Interview with Cressida Ryan on Neurodivergence and Reformation Bible Translations

In this interview from 26 August 2026, Cressida Ryan (Oxford University) discusses her current research into neurodivergence and Reformation Bible translations and her experiences teaching classical languages to neurodiverse learners, as well as Sophocles and some bits of academic drama from England and the Spanish Netherlands.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/5a50e9_3ebcb560f0084baaad27aa35b9c711b4/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Interview with Cressida Ryan. Transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT

Bridger Bartlett

Hello, my name is Bridger Bartlett. I'm a postdoctoral researcher with AMEND, and I am here with Cressida Ryan to discuss her ongoing new research involving Bible translations and the Reformation and neurodiversity. So to get started, I didn't read a bio for you or anything like that. So would you mind telling us all sort of who you are, what your deal is?

Cressida Ryan

Sure. Hi. Yes. I started out my academic life as a classicist. And when I graduated, I went into school teaching. And that was a really good chance to look at what my subject meant and make it accessible and thinking about the barriers to my subject and all those kind of things. And getting a lot of parents saying things like, ‘well, my child's dyslexic, they can't learn Latin,’ and that just not feeling like it sat right with me. And so it started up an interest in thinking, well, ‘what is it about classics, Latin, Greek that everyone thinks is so unfriendly, particularly in your divergent context? And how true is this? And what, if anything, can we do about that?’ So it was playing along as a seed in the back of my head all the way through.

And after a few years, I went and did a PhD in my favourite-ever play because I've loved the same play, Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles since I was about 16. And I hadn't quite felt up to tackling it properly as an undergraduate. And even in my masters, it had still been centre stage, but it had been, well, there's a lot to do here; when am I going to have the space to deal with it? And my PhD was a chance to go, why do I love this play so much? And it was essentially an exercise in discovering why I am the academic I am and what my life story has to do with that. And I was reflecting on my viva the other day because my external examiner's just died and thinking how much the viva was essentially a biographical exploration because she and I thought so differently about the play. And most of the reasons came down to who we were and it was really fascinating.

So for me, there's always been this interplay between what I'm doing and who I am and how that intersects with various other things. And I wanted classics to be available to more people. So I came to Oxford as a classics outreach officer and then broadened that more by working with schools generally on behalf of the university. So I've come through various different channels of being in school, being in the university, working for the university, but with schools. And then I found myself New Testament Greek lecturer, which I'd taught at Nottingham during my PhD, but at Oxford it was a chance to do just that and to get to grips with one form of Greek and language-teaching much more intensively and to think about my student needs much more.

And I was there for eight years, saw the department in Greek through COVID as scriptural languages coordinator. So I was looking at all six languages that we offered and the different ways in which those pose problems to students and teaching and what it meant to put those remote and how that affected the student experience and all of those things together before now finding myself a disability advisor. So I still have a fellowship. I'm a fellow at Wolfson College on the grounds of my theological and classical work, but I'm also a disability advisor as my main employment, thinking about the practical element of that. In some ways it feels like, as an outreach officer, I was encouraging people to apply to university and to make the most of things whatever their background. And then as a lecturer, I realised we weren't well placed to help people deal with academic study if they weren't what the system was expecting to see, et cetera. And now as a disability advisor, it feels like I've got a chance to handle that situation and make things in pedagogy better for students and allow the research and the teaching and all that to feed each other. So that's the arc of where I've got to and how I'm there. So I have a lot of fun thinking about the New Testament, Sophocles and disability all in the same headspace.

Bridger Bartlett

That's so exciting. Yeah, so I guess let's jump into the new project that we wanted to talk about. Can you tell us more about what you're working on?

Cressida Ryan

Yeah, my PhD was on the reception of Sophocles in the 18th century because I'd started off doing a survey of when people were interested in the Oedipus at Colonus. And they weren't until the early 18th century, and that interested me. So my PhD became an exercise in ‘why did this play suddenly become the way to reflect the ethos of the age?’ And in short, the answer was the sublime. So 4 years in one word, sublime, done. But it got me interested in a lot of other things. And I'd already been doing some work on neo-Latin and earlier centuries of works.

