Episode 299: Garrick Allen - Something’s Hiding in the Margins of Your Bible
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Garrick Allen about the concept of paratexts—elements like chapter numbers, footnotes, titles, and formatting that surround the biblical text—and how these often-overlooked features significantly shape how we interpret Scripture. Together they explore how the Bible is a dynamic, evolving tradition influenced by centuries of human interaction and editorial choices. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What are paratexts, and why do they matter when reading the Bible?
How have chapter and verse divisions, titles, and annotations shaped our understanding of biblical texts?
Are paratexts modern inventions, or do they have historical roots?
Can the same biblical passage be interpreted differently depending on its paratextual framing?
How does the physical format of a Bible—print, digital, scroll—impact how it is read and understood?
What does the presence of paratexts suggest about the nature of the Bible and tradition?
Should we strip away paratexts to get to the “pure” Bible—or embrace their role?
What can studying paratexts teach us about the communities that have preserved and transmitted the Bible?
Quotables
“[Paratexts are] important because they're everywhere. They're ubiquitous. They're part of every Bible that's ever been made. And these are things that are hidden in plain sight that have huge effects on the way we interpret and read texts—the way that we divide them up, the way that we see connections between them.” — Garrick Allen
“[Paratexts] are sort of the products of tradition, not [of] the biblical authors, but of ancient, medieval, modern readers who want us to do certain things with these passages. And when we attend to them and see them in the first place, we can understand how the Bibles we read are trying to get us to do certain things with them.” — Garrick Allen
“I think it's a really good concept for thinking about what the Bible is, how it works, and what the Bibles that we hold in our hands do to us as we engage them.” — Garrick Allen
“Paratexts attune you to really focus on different aspects of these passages and to interpret them in different ways. These are parts of every Bible you read, every English Bible for sure, and every manuscript of the New Testament that we have in one form or another. And you can't get away from them. So we might as well cast an eye on them and see what they're trying to make us do.” — Garrick Allen
“In your modern Bibles, in most versions, the subtitles are made up by modern editors. These are devised by the people who are trying to market these Bibles to particular audiences, to have people understand them in certain ways.” — Garrick Allen
“When you look at the manuscripts and carefully at the history of the Bible, its words are obviously very important, but it's more than just words. It's a big set of features that is text, that is material, that is paratext, that is this dance between scripture, tradition, and the people engaging it.” — Garrick Allen
“The best way to describe the New Testament is something that is constantly in flux in this negotiation between readers, the past people who played a role in bringing the Bible to us. But the important thing is that this change doesn't undermine the fact that the Bible might be sacred or revelatory or important. It's a symptom of the fact that communities have viewed the Bible as revelatory and important and valuable and worth passing on, that change becomes part of its essential substance.” — Garrick Allen
“It's really interesting and jarring to see how our readings differ when the paratextual ecosystem changes. That's where you see the secret hidden power of these paratexts.” — Garrick Allen
“I'm very open for publishers, scholars, artists to continue to think paratexturally about the Bible and other texts, and to invent new things, to try to do new things, to experiment. This is part of the process. But you also want to call out really bad ones, like the American Patriot Bible that puts the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, and a bunch of quotes from astronauts in the book of Revelation for some reason.” — Garrick Allen
“When we [experiment with the Bible], we're part of that long process, and we can empathize with and imagine the lives of the many anonymous scribes, readers, annotators, people who left small traces of themselves in these manuscripts that have helped to produce the Bibles we hold in our hands today.” — Garrick Allen
“When you can see [paratexts and] what they're doing, you also begin to see what sort of traditions and experiences we all bring to the text as human beings who are grappling with some of these questions. They help us to understand ourselves, to attend to the sort of liminality of our daily lives, to get new perspectives on the biblical text.” — Garrick Allen
“Don't throw your Bibles away. [My] book is actually arguing the opposite. That all of this seeming instability is part of the wonder of it all. And it's something to keep engaging with.” — Garrick Allen
“Whenever you make something, it reflects its makers in some way, shape, or form. And [with] something as complicated as the Bible, you are required to make hundreds of small choices about how to present this thing. What size font to use, what kind of paper, do you use chapters and verses, how do you divide the books and sections? What prefaces do you give? How many footnotes do you do? Which famous biblical scholar can you get to write the preface to the whole thing? All of these choices [are] not unlike the choices that every scribe made in copying a manuscript from the second century onward.”
