ITSEE student Gabriël Oberholzer has qualified for the award of MA by Research for a thesis on a Greek New Testament manuscript.
Gabriël Oberholzer presenting at the Birmingham Colloquium in May 2023.
Gregory-Aland 655 is a gospel book held at the State Library in Berlin, copied in the tenth or eleventh century. Over the last four years, Gabriël Oberholzer has been working on this little-known manuscript on the distance learning MA by Research while ministering as a pastor to congregations in South Africa.
Gabriël's association with Birmingham began when he volunteered to transcribe Greek manuscripts for the International Greek New Testament project. The skills he gained through this led him to seek to take his interests further through a research thesis supervised by Professor Hugh Houghton and Dr Amy Myshrall at Birmingham's Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing.
In his thesis, which has now qualified for the award of MA, Gabriël examines the biblical text, the lectionary apparatus and the thirty-nine exegetical comments found in the margins of this manuscript. Some of the extracts are from known early Christian writers, while others remain unidentified: one matches a scholium on the Greek playwright Aristophanes. Both the biblical text and scholia show that GA 655 is closely related to the manuscripts GA 028 and GA 200.
"Written Type": Gabriël's winning image of research
Alongside work on his thesis, Gabriël crafted a remarkable combination of ancient and modern scribal scholarship in a picture which he submitted to the Images of Research 2022 competition, where it won the Runner-up prize in the People’s Choice Award, determined by a popular vote.
Gabriël described his image as follows:
This picture represents the marriage of an old handwritten manuscript with our modern world's digital technology. Ancient witnesses of the New Testament can be read, researched and preserved by employing the best that our information age has to offer. My research is intent on transcribing this manuscript with a special interest in its marginal commentary and notes. Exploring its unique contributions will deepen our understanding and appreciation of such manuscripts not just in academic circles, but ultimately through translation lead to the reader’s upliftment and spiritual edification. Without this marriage of Written-Type, these treasures will be lost.
Following the award of the degree, Gabriël's thesis will be available on the University of Birmingham etheses repository, and his full-text electronic transcriptions of the manuscript have also been released online.
Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship
University webpage of Professor Hugh Houghton, Professor of New Testament Textual Scholarship at the University of Birmingham.
Research Fellow
Biographical and contact information for Dr Amy Myshrall, Research Fellow in the University of Birmingham.