So I was reading 16^th-century Latin translations of Sophocles, and they just felt different. I don't know how to explain it, but they did not read the same. And the more I read them, the more I realized this was partly due to the country of the translator - country being a slightly loose term for 16^th-century Europe. But there was a definite split between northern and southern Europe and between Germanic areas and others. And then when I looked into it a bit more closely, between those around Martin Luther and everyone else. And I started, as I looked into who was reading what and who knew whom, realizing that the translations that read most differently were the ones from Luther's entourage.

And that got me thinking about, well, ‘why? Why did Sophocles read so differently in Latin around Martin Luther?’ And that got me thinking about, well, ‘how does one learn Greek?’ Because Greek can only come back to the West at the end of the 15th century. So early 16th century, people are only just becoming aware of ancient Greek again, rather than translations. So I was thinking about, well, ‘how do people learn Greek and how does that affect the way they understand it? So what's the relationship between pedagogy and ideology? And what does that mean for teacher-student interactions, the emerging textbook market, dictionaries, all of those kind of things? How do your use of tools affect your education?’ And that then got me thinking about then the translation process as well, of ‘what did it mean to translate Greek into Latin and what are the specific issues in Greek that don't carry well into Latin and how do you work all of that out?’

And I came up with this overarching plan, which was essentially that Martin Luther needs a Latin that doesn't sound Catholic. And unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever, the two are very closely related in 16^th-century Europe. Latin is the language of the Church of Rome, and Luther was estranging himself from Rome. So he needed to be able to express himself in Latin without sounding Catholic or getting his head chopped off. And he translated the New Testament into Latin before he'd done it in German, so it was clear this really mattered to him.

And I found that first version of his New Testament into Latin, and it again reads very differently to Erasmus and Jerome in interesting ways. So I started looking at how it reads differently to Erasmus and Jerome, and putting that against the Sophocles translations into Latin, which sounds like a really stupid combination in some ways. But the more I thought about it, the more the differences in the Sophocles were to do with things like authority, sin, leadership, concepts of personhood and hierarchy. And those were all big topics for a Reformation as well. So I ended up with this sense that those around Luther were trying out what it meant to translate Greek into Latin in new ways, to build new thought worlds so that you had a consistent way of viewing the world in Latin that you could then import into the New Testament so that you already had this whole world set up.

Bridger Bartlett

That's so interesting.

Cressida Ryan  

Thank you.

Bridger Bartlett  

Yeah, wow. Let me see. I just have so many questions. I'm going through my notes trying to decide what's the best place to start. Let's broadly talk more about the neurodiversity angle. I can see kind of this new sort of new paradigms or approaches to thinking. I wonder if you could just elaborate more on how you're thinking about that, sort of in relation to neurodiversity or how that's shaping your thinking on that.

Cressida Ryan 

Sure. I've been really interested in communication and the way communication works within a neurodivergent context, but also between neurodivergent and neurotypical people and contexts, because so much of what we think about is about that communication gap and the double empathy problem and those kinds of things. And so I have, particularly as a disability advisor, been thinking really hard about 'what does effective communication look like there.'

And one of the things I found really good about working with the early modern materials is they're kind of a safe space in which to play around with some of these ideas and look at how it goes, because I'm not going to offend anyone through my own translation of Sophocles, et cetera, as much as I might writing something out right now. So it feels like using these materials for me is a way to unpack what the implications of different forms of communication look like and how they might work for different communities.

I have done a lot of linguistics and philology. And for me, it's one of those things of conversation implicatures: ‘What is written between, what is between the lines?’ And I did a lot of work on conversation implicature in drama. So particularly in something like a Greek tragedy, you've got long passages where two characters will be in dialogue, but there's always one directing the flow. And there's no word for ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in Greek, so you can't agree with someone using a yes or no. So a lot of the dialogue will be somebody echoing someone else to show assent or doing the opposite to show dissent. But it does mean that you often get this sense that there's somebody leading and directing the dialogue. And the interlocutor has to pick up on those cues and respond to them. And that then leads you an opportunity to play a lot of games with that.

There are dialogues where it's two separate conversations that happen to just be happening at once and dispersed, quite frankly. There are ones where you can flip who's in control very subtly. There are ones where you can map the different linguistic interactions and say, ‘well, this is how they are responding to each other.’ And there are ones where you can look at those implicatures and go, ‘well, they're not being followed. Is that deliberate or accidental?’