“All of these sorts of things come into play when you hold a Bible in your hand. It's the product of thousands of choices, of dozens or hundreds of people, spanning centuries. And it's a real-life treasure trove of a human experience trying to engage the divine. And you can empathetically think about the people who touch these manuscripts, who left their mark in them.” — Garrick Allen
Mentioned in This Episode
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Pete: You're listening to the Bible for normal people, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Jared: Hey everybody. On today's episode we're talking about paratexts with Garrick Allen. Garrick is Professor of Divinity and Biblical studies at the University of Glasgow
Pete: And his most recently published book, which is the topic of this conversation today, is Words are Not Enough Here: Texts, Manuscripts, and the Real New Testament.
We had fun with this discussion, so let's get right into it.
Garrick: Paratexts are those things. They're important because they're everywhere. They're ubiquitous. They're part of every Bible that's ever been made. These are things that are hidden in plain sight that have huge effects on the way we interpret and read texts.
The way that we divide them up, the way that we see connections between them, and these are sort of the products of ancient, medieval, modern readers who want us to do certain things with these passages.
Jared: Well, Garrick, welcome to the podcast. It's wonderful to have you.
Garrick: Happy to be here guys. Thanks for the invite.
Jared: Um, absolutely. I mean, we are going to blow all of our listeners' minds today 'cause we're talking about-
Pete: We usually do though.
Jared: We, I mean, think that's true. That's just, every day, but.
Pete: On the regular.
Jared: I was trying to set Garrick up, I was trying to set him up as a special and unique thing, and you just, tanked it. You just tanked it. Anyway, we wanna talk about paratexts and I think this is gonna be a new concept for a lot of our listeners. So let's just start with the basics.
What is a paratext and what are some examples? Kind of, let's lay the table for the concept before we get started.
Garrick: Let's do it. Yeah, let's, I think we are gonna take it to a, to a new level today. So, uh, I'm fully, fully on board with that. That's what I like to hear. You know, paratext, writing and thinking about paratext, a lot the last few years is a challenge because it's a [00:04:00] term that most biblical scholars have never heard of or used or, uh, played around with.
So, you know, one thing I always have to do is sit and just, just try to explain in simple terms what, what paratexts are. So, I mean, from my perspective, paratexts are, uh, everything around a text beyond the text itself. So everything from page numbers, footnotes, uh, annotations, corrections, front matter indices, bibliographies, cross references, any, uh, any sort of thing in a book beyond the text itself.
So, uh, paratexts are great because, uh, they are universal from, uh, the ancient world on to today, there are paratexts, uh, in nearly every manuscript or copy of a literary text that we have. Uh, and they're also highly specific to particular traditions. So there are paratexts specific to the New Testament, or dictionaries or, uh, phone books.
I'm [00:05:00] old enough to remember phone books. Um, so, uh, and the New Testament is great because it has been, uh, so important to so many communities from, uh, the first century onward that it garnered a huge amount of paratexts and a number of features that help people to do certain things with the book to navigate, um, between parallel passages in the gospels, uh, to understand the quotations that Paul makes, uh, in his letters and so on. So, uh, there's actually a lot of material to work with in this book. Really only starts to scratch the surface of these things.
Jared: Can you, um, I, I'm curious, do chapters and verses count as paratexts?
Garrick: Absolutely text divisions. Uh, there are dozens of different systems for dividing The Bible's text, the New Testament in particular. Uh, from the first century onward and chapters and verses are only, uh, you know, a relative newcomer from the 16th century. [00:06:00] So these things that we take for granted is ingrained parts of what the Bible is.
You can say a number, John 3:16 and know what the text is. This is a relatively new phenomenon and it's building off a much longer tradition of ways to divide and make sense of these passages.
Pete: Yeah. Uh, I mean, before we get into a lot of specifics, I can imagine people for whom this is a completely new concept.
And by the way, you know, you said before, even Biblical scholars, it's absolutely true. I went through five years of doctoral work in, in Hebrew Bible, albeit, but I never heard the term. I never saw it written. It was, it was just, it was nowhere. And then you start thinking about it, it's like, oh my goodness gracious.
There, there's, you know, uh, there's much more going on than just the text, right? So, so just, maybe just very briefly, without giving everything away, I. Like, why should anybody care? About page numbers and who? Come on man. Are you just some scholar trying to make stuff up, you know, and trying to make yourself seem important.
Jared: You gotta get a[00:07:00] PhD in on something.
Pete: Are you in league with Satan? That's really the question I'm trying to ask.
Garrick: Everyone’s gotta be good at something, I'm good at making stuff up. So that's what I'm, that's what I'm trying to do here. No, I mean, you know, paratexts are those things. They're important because they're everywhere.
They're ubiquitous. They're part of every Bible that's ever been made. Um. And, uh, these are things that are hidden in plain sight that have huge effects on the way we interpret and read texts. The way that we divide them up, the way that we see connections between them. Uh, and these are sort of the products of tradition.
