The text is changing. Every time that I make an edition of the Greek New Testament, or anybody does, we change the wording. We are maybe trying to get back to the oldest possible form but, paradoxically, we are creating a new one. 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 never ever a final form of the text.

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. Jesus says the person who is angry with his brother deserves judgement. But there is a variation on that. 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.

• Calvini Commentarius in Epistolam ad Romanos (Ioannis Calvini Opera Omnia denuo Recognita et Adnotatione Critica Instructa Notique Illustrata, Series II Opera Exegetica Veteris et Novi Testamenti) (with T.H.L. Parker), Geneva: Droz. 1999
• The Living Text of the Gospels, Cambridge University Press. 1997
• Codex Bezae. Studies from the Lunel Colloquium June 1994 (New Testament Tools and Studies 22) (with C.-B. Amphoux), Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1996
• The New Testament in Greek IV. The Gospel According to St. John Edited by the American And British Committees of the International Greek New Testament Project. Volume One The Papyri (New Testament Tools and Studies 20), (with W.J. Elliott), Leiden: E.J. Brill. 1995
• Codex Bezae. An Early Christian Manuscript and Its Text, Cambridge University Press. 1992
• Paul's Letter to the Colossians by Philip Melanchthon, translated with an introduction and notes (Historic Texts and Interpreters in Biblical Scholarship 8), Sheffield: The Almond Press. 1989