of what was being shared and what I'm trying to say and doing it not very briefly is that the Hebrew Bible the Old Testament does the same thing in many cases I realized that by reading Paul Borgman and then I was like well I need to learn some more thanks Steve Russell thanks Cliff I want to learn more about this and so that was really sort of my the spark that got us started and I'm still working at it I haven't mastered the Hebrew language by any stretch but it's very fascinating you know what's going on and so that's interesting because I was in that class when you were teaching that Old Testament survey at SMBI and it stands out as as a really pivotal class for me because you were helping me look at the Old Testament through a slightly different lens than I was used to and that was really interesting for me and I remember that and intriguing enough I was actually there in Cambridge visiting you just before COVID came through and shut a bunch of things down but you're doing a lot of research I would guess you would say or classes can you tell us a little what what are you actually doing there at Cambridge yeah so I started out with an interest for my undergrad to do my bachelor's I started out interest in the Hebrew Bible as a literature so I knew I needed to learn biblical Hebrew so that I could read it I could understand it I could interpret it through a literary lens and for one reason another I was like okay I can do that it didn't seem like that was good PhD material that that's just kind of something in the 80s that they did and it works well for Christians to do but there needs to be something else so so what are you going to do if you study the Hebrew Bible academically and I call it the Hebrew Bible because people you work with enough Jews you don't call it the Old Testament right you have to call it something more neutral Hebrew Bible works pretty well so what do you do in studying the Hebrew Bible well there's a couple of other approaches one you could take more of a comparative religious approach which is problematic to say the least for for Christians of at least some faith I suppose even problematic for agnostics I don't know but but the point is there are certain tracks that you go down and Hebrew Bible PhDs that didn't seem to be a fit plus I didn't find that to be that interesting and so I sort of settled on I like manuscripts and so really what I'm doing now is is working on a something rather opposite from literature it it may seem I'm focusing on manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible the oldest ones we have except for the Dead Sea Scrolls which is about the 10th century AD coming out of Egypt primarily Egypt Palestine or so-called Palestine it wasn't Palestine then right land of Israel Babylonia you know Iraq places like that and these old Bible manuscripts are very similar but there are differences and I'm working on some para-textual features of these manuscripts like not the text itself but like surrounding little notes that have to do with this manuscript and and then we're working up a I'm comparing them and saying I think this manuscript has come from the same scribe as this manuscript for this script this manuscript is rather different from this one trying to establish maybe scribal schools different approaches to the text and things like that nothing actually to do with the actual words of the text itself okay whoa that's fascinating so you're doing you're basically piecing together a historical picture of what it may have looked like when the scribes in different schools of whatever produced these manuscripts a thousand years ago yeah that's the idea so there is a lot of information and I sort of need some time to show you what I'm talking about before I can actually explain what it is I'm talking about and basically what amounts to is this you have the main text the biblical text of the Hebrew Bible occurring in usual columns very regulated that they knew what the text was they knew how to transmit it there were no problems with that it wasn't like people were like what text were using are is this right is this not right they were just very very very concerned obsessive like beyond obsessive to make sure they transmitted it correctly and so they had all these little ways or even just showing off how well they knew the text that that seems to me the case of some and in some instances so what they would do is beside a word that was maybe unusual so let's say you decide to spell the word why wh y with an i instead of a y right you could do that theoretically and you have a lot of these spelling differences in the Hebrew Bible it's not standardized you know it hasn't been run through a series of modern editors so it's spelled differently in different places same word same meaning different spelling and they were like we aren't just going to get the word right we're going to get the spelling right and we want to make sure that it's spelled this way here and not there like don't confuse this please and so they would note in the margin make sure you spell it this way or they had they had shorthand notations it takes a little to get on to how you read them but they would say it occurs once or it occurs twice or it occurs this way and another way like that and they might give you the reference for something like that and so I'm comparing those and that's why I'm calling paratextral features I'm comparing those features which surround the Hebrew Bible text but are not part of that text and to see where they came from or to see if I can relate certain manuscripts to other manuscripts and I'm guessing doing that at the University of Cambridge is a pretty nice place to do it like are there a lot of universities doing this type of research that you have access to the actual originals and things as well well actually what I'm doing is mostly working with manuscripts in St. Petersburg um yes we do have manuscripts here and yes this is a wonderful place to do it in Cambridge um there are a lot of manuscripts but some of the best oldest Bible manuscripts ones that are most complete are in St. Petersburg Russia of all places taken there in 1800s by a Jewish collector of these things Abraham Firkovich and through one thing or another he ended up giving them when they were taken to the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg and they've been there ever since so a lot of my manuscripts are from there and so I do everything online and I'm I'm reading manuscripts online a bit of a follow-up on that then you