Not the biblical authors for sure, but of ancient, medieval modern readers who want us to do certain things with these passages. And when we attend to them and see them in the first place, we can understand how the Bibles we read are trying to get us to do certain things with them. So, uh, you know, and once you see paratexts and all of their variety and all their functions and the things that they do, you can't unsee it when you read anything.
[00:08:00]
Uh, so once you can see the margins, the liminal space, uh, that these things inhabit, you can make sense of it. I mean, uh, Gerard Genette, who coined this term in the 1980s talking about French literature, uh, sees this as a sort of place of transaction between the text and the author and readers with tradition as a sort of liminal space in between a space where things happen, where readers see the text, the new, where they understand themselves better.
Uh, and so I think it's actually a really good concept for thinking about, um, what the Bible is. How it works. Um, what the bibles that we hold in our hands, um, do to us as we engage them.
Jared: Well, good news. That's what we do at The Bible for Normal People. So you're in the right place. This is the right-
Garrick: I knew I was in the right place.
Jared: Well, can, can we, I don't know if we wanna go to some specific examples for specific reasons, but I think it's still a little bit abstract for people. So can you give some examples that would indicate why it matters? And I'm thinking [00:09:00] especially of, uh, maybe chapters and verses or titles and how that can actually make a difference in terms of how people read their bibles?
Garrick: Yeah, so I mean, if you pick up any two modern Bibles, um, the thing you'll notice is that, you know, modern publishers play with paratexts to appeal to new audiences. So, uh, let's say you wanted to read, one of the examples I use in the book is reading Matthew 24, the apocalyptic discourse.
Jesus talking about the temple's disruption and everyone should run for the hills on this day and so on. Uh, if you read it in the Scofield Reference Bible, like the bestselling book in the history of Oxford University Press, uh, you will read that passage, uh, like a roadmap to the end of the world because Scofield was a dispensationalist who thought the end of the age was very near, and you could track what Jesus says onto particular things that are happening in His day.
But if you read Matthew 24 in the Green [00:10:00] Bible, uh, which highlights all of the texts about creation, care, and care for the world, and environmentalism in green, you'll be more attentive to patterns of, um, deconstruction the de-creation of the world that Jesus is describing, this chaos around, um, famine and the birth pangs of the earth, and so on.
So these paratexts attune you to really focus on different aspects of these passages and to interpret them in different ways. These are parts of every Bible you read, uh, every English Bible for sure, and every manuscript of the New Testament that we have in one form or another. And you can't get away from 'em.
So we might as well, uh, cast an eye on them and see what they're trying to make us do.
Pete: And what strikes me about these titles, you know, uh, I, I think on some level, um, they're almost presented as an objective kind of thing. Like, here's what this next few verses are about. [00:11:00] But they're also highly rooted in tradition.
And that's, and that, and that, and that affects how we read it. And therefore it's important.
Garrick: That's right. I, I think, I mean, titles are an interesting case. I mean, they are. One of the clearest products of tradition that become ingrained into what we think the Bible is, whether that's the chapter numbers, or the little subtitles you find in modern Bibles or in the manuscripts.
But we've been working on a project here, you know, kind of apart from the book, where we've edited every form of every title and every Greek New Testament manuscript. And there are over 30,000 entries. And these books are called all sorts of different things. The book of Revelation has 54 different Greek titles
Pete: Really?
Garrick: Oh, absolutely. In the tradition-
Pete: No!
Garrick: Yes. Some talk about Patmos, where John was, what he was doing there, the vision he saw, which John, it was all these sorts of things. Uh, and so, you know, these titles really [00:12:00] shape what people are doing. Whether you see, you know, 1 Timothy as a letter or as a book.
That matters. You see both of these words in the manuscripts and in modern Bibles, whether it's Paul or St. Paul, these sorts of things, uh, influence our view of the author and the authority of their texts and what they're trying to say.
Pete: I just, this is just sparking a memory here and, and, and the Hebrew Bible in terms of titles mattering, I, I think it's in chapter 21, there are a list of laws about property.
If your cow does this to your neighbors, then this will happen, and um, then there's this little break, there's this subtitle saying “social laws.” And the first one is, you know, if a man seduces a virgin, you know, he still has to give the bride price to the father, you know, if, if he doesn't want to marry her.
And, and the thing is that that's not a social law, that is property law that goes with, it's, it's an if-then law. It's, it's right there. But to break it up, absolutely. 'cause we can't have our Bible saying that, you know,
Garrick: Women are property.
Pete: Yeah, [00:13:00] exactly. Virgin daughters are property. That's exactly right.
And it's like, first time I saw that I was like, wow, this shouldn't be here. This, it's just, it's ruining it, you know? It's just, it's plain old wrong, but it's, it's, that's the way it is because you have to. You're, you're marketing in a sense, you're selling something to people.
