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.

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 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.

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.

[1]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.