David C. Parker

David Charles Parker OBE (born 1953) was the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology (2005-2017) and the Director of the Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing at the Department of Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham. His interests include New Testament textual criticism and Greek and Latin palaeography.

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.

Regarding a textual change in Codex Sinaiticus: There is also a fascinating place in the codex in the Sermon on the Mount 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."

Books

 * - translated with an introduction and notes

Journal articles

 * - review article
 * - review article
 * - review article
 * - review article
 * - review article
 * - review article