Garrick: Absolutely. I mean, the modern Bible industry is a huge, uh, paratexts are marketing tools for them. I mean, Bibles underwrite a lot of the other books that we write, uh, as scholars. Uh, and so, you know, that makes some sense. But you see these sorts of things, even like the household codes in Ephesians, you have the, the rules that Paul talks about, uh, between slaves and masters, and then there's a subtitle and then it's about uh, wives and children and so on.
And these things are divided off from one another. And what's interesting is in your modern Bibles, uh, in most versions, the subtitles are made up by modern editors. Uh, so these are devised by the people who are trying to market these bibles to particular audiences, to have people understand them in certain ways.
[00:14:00] But that tradition goes back all the way to the third, fourth century, uh, where people are inserting subtitles into the New Testament. It's just that the ones that we're presenting to people aren't necessarily the ancient ones.
Jared: And, and I see with, um, and maybe you guys have other examples of this too, where the chapters and verses, well, are also pointing to particular interpretations and meanings of things.
I, for me, I, I immediately think of, uh, Jonah, um, where there's certain parts where the story seems to keep going for a couple of verses. It's like the climax of the story might be in 2:6, or like, you know, the first couple of verses and it's like, well, why did they put the chapter there and marking that off?
So even there, I think as scholarship has progressed more and more, those have gotten in some ways I kind of 'cause of my way I think, I'm like, we should go back and maybe change some of these chapters and verses here. Yeah, absolutely.
Garrick: I mean, absolutely. I mean, I think you see it in, uh, Revelation chapter 10.
There's a clause at the end of that verse. It's unclear [00:15:00] if it goes with the end of chapter 10 or the start of chapter 11. These things are pretty common, or what do you do with the four endings to Mark? Um, how do you present these things right in the Bible? What do you do with the woman caught in adultery in John 7 and 8? I mean, uh, how do you frame these troublesome passages off from one another.
Um, and these are all sort of paratextual choices we make to present the text to people.
Jared: Do any, this is, this is getting really specific, but do any, in the book of Ecclesiastes, do we have paratexts that would set off the, the book-ended editorial?
Pete: Well, yeah, the, the last, yeah. The, the, the, uh, the epilogue.
Jared: Yes. The, the epilogue. There are some that will.
Pete: And they, and they, they say different things too, and, a lot of them, I mean, I'm trying to remember what some of them are, but like, I think some missed the whole point.
Garrick: Yeah, and I don't know, I, I don't know if this example off the top of my head, but the Masorah for the Hebrew Bible, this medieval, very intricate, a set of marginal annotations around a [00:16:00] manuscript that create cross references, that point out the middle word in a book that talk about,variant readings, all these sorts of things.
They're, uh, this really, uh, widespread pretextual system for the Hebrew Bible from the 10th century onward. Um, that is hugely influential.
Pete: And, and those are more statistical, right? They're, they're not really necessarily trying to, it's not marketing.
It's, it's more a way of trying to establish the preservation of the text. No, that's right, that's right.
Garrick: No, that's right, that's right. That's right. I mean, none of these until the modern bible publishing industry in the 19th century are marketing devices. They're about helping people to do certain things with it. To read the text in, uh, orthodox liturgy, to, um, you know, understand the relationships between the four gospels or whatever.
Uh, it's only when you get to the modern day that you get, um, ever increasingly niche paratexts designed for, um, particular audiences, the American Patriot Bible. Uh, Donald Trump's, [00:17:00] you know, strange bible, uh, you know, bible for women's small groups, teens and so on, so, right.
Pete: Yeah. Well, yeah. And, and even the innocent ones, just, just putting in chapter numbers, you know, justly, Genesis 1 and 2. You know, the first story, right. That break is made like, uh, four verses too early. But that happens, and that, that affects people. And as a, as a professor of college students, you know.
“Why are you stopping? Why are you, why do you keep going into chapter 2:4? Why, why do you do that?”
Well, that's because the context seems to demand it actually, you know? But somebody, somebody was too much meat. I don't know what these scribes were doing, but they put, you know, they put the, the 2 in there far too early.
Garrick: I mean, our modern chapter and verses mostly go back to a, uh, 16th century, uh, French printer who printed one of the first, uh, [00:18:00] Greek Bibles that we have, Stephanus. And so this system, there's other versions similar to it, but it really becomes popular with his early edition of the Greek New Testament. And we, we haven't looked back.
Jared: Okay. Can we zoom out a little bit because
Garrick: Yes. Yes.
Jared: I wanna talk about these, you know, Bible for Normal People, what is the Bible? So, what are some of the questions that get raised as you start studying these paratexts and seeing how they are integrated or influencing tradition and the text itself in some ways?
