Conclusions and Conversation Starters

Abstract

This chapter synthesizes information gathered throughout the book pertaining to several topics. It first summarizes the book’s findings about the genesis of the Bible’s First Chapters, seen both as an integrated set of numbered chapters, and as an underlying set of unnumbered text-articulations in earlier manuscripts. It also reviews what the book may contribute to the quest for the provenance of Codex Vaticanus and the manuscripts its scribes used for it. It reflects on the age of the textual divisions memorialized in the Bible’s First Chapters. Chapter 8 also continues a conversation about whether the sense divisions in biblical manuscripts have any useful contribution to make to the task of dating manuscripts. Finally, the chapter offers two examples from the NT of how an awareness of the divisions in Codex Vaticanus might be helpful in Scriptural exegesis.