know why do you feel studying biblical languages is important to begin with I'll answer that partly by by restating what I did say regarding what I read from Paul Borgman so if you want to read the Hebrew Bible and really get into it you sort of have to say okay English isn't going to cut it I need to understand what they actually wrote and not the translation sort of like sort of like you don't want to study the I'll go back to my illustration um to get a spring address in translation in French you want to know it in English if you really want to get whatever it is that it was it's the best of the best of your ability and so I felt for that purpose I just really needed to study Hebrew I couldn't just say well King James is good enough for the possible it's good enough for me whatever I really needed to look a bit more carefully at what was happening there so that's one reason that is very important I think if you really want to get to know the text to enjoy it in the way that it's supposed to be read you sort of have to read it in the language in which it was written my excuse for doing this I enjoy it is that in most other fields if you do something academic makes it's like well if I'm studying to be a doctor and I decided not to be a doctor when I'm done I really blew all that money I wasted it or you decide you know you're going to I don't know be an engineer and you decide not to be an engineer after spending all the money you wasted it or a lawyer whatever well here's the thing a nice little catch for Christians if you decide to study the bible and end up not using your phd in biblical studies you didn't waste anything so I I have something that no one else does it's always going to be useful and so it's it's useful on a personal level it can be useful in academic level I enjoy it it just it takes a number of boxes at the same time in a way that number of other degrees wouldn't I suppose and I guess I'm kind of happy about that and I like I like the energy that I can get from that I find that it's often easiest and best to talk to people who are at the same place in life that I am you know someone else that's I don't know in academics or that's thinking through some bible problem we're struggling with it you know those sorts of things those are people that I can connect with best on some of these deep issues for me and there aren't many people like that from my past I really can think of almost no one so it's very lonely and that's probably more detrimental than than anything else or a potential for detriment because it's hard to stay community one year I think I suppose taught us that to remind us of that so we're gonna shift again for my last question here can you share one thing you've learned from your studies that you think would be of interest to our general audience something in your research that you found intriguing that you would like to share in terms of the Hebrew Bible more generally I'll point back to what I did talk about the beginning with this Paul Borgman guy who wrote the book the Genesis story we haven't heard where there's there's a lot of wordplay in the Bible so they didn't they didn't rhyme rhyme wasn't a thing but they used a lot of wordplay in intriguing ways it's not just for fun that they would use it over and over again the same word same sounds similar sounds partly because they could there is no no deeper theological reason it just you know sort of like the forescore instead of in years ago our fathers brought forth it's just well done it's well done and then that's that and so that's that's an exciting or an interesting bit of information that we've that's always passed me by but it's not just that like the stories I think if we read them carefully and don't just do the Sunday school reading where we're like okay this is a moral situation you know it's a good moral instruction now I need to be like David and not like Goliath I need to not do like Jonah you know because God tells you what to do you'd better do it and that's sort of our take on the book of Jonah and well let's let's think about the book of Jonah for a bit you know from that song when God tells you what to do you'd better do it like Jonah you'll find out the hard hard way and the idea is that if you don't do what God says he'll finally hit you hard enough over the head until you do what he says that's sort of the point we get and that isn't even the story of the book of Jonah I mean look at it closely understand the context of the story it's it's not I mean not to be too obvious or not to be assume everyone's stupid here but it's not talking about us it's it's it's not that concerned I'm not saying it can't apply but it's not that concerned about us it's talking about the Jews of that time period who were supposed that God actually loves the Assyrians these horrible Assyrians God loves them too how is this possible I mean Jonah is actually this man who's doing the right thing he's like I don't listen to God because I'm a Jewish nationalist or not even nationalist I wish to preserve my people how can you blame the guy so I'm going to sacrifice myself so that these Assyrians are destroyed I'm all about destroying Assyrians this sounds like a good idea to me and the book of Jonah is saying how can God say how can I do that you know all these people and also much cattle which is how the book ends like he also cares about the cattle like the strangest story you could ever imagine and all we hear is in Jonah you shall find out the hard-earned way so I think the point is if in studying Hebrew it helps to look at some of these things more closely and I at least have been more attuned to these things than I was in the past that these are not quick summaries of what we ought to do necessarily but very complex issues that sort of require a lifetime to unpack to think about reflect on it's an open-ended discussion is what you see a lot of in the Hebrew Bible the New Testament somewhat different that's a different thing I'm not discussing that necessarily but with so much what you see in the Hebrew Bible is an open-ended discussion an invitation to think about something at a much deeper level and where there is no easy solution or this is how it is supposed to be or now we solve the problem we can move on it's something you live with you sit with for a long time and I think that's valuable for us to do as well because if I think we do that then we mimic those early listeners and get closer to what the intent of the Bible is yeah that's that's a great note to end on