What are the questions that come up when we ask? What is the Bible when it comes to paratexts?
Garrick: Yeah. I mean, this is the main question of the book. I'm trying to grapple conceptually with what the [00:19:00] Bible is when, uh, you consider the entirety of its transmission. So, you know, as a kid who was not super religious and went to church on Easter and Christmas, you think of the Bible as a floating text out in the penumbra that someone snatches down and prints in a book and is accessible to you.
Jared: What is a penumbra?
Garrick: It's like the ether, the, the stuff in the air, I don't know. It's a dumb, it's a dumb word. Um, but uh, you know, it's something that's floating out there that a really smart person can get hold of and give to you. Um, when in fact, I think, you know, when you look at the manuscripts and you look carefully at the history of the Bible, you know, its words are obviously very important, but it's more than just words.
It's a big, um, set of features that is text, that is material, that is paratext, that is this dance between scripture and tradition and the people engaging it. Uh, and this process [00:20:00] to my mind is defined by change, is the main argument of the book. That, um, the best way to describe the New Testament is something that is constantly in flux in this negotiation between, um, readers, the past, um, people who played a role in bringing the Bible to us.
But that, the important thing is that this change doesn't undermine the fact that the Bible might be sacred or revelatory or important. It's a symptom of the fact that communities have viewed the Bible as revelatory and important and valuable and worth passing on, that change becomes, uh, part of its essential substance.
Pete: Yeah. Well, Garrick, um, you mentioned just a, a few seconds ago, um, material. It’s a paratext. And I, I think I know what you're after, but could, could you explain that? 'cause I mean, I, I get chapters, I get that, you know. Subtitles. I get that.
Um, you know, all [00:21:00] weird stuff like explanatory notes or little inserted, uh, essays, you know, in some study bibles that I get that. But what- the material? Who cares?
Garrick: Yeah, I think it is, the material's kind of on the boundary, I think of, of, of a paratext. But I think it does have, uh, you know, the material does communicate to us.
So as a manuscript scholar, you know, I'm firstly interested in material to understand who made the book, why, and when, what is it made out of? Is it paper or parchment or papyrus, what are its dimensions? What kind of binding does it have? Who did it, you know, who has repaired it over time? So I wanna understand the people who you know, made and used this thing.
So from a historical perspective, that's one thing I'm interested in, but the materiality also communicates like a little pocket bible is, uh, something quite different than a family bible that you put all your family's heirlooms in and wedding invitations and all that stuff, like my grandmother does.
Uh, you know, [00:22:00] that's a monument to our family that is mediated in this weird sort of sacred space that's this big sort of closed book monument. Um, but a messy copy of a text on poor paper, you know, it doesn't say, uh, the same sort of thing. It communicates something different. Like if you look at, um, modern Bibles, for example, like the Scofield Bible again, uh, which I had to buy a copy of for this, for this book, came in its own fancy box, in its own little case with a gold leaf around the edges.
And a gold, uh, you know, uh, bookmark and all this, all this sort of fancy stuff that communicates that this is something important, valuable, sacred, whatever, but the Green Bible is, uh, you know, printed on paper that makes you think like someone just scraped it off a tree because it's recycled and the quality is much lower.
But it communicates that look we are trying to do, take care of God's creation. So you should buy this book in the first place. So the material does, you know, communicate to us what something is for, like, a [00:23:00] dictionary looks different than, um, a journal article or a newspaper. Um, and a newspaper, you know, is ephemeral and a dictionary is something you have on your shelf for a long time.
So these sorts of things, uh, matter. How big is the margin, you know? Do people, are you supposed to write notes in it, right?
Is the script clear and beautiful? Is it, uh, messy and fast? Like these sorts of things matter for understanding what that particular book is trying to do.
Pete: or even what verses are footnoted. I mean, even something like that.
Garrick: That's right.
Pete: Yeah. It's just like, oh, this must be really important, or something like that.
Garrick: That's right.
Pete: What, what about um, I mean the transition to electronic bibles, which I hate, I just, 'cause I'm old and I just can't, I can't, if I don't have pages in my hand, I don't, I don't care if it's a, a leaf, gold leaf or not.
I just need pages to turn. But I, I'm wondering if, I mean, going all the way back to scrolls, transitioning to books, transitioning to now electronic forms of reading, [00:24:00] and those are all material paratexts.
Garrick: Absolutely.
Pete: I mean, I I, I'm not asking for a big answer here, but just it seems like that it affects how you read it.
Garrick: I, I, I mean, I agree completely. I mean, one thing I kind of touch on briefly in the book, but don't give too much time to, is this idea that the media, the shape of the book matters. So changes from scroll to Codex and from manuscript to printed book and from printed book to digital texts. Going back to kind of a scroll up and down, a style of reading.