And this sense of 'what is the unwritten text and who's driving the narrative and the dialogue', I think is really important in the neurodivergent context, because it speaks so much to, ‘Will people please say what they mean and mean what they say and not allow this unwritten code of communication that relies on everyone seeing the same material between the lines to be presumed to be normal?’ And it's not to say that it's not there in a neurodivergent context, but it functions, I think, in a very different way. And I think a lot of the communication mismatches can be to do with those kinds of issues. So for me, looking at stichomythia, the dialect stuff, the dialogue stuff has been particularly important there because it shows how communication functions.

And then thinking about that in a translation context is even more important. People often ask ‘why is the New Testament written in Greek?’ Before the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri in the early 20th century, there was this weird floating idea of ‘Holy Spirit Greek’ because the Greek of the New Testament is not like Greek that was otherwise known at the time. So people were trying to figure out, well, ‘why is it in this Greek?’ And then once we discovered the Oxyrhynchus papyri, which include things like shopping lists and day-to-day business, we discovered it's not some God-given Greek because the New Testament is special. It's the Greek of everyday language. And our understanding of how the New Testament communicated had to change radically in the light of that.

So I'm really interested in ‘how does the Greek of everyday language, which has to be a missionary language accessible to all, particularly in a very low literacy population, communicate consistently and effectively,’ particularly as the New Testament is an artificial canon. It's written by lots of people over a spread of time, and most of them are not native Greek speakers. So if you put all of that into the mix, it's a really interesting text in terms of ‘how does it communicate and what strategies do they have to use?’

And then as soon as you look at translating that, you've got a different set of problems. But also, as I said, it's not a text that's largely composed by native speakers of Greek. So you're already dealing with the word of God and your model of inspiration already needing to be a translation into language and potentially a translation into one's non-native language. So we're potentially looking at at least two layers of translation before we even get to thinking to putting the Greek into either Latin or a vernacular.

And there's something about that translation process that I think is also very key to the neurodivergent experience, partly in terms of non-verbal communication. So there's increasing work on autism and non-verbal spirituality, for example, that you can bypass that when in order to express it, we need to put it into words because a lot of the autistic experience can be non-verbal and therefore allow, in some views, a more direct and immediate access to the sacred. So what does it mean to put that concept in, but also then to think about carrying over ideas, what is lost, what is gained, what does it mean to get two different mindsets, worldviews in dialogue and conflict with each other.

And so for me, the neurodivergent framework allows me to ask some really interesting questions about what the process of translation looks like and how we enable things to mean, but also get what gets changed in that process. So what is inevitably focused on more, lost, gained, underemphasized, shaped, twisted, and we can't necessarily do anything about that, but by understanding the mechanisms better, we can be perhaps kinder and clearer, and more aware of what those processes look like in modern discourse.

Bridger Bartlett 

That's so interesting. I'm fascinated by this idea of kind of the poetics, I suppose, of when you translate something and how the resonances perhaps with neurodivergence and neurodivergent communication styles might show up in one translation versus, you know, the source or vice versa. So for example, you were talking about, in Greek plays, agreement might be signaled by repeating. That's so interesting because that's something that many autistic people, for example, might do: repeat something to say they agree or go along with it, for example. Another example of yours that stood out to me was, I know you'd written A blog post for the Women in Theology blog, where you'd mentioned how often in the Gospel of Mark, it repeats the words ‘he was saying’. And you mentioned that it has this superficial similarity to almost like a Tourettic tic. And I know you brought that up kind of to say that doesn't mean it's superficial or meaningless the way we stereotypically think of that. But I was really struck by that idea that this repeated thing might have this sort of neurodivergent effect for how it's taken by the reader. So I was wondering if you could say more about anything in that realm of these effects, you know, potentially seeming neurodivergent or not, possibly depending on like what choices the translator makes.

Cressida Ryan 

Sure, I think that's a really interesting angle. I'm not sure I'd want to make a very strident case, but I do think there are a couple of interesting angles to pursue.

And to me, actually, the first one comes back to that sense of the New Testament being a text that is not necessarily written by or for native speakers of Greek. Or, indeed, readers. That it is in many ways an oral text because a lot of these things, so Mark is well known for his use of, ‘he was saying,’ and messing around with tenses in that sense because it's an imperfect tense and it crops up in all kinds of places. It kind of keeps the narrative ticking along quite a lot. And as a hook, as a narratological hook, that's really helpful because if you are trying to compose at speed, we see the same in things like Homer, then you need those little hooks to reorient yourself in the text and for your audience to do the same.

