Acknowledgements

I warmly thank Fr Justin Sinaites for inviting me on two occasions to visit St. Catherine’s monastery to inspect the manuscripts of this study in person. Fr Justin’s passion for the manuscripts is inspirational. His generous support for researchers is a tremendous benefit to the scholarly community. I am also deeply grateful to my supervisors, Alexander Treiger and Michael Bird for their terrific support over a number of years. Their comments and insights made this research significantly stronger. I thank the three examiners, Tommy Wasserman, Ronny Vollandt, and Miriam Hjälm for their feedback which I was able to incorporate into the final version. I thank Alison Flynn and the registrars at Ridley College who have been a tremendous help throughout my studies there. I thank Stephen Carlson for his friendship and his comments on various versions of this thesis. His work on applying phylogenetics to textual traditions is truly groundbreaking and I am privileged to follow in his footsteps. I am thrilled that Joey McCollum has taken some of the ideas of this work and developed them further. I have already learned much from him and I look forward to seeing where he takes these ideas in the future. I thank Brian Rosner and Michael Theophilos for employing me as a research assistant during the period of my studies. The research that I did with them sparked many ideas which contributed to this thesis. I thank Andrew Turpin who generously allowed me to delay the start of my employment at the University of Melbourne to allow me time to work on this thesis. Andrew and the rest of my colleagues at the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform have been a great encouragement as I have been finishing this work, in particular I thank Simon Mutch, Geordie Zhang and Damien Mannion for reading sections of the text. I am deeply honoured to contribute to the series New Testament Tools, Studies, and Documents and I warmly thank Eldon Epp and Bart Ehrman for allowing me this opportunity. I thank Marjolein van Zuylen and the other editors and staff at Brill who have been so supportive at every step. I thank my Arabic teachers in Jordan, Yayha Barakat, Thaer Tamimi, Moayad Abadi, and Loay Jawabreh, without whom the thesis would not have been possible. Loay especially helped me by correcting some of my early transcriptions of the manuscripts. I thank Alin Suciu for transcribing and translating the Coptic of Sinai ar. NF Parch. 15/24/36/64. It was very helpful to have his thoughts on the manuscript. I have been able to present some of the content of this thesis at various conferences and I am grateful to the organisers for giving me these opportunities. This was only possible through the travel grants of the Australian College of Theology and the European Association of Biblical Studies and also through the generous financial support of Scott and Sarah Leslie, Jonathan and Rachel McConchie, and Jeanette and Kerrin Lee. Scott also read an early draft of the thesis and gave many helpful comments. I am grateful to Camilla Adang, Meira Polliack, and Ronny Vollandt for introducing me to the Biblia Arabica community. I thank Ronny especially for kindly allowing me to post some of the content of this thesis up on the Biblia Arabica blog. I thank Jean Valentin for his friendship and the support he has given me through corresponding together. I am very grateful to Stéphane Verhelst for reaching out to me after noticing that I am interested in the Hagiopolite liturgical tradition and mailing me a copy of his excellent book on the topic. I thank Hikmat Kashouh for his encouragement to begin work in the field of Arabic Gospel manuscripts. I appreciate of the help of editors who have made suggestions for various parts of the text which have been or will be published elsewhere. They are acknowledged in the relevant sections of the text. All remaining errors in this thesis are of course my own. I am grateful to Krishna Kumar and Amber Jain for releasing the 978-90-04-68580-2 templates used in this document and to my friend David Purton who wrote and maintains the package for the referencing system. The phylogenetic analysis presented here would not have been possible without the work of the community of researchers behind the Beast 2 package and I specifically thank Remco Bouckaert for corresponding with me and swiftly fixing issues in the code when they arose. I thank my parents, David and Anita Turnbull for a lifetime of love and provision. My father read through several drafts of this work and greatly helped to improve the language. I thank my children, Hannah, Bethany, David and Lydia who are a joy to me and have shown tremendous patience with me working long hours at home. Finally, I thank my wife Simone who has supported me at every turn. To her, I dedicate this work.