You know, these do have fundamental impacts on how people read, period. Uh, how they read sacred texts. But of course, digital text has its own pretextual possibilities with hyperlink, and, uh, all sorts of things that Eusebius was experimenting with, with the codex in the fourth century, uh, as well, these forms of hypertext and flipping back and forth within a book.
Uh, so, you know, the digital texts have their own sort of materiality, but they're not all that entirely [00:25:00] different from things that people have played with throughout the history of the bible.
Pete: You mean like Eusebius, you mean like a, a concordance kind of thing or just-
Garrick: Yeah, so Eusebius made a very cool thing.
I have a, a chapter or two on it in the book, um, called the Eusebian Cannon Tables. Uh, and what he did was he gave each like sentence or section in the gospels a number. So this is before chapter and verses. So in Matthew there's a few hundred sections, you know, in John there's less and so on. But then he took those numbers and put them on a set of tables to see where the gospels agree on certain sections.
So the first table is where all four gospels have a passage. You know, the second table is where Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree. The tenth one is where they all have individual passages. And if you have these tables and the numbers in the book, which most Greek gospels have, you can flip between passages and compare them without breaking up the narrative of gospels.
So it's kind of like, uh, built-in concordance or a, [00:26:00] uh, uh oh, what, that's, that's not the right word, but where you can cross reference
Pete: Cross-reference?
Garrick: Maybe. Yeah, exactly. It's the parallel where-
Jared: Yeah, yeah.
Garrick: Yeah. So it's a way to do parallel readings without actually moving around the gospel text, and it's really complicated.
And really hard to transmit and produce, but there are hundreds of manuscripts with this system in it. So, you know, uh, the digital text where you can flip back and forth between parallels with a click is not, that dissimilar.
Pete: Oh, and another one just, um, not double columned, but I mean, I think Zondervan came out with, um, a, a bible a few years ago.
I'm not, I'm not sure how, um, if it's still in production, but it's like, no, this is wrong. It's just lines, it's like a regular book. I can't, I don't even know what to do with this. You know, I'm looking, I, I want the columns. That's what I'm used to. And it affected how I read it.
Garrick: No, I agree.
I mean, I think that's right. I mean, you know, Eusebius wants you to be able to read the gospel front to back if you want, but to be able to flip back and forth and compare them all you want as well. Uh, there is a number of [00:27:00] Bibles like this that are no chapter and verses. Just text.
And they want you to read it like a novel front to back, which is a fine way to read, but it's certainly not the only way to read these passages.
So I'm fine with experiments like this. I think it's really interesting and jarring to see how our readings differ when the paratextual ecosystem changes. I think when you look at stuff like that. That's where you see the power of, you know, sort of the secret hidden power of these paratexts.
Jared: When you were talking about the first person in France, um, in the eighties to come up with this concept, I immediately thought of, of Jacques Derrida, who in his own way was playing with these same questions. Right? What, what is a text? I think he has a text called Glas or something. Um, G-L-A-S, one s. Um, that, like, really upset the academy in France at the time.
Sort of like playing with the idea of what is a text. So that made me think of, you know, for me one of the big takeaways of what you said is tradition is a part of [00:28:00] the text in some important ways. Like you can't get away from it. It's always a part of it. How do you, you talked about you being interested-
It, it doesn't sound like you're more of a conservative thinker in this way where it's like, “well, let's get back to the, let's get back to the real basics. Let's strip all the paratext away.” So as you think more creatively or interestingly, what are ways that you've thought of, if you have to incorporate more of the playfulness or the creativity of the paratext as a, as a way to, um, maybe pull out different parts of the biblical text in, in ways that I, I think we've talked about it in ways that can go kind of awry, where it's like, well, you're just kind of inserting your own interpretation.
But if it's unavoidable and we're not saying, let's try to get rid of that, what's a vision for how to maybe help us do it responsibly where the tradition just is gonna be a part of it?
Garrick: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, [00:29:00] you, there is no literature without paratext. I'm convinced. I'm convinced there's no Bible without paratext. So we have to understand what has come before and what we're doing as readers and publishers and scholars, um, when we're engaging this material.
So it's not something that we can ignore or strip away in its entirety, like scripture and tradition are fully intertwined. Right? They need each other, and I think that's part of the process.
Garrick: Um, I mean, one thing I do in some of my classes is I'll show, uh, different English bible versions of the same passage or different manuscripts of the same passage with wildly different paratext and have students break into groups and try to interpret and see what's going on and come back in the group and they come back with wildly different things.
