“When you hold a bible in your hand you hold a book that is unlike any other. It is, as we believe, teach, and confess, breathed out by God. It is also the product of God’s work through human hands. That includes those authors known and beloved by us like St. Paul. But, it also includes those who copied manuscripts and passed them down throughout the years, many of whom we don’t know and yet owe a debt of gratitude. The Bible we pull off the shelf did not magically fall from heaven. Translators, editorial committees, and textual critics have all helped to facilitate the reading of the scriptures we often take for granted. Recently Rev. Alec Fisher, a doctoral student at the University of Birmingham and pastor in our Southeastern District, made a significant scholarly contribution from which future generations will benefit. His field, textual criticism, is often misunderstood and sometimes unfairly maligned. We do not have the original autographs of the New Testament books and so we are relying on the copies produced in faith and reverence, handed down from one generation to the next. The issue, of course, is that not all the copies agree. Textual critics set about the task of sorting through the various copies to assess their quality and relation to each other in the hopes of reconstructing the text that gave rise to the others. As the CTCR stated in 2019, “Our Synod affirms the legitimacy of textual criticism, rightly used, because it does not hide from hard questions or challenges.“ Rev. Alec Fisher has rightly used it to demonstrate clearly that one of the manuscripts involved in these textual critical discussions, Codex Augiensis, is definitively a copy of another one, Codex Boernerianus. Moreover, because it is a copy, it should not be part of certain textual critical discussions moving forward. This may not seem all that practical to the life of the church because Alec has spoken directly into an academic debate.  And yet, the church that pulls the bible off the shelf tomorrow can be just as, if not more, confident in the text because of Alec’s faithful, reverent, and important work. We give thanks to God that he has not only breathed out his word but has raised up faithful scholars like Alec to ensure that his word is preserved from one generation to the next. If you are interested in reading his article you can find it here: click here!”