So I think for me, there's almost a sense in the New Testament that these things are functional as markers to support both the author and the reader in accessing the text more effectively. And that blog post came out of some bigger work I was doing on the use of the imperfect in Mark and Luke. And it's very clear to me in Luke that the imperfect works alongside other things to start new movements. If you look at where chapter divisions have been put in - and chapter divisions are early modern, they're not classical - then the chapters are often marked by very specific linguistic moves. And every time Luke introduces a new part of his journey narrative in the Gospels, you get a couple of very specific linguistic markers. You get things like a time phrase using an infinitive saying why that was happening. You might get an aorist, so a one-off action to start something, and then an imperfect to keep the motion going. So you get these little clusters of linguistic markers that show movement throughout text and allow you to reorient yourself in that movement. And that's really interesting to me.

And I was particularly looking at the difference between where you can do it using one word, and I particularly use the one for he was teaching, which is ἐδίδασκεν (edidasken) and multi words. So you can say ἐδίδασκεν (edidasken), which in one word means ‘he was teaching’, or you can say ἦν διδάσκων (ēn didaskōn), ἦν (ēn) means ‘he was’, διδάσκων (didaskōn) means ‘teaching’. Now, when I am teaching, if I'm doing prose composition with my students, getting into writing Greek, and I say, ‘Please translate, “he was teaching” into Greek for me,’ beginners, 70% of them will do the two-word version, ἦν διδάσκων (ēn didaskōn), because they're thinking like English speakers. They're seeing the auxiliary verb and the participle and putting them together. It's only when people really start internalizing how Greek grammar works and how the tense system works that they then say, ἐδίδασκεν (edidasken). You can do it in one word.

But actually, Luke does use both. And I was trying to think about what the difference was between them. And research so far has suggested things like ἐδίδασκεν (edidasken), ‘he was teaching’ all in one word. It gives you just the general processes going on, et cetera. Whereas ἦν διδάσκων (ēn didaskōn), gives you more of a ‘he was there and teaching was happening’. It puts a bit more of the emphasis sometimes on the teaching than it does on the fact that there's someone there doing it. And if you look in the Gospels, that's often got to do with the fact that it's on the Sabbath, that Jesus is doing things that are marked in other ways, that maybe he was healing on the Sabbath. Obviously, you shouldn't have been doing that, et cetera. So by grammatically shifting the focus onto the action, you're flagging up what's so controversial about it.

Bridger Bartlett 

That's so interesting. And I, in a minute, want to talk more about teaching. But before I forget it, one thing that's definitely coming to my mind with that idea of teaching Greek; it strikes me that all these topics could be very interesting when it comes to neurodivergence and language processing because it sounds like potentially somebody who has more of a gestalt way of understanding or learning language might be approaching Greek translation in a different way than somebody who kind of learns it word by word. I'd love to hear more about that in a minute.

Cressida Ryan

Absolutely.

Bridger Bartlett

But while we're directly on the topic of the New Testament, I think this is so fascinating that this is not a really rarefied form of Greek, but in fact, kind of the opposite, especially because with the Gospels, I think that is especially something that we think of as being this kind of special language versus something like the epistles. Like obviously there's a degree to which they're going to be more like, 'listen, I'm talking to you specifically, here's what you need to know.' You might expect those to be, you know, some degree less formal perhaps. So one thing I would be really curious about is whether something like Paul's epistles, look different from the Gospels. And I think one reason this is particularly interesting with these topics is that, of course, Paul has that line about the thorn in his side that is constantly of interest to disability scholars. No one really knows what it means, but it's, there's all sorts of theories that it has something to do with disability potentially. So partly just coming at it from that angle, I'd love if you could talk at all about the epistles versus the Gospels, if there's any difference, if there's not, if that is significant.

Cressida Ryan

Thinking about the epistles versus the Gospels, yes, I think there are several angles there, most of which I'm probably not terribly well qualified to think about, but there are definite movements. Some of them is language generally, some of it, you're right, is very specifically tied to things like disability. And some of it I think is potentially linked to other things.