So it's, I think if you're a serious Bible reader of any kind, um, you're reading the Bible for any reason. I, I recommend reading different versions. If you're just reading English bibles, that's great. Pick up different ones. Uh, [00:30:00] learn from, um, the traditions of the past. And you can even learn from bad paratext in the present if you're aware of their influence and what they're, uh, trying to do.
So, I'm very open for, uh, publishers, scholars, artists to continue to think paratexturally about the Bible and other texts, and to invent new things, to try to do new things, to experiment. This is part of the process, but you also want to call out really bad ones, like the American Patriot Bible that puts the US Constitution and Bill of Rights and a bunch of astronaut, um, sayings and quotes from astronauts in the book of Revelation for some reason.
So all these, uh, all these very odd, odd sorts of things. Like, they may be for some people, but they do more harm than good. So we need to be critical still. Um, but I think experimentation has been, uh, part of the process of the Bible from the ancient world onward.
And when we do this, we're part of that [00:31:00] really long process, and we can empathize with and imagine the lives of the many anonymous scribes, readers, annotators, people who left small traces of themselves in these manuscripts that have helped to produce the bibles that we hold in our hands today.
Jared: Well it seems like a great object lesson for this abstract thing that we talk about a lot, which is, you know, some people say, um, they don't interpret their Bible, they just read it.
And so this is a very concrete example of, no, you don't. There, that's like just from the paratext themselves. Even if, even, you know, just to say it wouldn't be true even if you just had the words, but you don't just have the words, you have interpretive, you have, uh, interpretive traditions built into the Bible that you have right in front of you.
Which seems, like, really tangible and maybe easier for people to grasp in this conversation. So I think it's been a great conversation just to have, uh, paratext as sort of a tool, right, to help people [00:32:00] understand these bigger ideas of Bible reading.
Pete: Even things, I mean, just tables of content..
Opening essays, you know, I mean, all these things. It just absolutely, it, it's, it's, it's intended to steer the reader, which is not a bad thing in and of itself. But it's intended to steer the reader toward understanding. But that's very much a constructed reality at that point.
Garrick: Fully, that's fully the case.
And I think, you know, paratexts, when you, uh, when you can see, see them, then they're what they're doing. You also begin to see what sort of traditions and experiences we all bring to the text as human beings who are grappling with some of these questions. They help us to understand ourselves, to attend to the sort of liminality of our daily lives, to get new views, new perspectives on, uh, the biblical text, but also on, uh, you know, a range of other experiences that we have as human beings out in the world, in relationship with people doing things. [00:33:00] Uh, and to see, at least for me, helps me to see, uh, the world afresh a bit.
Pete: You know, I, I can imagine some people listening to this and saying, I'm just gonna throw my Bible out now, because I think it's just, oh, full of things and I'm not even aware of, blah, blah. So do you have, here's a nice practical question. Do you have a go-to English bible?
Garrick: Oh, I don't, uh-
Pete: Ah, of course you don't.
Garrick: I use-
Jared: I don't, I only read the Greek and Hebrew.
Garrick: No, I, I don't. I read a lot of different English bibles. It depends on what I am. What I'm trying to do, don't throw your Bibles away. This is, this book is actually arguing the opposite. That all of this seeming instability is part of the wonder of it all.
And it's something to keep engaging with. Um, but I mean, so if I am doing in class, I often use the NRSV 'cause that's what we [00:34:00] use on this side of the pond. Um, but if I am, uh, you know, which, which-
Pete: Which, which has standard subtitles for the mo-
Garrick: I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah. They're made up by editors. Yeah, they're produced by the editors of the NRSV, but they're there.
And they have chapter and verses and they have notes on, um, uh, you know, important variant readings. Uh, in the Greek and Hebrew and things like that. So that's useful for students. But what I'm, uh, trying to read Bible stories to my kids at night. I'm reading the, uh, uh, Mennonite, you know, Peace Table Children's Bible to them. 'cause it's a nice, you know, kinda gives a nice, a nice story to it.
So, um, or if I'm gonna go teach a class on apocalyptic literature, I might read the Jewish Annotated New Testament, uh, Jewish Annotated Study Bible or something like this to, you know, so, or if I'm gonna go to Vespers at the Orthodox Cathedral in Glasgow and Father Marcos is gonna ask me something. I might read the Orthodox study Bible or, uh, [00:35:00] something like this. So I think, you know, the more Bibles we read with the different types of paratexts, that gives you a larger perspective on the possibilities out there, and you'll see things that you've not thought of before.
Jared: So it's not, it's not get rid of your Bible, it's buy more of them. Buy more of them.
Garrick: Yeah. Yeah. Borrow more.
Well, yeah. And it's, and it's not, you know, um, “well, the Bible says.” Well, the Bible is, first, doesn't say anything. You have to interpret it, but it's all happening within a context as well that is setting you up.
