Summer 2026 Update

The last twelve months have been full of changes for us as founders of the Text & Canon Institute. Last June, we moved our families from Phoenix to Kansas City where we took up new teaching positions at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. It’s hard to believe we’ve now been here just over a year! The move involved all the normal upheavals of finding new homes, schools, and churches. As a result, our work here slowed but didn’t stop.

What we’ve been up to

Just a few weeks after landing in Kansas City, we were off to Amsterdam for the Preachers & Leaders conference at Tyndale Theological Seminary. It was a special time since the seminary was celebrating its 40th anniversary in the same year that marked the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s first attempt to print the English New Testament—all in the same year that Amsterdam celebrated its 750th anniversary.

The conference was also the occasion for the first translation of our book Scribes & Scripture. It was translated into Dutch with additional material from Paulus-Jan Kieviet on the Dutch Bible. This was followed later in the year with a Croation translation. German is next and we would love to see it in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese eventually.

But Amsterdam was not the only long flight on our agenda. In October we headed to Fairbanks, Alaska to speak at the Christian Thought Forum held annually by Bethel Church. We saw snow, but no bears. We also flew to Spain to film about the incredible Complutensian Polyglot with Tony Evans’s Unbound documentary. We’ll let you know when it’s released. Other Scribes & Scripture conferences took us to Washington, Michigan, and our own backyard in Kansas City. We were even online for a TGC cohort.

Speaking of online, both directors were interviewed earlier this year on Wes Huff’s YouTube channel. Dr. Meade talked about key prophetic texts in Isaiah and Dr. Gurry addressed places the NT text has changed. If you want to see us in person with Wes, join us for the annual Apologetics Canada conference in Ontario September 25–26. Dr. Meade will also be back in Canada for the Calgary conference October 24.

Despite all the traveling, we did manage to publish several new articles. The first was by Dr. Tracy McKenzie in our Bible in America series on the Bible’s influence on the American constitution. Stay tuned for more articles in this series to mark America’s 250th anniversary. The other article, published in time for Christmas, was a detailed look at whether Isaiah predicts the virgin birth of Christ by Dr. Peter Gentry.

Rebuilding our email list

Regrettably, the move was not the only interruption to our work. Leaving Phoenix threw us into a disappointing and prolonged intellectual property dispute with Phoenix Seminary. As part of that, the marketing software we used to send new articles was apparently hacked by our former employer and our access removed. We have tried to resolve the issue for twelve months without success. (You can read more about that here.) We share this not only so you know why we haven’t been more active, but also to let you know that we have to rebuild much of our email subscription list. If you want to get new articles and updates, please resubscribe using this new form:

You can still follow us on X, Facebook, and YouTube as you always have.

What’s ahead

The good news is that we have recently finalized a new and exciting partnership with Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (MBTS) and are excited to continue our work. We will be hiring new staff, publishing new articles, and speaking across the country. In addition, we are both able to take on doctoral students through the MBTS doctoral program. If you’re interested, please reach out. We are also making plans for our next academic colloquium and are in process of publishing the papers from our previous one. Stay tuned!

As we resume work, you can once again look forward to regular, monthly articles along with ongoing translations into Spanish and Portuguese. We also have some helpful developments to our website in the pipeline that should make it easier than ever to find what you need among our nearly 100 articles on the history of the Bible. In all this, our mission remains the same: to illuminate the incredible history of the Bible.

Thanks for reading!

Peter J. Gurry

Peter (PhD, University of Cambridge) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Codirector of the Text & Canon Institute. He is the author of Scribes and Scriptures: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible (with John Meade) and Myths and Mistakes in New Testament Textual Criticism (with Elijah Hixson).

John D. Meade

John (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Professor of Old Testament at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and Codirector of the Text & Canon Institute. He is also a contributor of the Hexapla Project. He is the author (with Ed Gallagher) of The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity and Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible (with Peter Gurry).