I think what I've been finding is, well, first of all, for me, the knock-on is then ‘what does it mean to translate this into Latin?’ And Latin doesn't work the same way as Greek. And so it doesn't have as many participles, for example. So you can't do the ‘he was teaching’ construct in quite the same way because your participants are much more limited. So when the language you're translating into doesn't do what the what L1 does, how do you make that work? And that thought problem has been what's unlocked a lot of these things for me. It's been going, ‘well, you can't do that in Latin. So what function is it serving in Greek? And how does Latin serve that function in a different way?’

And that's where I think a lot of the early modern stuff comes in because people are struggling so much with ‘What does it mean to express religion in a new way and how are we understanding it? And what is the word of God and how pure is it? And sola scriptura, what does sola scriptura actually mean? What does it mean to be linked to the word of God and be ad verbum, ‘linked to the word,’ as opposed to something that is more fluid and dynamic?’

And this shows up, I think, very specifically in things like word choice as well, which I think is probably relevant in a neurodivergent context.The vocabulary of the New Testament is enormous. Depending on exactly what you consider a word, there are about five and a half thousand different words. But there are only a fraction of those in terms of different lexemes, in terms of word roots. And people talk about needing a vocabulary of around 95 to 98% in order to read a text well. Anything over about 90% to read it with effort. And those levels in New Testament Greek take you to vocab lists of ‘round about 800 or 900 words. So the vocabulary of only 20% of the original huge vocabulary, you can access a good 90% of the words in New Testament. And the ones that are missing are quite often only used once or twice because they're very specific to a context.

So what does that mean for understanding things and how do you gap-fill? No one's going to learn five and a half thousand words. When I was teaching A levels, the average A level list was around about 1000. People talk about needing around about 2000 to be fluent for everyday purposes, 4000 to be fluent for academic purposes. So nobody really has got the time to invest in learning 5 and a half thousand words.

So one of the skills I'm trying to teach is ‘how do you work out what the missing word is?’ Particularly if you don't have a dictionary with you. And Greek word builds very beautifully. So it then comes down to, well, ‘how much linguistics can I teach you and how much can I teach you to think structurally about this in order to make educated guesses about that? And what does Greek compounding look like and where are the problems in that?’ And Greek compounding looks very similar to German compounding, for example. But Latin compounding is different. So you're again faced with this, ‘well, what does it mean to work with a culture that compounds very differently and therefore thinks very differently about it, its words, and what does it mean then to try and get that enormous vocabulary in the Greek into the Latin?’

And then that left me thinking about things like the Jubilee Bible, for example, which is a 2000 edition which very strongly says every Greek word must be mapped by one English word and every English word must be kept for one Greek word. So there's a one-to-one correspondence between the languages. But that really worries me because then I'll take a word. The one I use for students quite a lot is ‘father.’ If we look at all the things ‘father’ can mean in English, and we look at all the things πατήρ (patēr) can mean in Greek, and we put them together in a Venn diagram, there is not a complete overlap. And then you take a word like ‘and,’ which is now more of a discourse marker than necessarily a word to translate; the difference is even greater because what it is doing in Greek and what it is doing in English is so different.

And you need people to understand what discourse looks like in order to choose what word to translate it as. So you need people to have this understanding of how communication works in order to make effective translation choices. And that's really hard to teach or to think through, unless you've done quite a lot of the linguistic unravelling first and worked out ways to then communicate that to your audience, really.

So a lot of the work I'm publishing at the moment is quite rarefied philology in some ways, because what it's allowing me to do is build a map of how New Testament Greek functions to then map that into other contexts, which in some ways is the early modern material, in other ways could be the Jubilee Bible. 'Why is it so difficult to read? What compromises does it have to make because of its insistence on one-to-one correspondence?'

And I think in a neurodivergent context where language can be used very specifically, vocabularies are often much higher, so people that hyperlexia is a thing and communication is sometimes much more direct or specific that having the right word for the right thing in the right way means something different to an autistic person than to anyone else, and where does that different skill insight help with a process like translation and getting a sense of the words in context, out of context? What's the associative thinking that comes through, as well, if we think about how terms work throughout the text.

