Being Trained To Interpret Texts

In some rather surprising and ironic ways, I think my training in a particularly obscure and technical aspect of New Testament studies made me *more* qualified to write books for a general audience than most of my colleagues and peers. Almost everyone I knew in my graduate program was interested almost exclusively in two areas of academic research: exegesis and New Testament theology. I was interested in something that most of them did not care about in the least: textual criticism. Let me ex...