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Interview with Garrick Allen about Words Are Not Enough

Interview with Garrick Allen about Words Are Not Enough

Last updated on: November 3, 2024 at 4:45 pm by James F. McGrath

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Interview with Garrick Allen about Words Are Not Enough 2024-11-03T16:45:56-05:00 James F. McGrath

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I am delighted I got the chance to take a look at Garrick Allen‘s important new book, Words Are Not Enough: Paratexts, Manuscripts, and the Real New Testament (Eerdmans 2024) and to get him to provide an interview about it. We tend to think about paratexts differently depending on whether they are ancient or modern. Yet there is so much that connects ancient commentaries and modern ones, for instance, and yet we rarely think of them as similar, much less compare them in the kind of thoughtful way that Garrick Allen has. You’ll never think about the Schofield Bible or the Green Bible – or about ancient Bibles with annotations and illustrations – in the same way again! Here’s the interview. Garrick’s answers are in bold.

Garrick, thank you for writing a book about a fascinating and neglected topic. Those of us who teach biblical studies know that readers of the Bible are influenced by other words and ideas about the Bible that reach them via various routes, including sermons and art. Quite often that additional information is found within their Bibles, in the form of illustrations and/or commentary, and sometimes other things like charts and diagrams of the end times. Why do you think that, with all the scholarship that has been produced about the Bible, comparatively little scholarly attention prior to your book has focused on these paratexts, the things that go along with the text that influence readers and which, for historians of religion, clue us in about how the Bible was understood in past generations?

Thanks so much, James! There are number of reasons why paratexts have been hidden in plain sight when it comes to the Bible. The first is that biblical scholars have, for the most part, given over the manuscripts to the textual critics, who then abstract the texts the manuscripts carry from their material context in the form of transcriptions. These abstractions are used to create editions and make textual judgements. Textual criticism is not bad (in fact, it’s quite good!), but its focus on reconstructing an ancient text of some kind means that it can easily bracket off anything “non-original.” Paratexts of the New Testament are the product of tradition, so they get lost in the mix and become invisible to users of editions of vernacular Bibles.

Another reason is that, except for the last twenty years or so, access to manuscripts has been extremely limited. Very few people had the resources and time to travel to dozens of museums, libraries, and private collections for the purpose of exploring specific paratexts. The explosion of accessible digital images through tools like the New Testament Virtual Manuscript Room and institution repositories makes it possible for us to examine both the paratextuality of individual manuscripts (even those not especially valuable for textual criticism!) and to map the transmission of these features across the corpus, to see the structures and complex interactions between biblical works and paratextual traditions.

The final reason that I’ll mention is this: paratext have been overlooked because they are not amenable to grand narratives. They are the piecemeal residues of larger intellectual contexts, rarely reflecting on their own purposes or functions. Even in some of the more systemic paratexts, like the Eusebian apparatus or the catenae extracts, it is difficult to tell a clear story. Eusebius’s work enables users to cross-reference parallel passages in the four gospels, but the impetus and intended outcomes of such a system are contested. Like all manuscript study, paratexts can be quite technical, so if the big picture payoff seems low at the outset, scholars might be tempted to look elsewhere. I think, however, that although it’s a challenge to craft one overarching narrative, the power of the paratext lies in its complex diversity, decentering scholarly fixations and enabling us to ask some new questions.

Do you have a favorite Bible edition or paratextual resource, ancient or modern?

Not really! I use also sorts of critical editions and vernacular Bibles in my work, which is a good way to simulate what it’s like to use multiple manuscripts. I depends on what question you have, but it’s good to listen to many voices in most cases, I think. In terms of some of the work I’m currently involved in, I’m regularly using von Soden’s edition from the early 20th century, which gives a pretty good overview of many of the paratexts found in Greek New Testament manuscripts. I’m also working on the Euthalian tradition to Acts, the Catholic Epistles, and Paul at the moment. It’s a complicated set of lists, prefaces, cross-references, and text divisions, so I often have its last edition open, made by Alessando Zaccagni in 1698. Working with manuscripts and paratexts is nice because you never know what you’ll have the chance to work with day to day!

What is the most interesting (in your opinion) illustration or doodle in the margins of a New Testament manuscript?

There’s so many to choose from! One thing about working with paratexts is that you get to spend most of your day just reading manuscripts and you come across some unusual and fun things. I tweet about some of the things I run across, but some of the examples that struck me are in the book. A good case is GA 1175 (Patmos, St John the Theologian Monstery, 16), an Apostolos manuscript from the tenth century. It has multiple notes and doodles made by later readers, including some weird little guys and battle in the margin between two characters in European and Ottoman garb brandishing weapons. But there’s so much more, and none of these post-production doodles have been catalogued: there’s multiple ships, drawings of monasteries, and a portrait of Jesus in the back flyleaves with tiny little hands. There are more serious things too, like prayers in the margins, and dozens of examples of later readers copying out the alphabet in the margins or mimicking the script of the main text. The New Testament’s manuscripts were also a space where people learned to read and write, often because they might have been the only books in a given community. Personally, I’m drawn to the non-professional drawings, the things made by regular folks in the process of using a manuscript.

I know that when I look at patristic commentaries on the New Testament, my mind categorizes them as somehow inherently different from something like the Scofield Bible or the Green Bible. What do we miss about both if we fail to consider how these are similar?

I agree! But when we look closely at the manuscripts the categories we bring can breakdown when we see the tradition in all its glorious complexity. I’ll say two things: first, many of the manuscripts we classify as “New Testament manuscript” have commentary built into them, either as single author commentaries (like Andrew of Caesarea on Revelation) or as catena (extracts of multiple patristic authors arranged around the texts they comment upon). So commentary and scripture are inextricable in many cases. Second, many of our modern Bibles also include modern kinds of commentary. The Scofield Bible is a famous example, containing layers to pretty top-down perspectives by Scofield himself (a Confederate soldier and dispensationalist). Many even hailed his marginal notes as a major advance in Bible technology, but those people had clearly never seen a medieval Greek manuscript. When we look at the manuscripts, it’s clear our own Bibles rarely do anything truly innovative; in most cases the paratexts we encounter in our Bibles are a shadow of what we find in the manuscripts.

What are some of the most interesting paratexts or manuscripts that you didn’t include in your new book? For those who read your book who are thinking about future research projects, what deserves further attention?

There’s so many. In the last chapter of the book I describe a few of them. The most prominent is the liturgical apparatus that occurs in the vast majority of the manuscripts in one form or another. There are long lection lists that prescribe which texts ought to be read on which days and feasts and copious marginal annotations that tell lectors where to start and stop, which in some case have been revised multiple times. There is much work to be done on these lectional systems and the relationship between textual transmission and Orthodox ritual. The list goes on, though: illuminations and other decorative traditions, signs of devotion (prayers and doxologies), owner’s notes and colophons, and much more! We also need to move beyond the Greek tradition and explore how these features function in other languages, like Armenian, Latin, Coptic, Georgian, Gothic, and Syriac, to see how these traditions developed their own paratextual realities. There is so much more work to be done, which is why I find this area so exciting.

Thank you for the chance to interview you about this, and congratulations on the publication of this important book! I hope it will get the attention it deserves.

Readers, get your copy of Words are Not Enough through Amazon or any local bookstore you prefer to purchase through. For more, check out the “Meet This Book” on the Eerdmans blog about Words are Not Enough!

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