And to go back to what you said about the epistles, for example, I think about texts like Galatians. Paul has a phrase, ‘may it not happen’. So very, very obscure bit of Greek grammar that basically doesn't operate much in the New Testament anymore. And it's quite high Greek. It's called the optitative. It's kind of a subform of subjunctive. When you see it, it's often a marker that they are trying to archaize or look higher-register. But for Paul, it does become, again, a slight thing where it's almost like, ‘I'm saying this again and drawing you in, will you please pay attention to it?’ And it happens six times in Galatians, which is a short text. So what is going on in Galatians that means the μὴ γένοιτο (mē genoito) has to become such a refrain? And in Luke, he does a very similar thing with the octative of the verb ‘to be,’ εἴη (eiē), he'll have τί εἴη (ti eiē); 11 of the 12 uses of that word in the entire New Testament are Luke. Because it's just the way he works.

So I've been looking at a lot of these things that become an author's linguistic refrain and a way of structuring the text and a way of orienting the reader in the text, as well as perhaps conveying how they want to communicate. And in both those cases, for example, by using high-register Greek, they're also pointing you towards the sense of this being important material and the rest of it.

Bridger Bartlett 

That's so interesting. And I'm fascinated by the ways that insights you get from teaching in the classroom sort of feed into how you're thinking about, you know, text and translating text and making text more accessible in terms of teaching. And I think all of that is so interesting in the text of when we're talking about the New Testament, where very literally Christ is figured as a teacher and teaching. So I think there's so many interesting throughlines there. And I was wondering, maybe zooming out, because now a lot of your work focuses on working with students from an accessibility angle, do you see lessons for contemporary teaching, whether about things like classics or just more broadly? Do you see any lessons or insights from the research you're doing on all of this?

Cressida Ryan 

Massively, yes. I see lots of ways in which my teaching can change and other people's teaching can change based on the kind of work I've done. I have spent a lot of my career teaching theologians. So I did three years at Nottingham, eight years at Oxford. And that includes a lot of trainee clergy or, indeed, ordained people, and they are disproportionately neurodivergent. So it sort of became second nature. I mean, why that is, is something under discussion and there's a wonderful new research centre in Aberdeen that's dealing with a lot of this and it's a really interesting topic. But for me as a teacher, it was also a pragmatic reality that a large number of my class were going to be neurodivergent and I was going to need to make that an inherent part of my teaching.

For me, one of the things that I tried to do and that a lot of this work has helped me to do is think about what it is I'm trying to achieve with something like translation or language learning and what communication actually is and therefore what different ways to get to the same goal are. And we come back to things like core competencies and assessment objectives in education, because it may be that asking somebody to storyboard a parable shows me much more about their understanding of that parable than it does to say, write me a translation. And I often try to get students to think of the text as though they were filming it. And a really great example is the word in Greek for ‘Go’. ‘I go’ is ἔρχομαι (erchomai), but it also means ‘I come.’ And if somebody is coming or going, it makes quite a big difference to perspective. And in a neurodivergent context, we're often dealing with people who have got aphantasia, for example, who are struggling to imagine a scene. And the Gospels, in particular, are so much about imagining the scene.

What can I as a teacher do to square that circle a bit and help students access this idea of an imagined scene that they can't visually imagine? And the first thing I did is: I happened to go to Israel to give a talk and I visited all the places I was teaching and all of my teaching materials then had photographs of the places that I was talking about in them, which at least gave people some starting point for thinking about, well, this is what it was like. But then it grew into, ‘well, Imagine you're a film director. Is it coming or going? Are you standing behind someone or are you standing in front of them? When you use the imperfect and you've got a crowd gathering, are you watching a trail of people beginning to come in from the desert? Are you in medias res? Are you walking into the middle of a scene and just seeing Jesus in the middle of a crowd?’ I'm asking people to make those decisions about the language in a very tangible way, and I think that's helped a lot of neurodivergent students work out what it might be meaning in a stronger way than if they were just being asked to imagine the scene, because that's something a lot of them find very difficult.