Again, I don't mean that in a negative sense, it's just, yeah, it's, it's laying groundwork that is, um, nuanced and not obvious, maybe to many people, just little things like subtitles. I mean, when I, when I teach a class and we're reading something, I say, does anybody have a, a little subtitle here? And it's amazing how different they are from different translations and, and they really do communicate different things and they lead to certain expectations of that text that actually might not even let you, um, ask, uh, [00:36:00] maybe the right or at least good questions of this type.
It almost takes that away from you at the onset. That's the negative impact. I agree. But yeah.
Garrick: Yeah, so, I mean, it's, yeah, it's neither, yeah. It's, it's not positive or negative, it just is. I mean, this part of the inescapable humanness of reading we bring ourselves, we bring the sort of hidden things around the text into what we're doing.
Um, and this is part of the process. Like, I've talked to some students, you know, we have a very mixed group of students here, but some say, well, like, “if the Bible can be made to say anything, what are we even doing here?” And my response is, you know, we have to engage it in all its complexity and take it for what it is.
And if the Bible is revelatory, if the Bible is inspired or important in some way, then we have to let it be what it is in all of its complexity.
Pete: Um, it, it may just as, as we draw this to a close here, um, I, I'm just, I'm fascinated you have a, a quote and, and we don't have to get into all of it 'cause we, [00:37:00] we've touched on a lot of this already.
But from your book, you say the New Testament is a diverse set of narratives and letters that have been remade each time they're copied and printed, right? I mean, yes, can, do you wanna expand on that a little bit more in different angle maybe that we've-
Garrick: Yeah. I, I mean, I think the, the main argument is that, uh, you know, whenever you make something, it reflects its makers in some way, shape, or form.
And something as complicated as the Bible is, you know, you are required to make hundreds of small choices about how to present this thing, what size font to use, what kind of paper, do you use chapter and verses, how do you divide the books and sections? What prefaces do you give? How many footnotes do you do?
Who, which famous biblical scholar can you get to write the preface to the whole thing? You know, all of these choices, and they're not unlike the choices that every scribe made in copying a manuscript from, you know, second century onward. [00:38:00] Um, they're a set of choices that we often make without thinking about, um, their impact that are made for a whole range of purposes.
Some, you know, really conceptual and theological about what the Bible is, some, you know, political, you don't want to be talking about, um, laws about wives and children under the auspices of property, uh, or, um, technological, like, you know, the books that we make are, um, uh, you know, influenced by how cheap something is to make, how fast you can make it, what the audience is.
All of these sorts of things come into play, uh, and when you hold a Bible in your hand, it's the product of thousands of choices of dozens or hundreds of people spanning centuries. And it's a real-life treasure trove of a human experience trying to engage the divine.
And you can empathetically think about the people who touch these manuscripts, who left their [00:39:00] mark in them.
I mean, one of my favorite examples is there's a gospel manuscript at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. It has a little prayer in the lower margin, uh, of, that is randomly in the middle of Luke somewhere. Uh, and it's a guy who calls himself Peter the Shoemaker, and he prays for his wife Anastasia and their children.
Pete: Wow.
Garrick: So we don't know who he is, when he lived, where he was, but it's the only tangible record of this person's life. Um, and when we see the Bible as something that we only hold a part of when we hold a book in our hands, um, we can start to think more broadly about the other people who came before us trying to do the same thing.
Pete: Yeah. There is a tradition, you know, I mean the, the biblical tradition, it's not just the text, but the tradition that involves all these things. Paratext and, and, and whatnot.
Jared: Yeah. And just a reminder, I mean, yeah, a reminder that a tradition is also generations after generations of people engaging.
And the [00:40:00] faith that it, you know, bears witness to. Well that's, I think, a great way to end the conversation. So thank you, Garrick for jumping on and for sharing your passion with us, at least the passion for the last couple of years. You may be moving on and ready to talk about something new soon, but uh, thank you so much.
Garrick: Someday, we'll see.
Jared: Well, thank you.
Garrick: I appreciate it guys. It was very fun. Thank you.
Jared: Well thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it. One, if you just wanna give a little money, go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
Pete: And if you wanna support us and want an all access pass to our classes, ad free, live stream of the podcast, and a thoughtful community of people asking tough questions about the Bible and faith, you can become a member of our online community, the Society of Normal people at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join
Jared: And lastly, it goes a long way. If you just wanted to rate the podcast, leave a review and tell others about our show. In addition, you can let us know what you [00:41:00] thought about the episode by emailing us at info@thebiblefornormalpeople.com
Outro: You've just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People. Don't forget you can catch our other show Faith for Normal People in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for normal people team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Joel Limbauan, Savannah Locke, Melissa Yandow, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Lauren O'Connell, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
