In my early grades, I used to get good marks for penmanship. I can remember practicing rows of letters on tablets marked with dashed lines between the solid lines to indicate the height of upper and lower case letters. I memorized the heights of the letters that extended below the line, such as y and g and the lower case letters that reached above the dotted line, like t and h and the dots on my i’s. When we got to cursive, I practiced rows of o’s, trying to make each circle round and connect them with consistent lines.

When I was in the fifth grade, I happened to be at a meeting that my father was having with partners in an airplane. There was some document that needed to be signed and I watched as a doctor, a dentist and my father made their signatures. I couldn’t read any of them. None of these men, whom i considered to be among the most intelligent men I had ever met, had what my teacher would grade as good handwriting. I made a conscious decision to be more like them and even practiced copying my father’s signature, with upper case letters that extended way above the line and lower case m and n that were indistinguishable.

At my next report card, my mother asked, “What happened to your penmanship?” I had slid from an A to a C-. I told her that I was pretty sure that penmanship wasn’t a skill that I would need and that I wanted to be like my father’s partners.

In retrospect, it was the beginning of a period of focusing less on the expectations of my teachers and turning to the subjects and activities that interested me more than the official subjects of school. My grades were more mixed from that point until i entered college.

I didn’t give handwriting much more thought until I began to learn about manuscript study when I was in seminary. I went to graduate school in the days before personal computers. Virtually every document we read in school was either printed or in the 12-point courier type of a standard typewriter. We all wrote with typewriters and learned to read typewritten pages.

At about the same time, Steve Jobs was taking a calligraphy course at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, that was to have a direct influence on the availability of multiple fonts and elegant computer printing that we take for granted today.

Meanwhile I was learning about fragmentary manuscripts, manuscripts that were written without distinction between upper case and lower case letters, manuscripts written without spaces between words, and a whole world of ancient texts that were challenging to read and sometimes inaccurately rendered by those who copied them. I began to understand the challenges of reading and understanding ancient texts.

What we now have as the New Testament was compiled from many different documents, many of them called minuscules, not because of the shortness of content, but because of the type of writing of the Greek alphabet that was employed. Greek, like English has some distinctions between upper case (majuscule) and lower case (minuscule). These distinctions weren’t yet standardized in the time that the texts upon which the New Testament are based were written. Because all writing was done by hand in that time there is plenty of room for interpretation about the exact words and meanings in the texts.

All of this information came as a bit of a revelation to me. I had come to think of the Bible as a fixed document that had never changed from the beginning - words that had been printed and handed down from generation to generation from the days of Jesus. The paths of our words and their meanings are far less fixed than I had assumed them to be.

Scholars continue to pour over ancient texts and to learn more about their original letters and meanings while, at the same time, our language continues to evolve. New words and new meanings for old words emerge constantly as we use the language. The terms “upper case” and “lower case” for our letters, for example didn’t emerge for about 1,600 years after Jesus. They come from the way type was arranged in early printing presses. The presses used specific reversed letters which were set into rows one letter at a time in preparation for printing. The cases of majuscule letters were stored above the cases of minuscule letters, thus the terms “upper case” and “lower case” referred to the storage location of the letters.

The letters were reversed so they appeared correct when stamped by the press, thus making it very difficult to distinguish between minuscule p and q - giving rise to the expression “mind your p’s and q’s!”

By the time printing was available as a technology for transmitting documents that were standardized, Biblical texts had been copied by hand over and over again. The scholars who copied the texts hadn’t studied the Palmer method. And, to make things more complex, the original languages had been largely abandoned in favor of Latin in the fourth century, so the texts that were being copied had been translated, with varying levels of accuracy. There is no small amount of discussion among scholars about which contemporary words communicate best the original meanings. And there are plenty of scholars who believe that it is impossible to get all the way to the original meanings because there are no complete original texts to use for a basis. Even so, the evolution of language would make it impossible to be completely certain about meaning.

So whenever we read the Bible, we are reading not only the words of the ancients, but also layers of the history and tradition of the institutional church. We are learning as much about how our forebears saw the gospel as we are about what Jesus actually said and did. Those traditions and the story of our church are important, however. They are well worth reading and studying and learning. Our faith has been shaped not only by the original words and actions of Jesus, but also by generations of faithful followers who contributed layers of meaning and understanding to our mission and ministry.

So when I get hung up on minuscule (or miniscule - even the spelling is not fixed) details of the texts, have patience with me. I’m just trying to discover more truth and light.

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