So it's had that really practical impact, because if I can get them to produce those materials, sometimes that then is the hook they need to get them into translating in a more conventional style. But sometimes, as far as I'm concerned, that's the assessment in its own right, because it's showing me they understand the text.And I've also started thinking about tasks that are things like, ‘well, Can you write me a translation of this text in two different styles, aiming for different audiences?’ So we can think about ‘what does it mean to actually understand this and can you demonstrate what's difficult about this?’ Or ‘write me whatever translation you want, but comment on anything you think I'll pick you up on.’ And that way students get to make decisions and say, well, ‘I'm going to be really radical here, but as long as I explain to her and she can understand my explanation, then I'll get the marks.’ And I have seen some of the most exquisite, stunning, incredible, imaginative, thoughtful, insightful work as a result of doing this. My students have blown me away with it and I've modelled up a lot of this as teaching resources for other people.

So it's had quite a big impact on how I teach. I've made everything multimodal now, and I'm slowly in the process of publishing. But now I'm a disability advisor; this isn't my day-to-day work. Workbooks I've written, which include things like recordings of all the texts with the words highlighted as I read it so that someone can follow along the text. And, as AI improves, there are tools that can help you do this more now, so that students can mix auditory and visual processing in better ways to be able to access the text better. I'm building in a whole bunch of interactive tools like that, so that as pilots, so that people can work a bit better. And I've been looking at things like comprehensible inputs, a teaching strategy for languages involving copious amounts of material that is one step ahead of where the reader's at, et cetera, as a form of Universal Design for Learning, because it does work particularly well for neurodivergent students because of the way in which it works: the whole world, the immersive approach, the stepwise approach, all the different elements of comprehensible input can make it very neurodivergent-friendly.

So I've been thinking about all of these things in teaching, but also thinking on a more nitty-gritty level about language again. I've done some work on the difference between ‘He sins’ and ‘he commits a sin’. And if you look in the letters of John, there's quite a big difference there. You get the verb ‘sin’, but you also get the support verb, ‘make’ or ‘do,’ with the noun ‘sin’. And that allowed me to think about the relationship between sin as a concept and a person as a sinner. And to what extent a person could be divorced from their sin and therefore redeemed and what that meant for Christian ethics and the idea of redemption and confession and all of that. And the sense that there's a Christian ethics building through those texts that can be seen in the divorcing of sin from sinner: it's not part of their personhood; it's part of their action, and there’s a difference.

And that got me thinking a lot more about neurodivergence and one's relationship with oneself and one's actions, also about active and passive. So quite often when you're told to be kind, et cetera, people try to make it less directive and they will use the passive voice to take the pressure off assuming that you've done something. So instead of ‘have you broken the window?’, it's ‘the window has been broken.’ And that's supposed to take the pressure off the person you're not accusing of breaking the window, except for your average late-diagnosed neurodivergent person, they're immediately going to hear that as, ‘you mean me, you're just not saying it. And now I feel even worse.’

So this standard, ‘let's make it passive’, which is actually very common in the New Testament because as a universal agent of God, the passive is used very differently - which has got me thinking about it a lot - works very badly in that context because a neurodivergent person is much more likely to supply themselves as an implied agent. So what's the next level of that, in terms of ‘how do I couch this as still the information I need to communicate, but without then getting you to second guess whether I mean you as an implied agent or not?’ And this is something I'm still working on and it's coming in phases as I work on things and write my book and work with a lot of neurodivergent students. And ‘how can I communicate in a way that is going to be as least demands-making, potentially (not that I never want to be aggressive anyway) come across as aggressive even when I don't mean to,' all of that kind of thing.

And I suppose the other element is also thinking about masking and perceived self versus real self. And for me, there's a big shift in a lot of the literature I'm working on both in terms of Greek tragedy and in terms of the New Testament, and that people often talk about shame and guilt and its relationship with an interior life and a sense of self that is not necessarily what the world sees. And I'm beginning to do some work on what can tragedy and the New Testament teach us about that kind of personhood, in terms of ‘what do people see and how do people see who you are versus who do you think you are? What role does God play in that? What happens when you try and translate that into a language that functions differently and all those kind of things?’ If you put all of that together, I think it's had quite a big impact on how I read people, how I try to help colleagues read people and how I might function in the classroom whenever I get a chance to be near students.

Bridger Bartlett 

Oh, that's so interesting. And I'm so glad you brought up topics about sin and the person, like ‘what kind of agency does the person have as a moral actor?’ Because my next big question: obviously, the Reformation is in many ways very much centered on questions of ‘what sort of agent is the individual person? Are things predetermined? But also what is the precise nature of kind of original sin? How, to what extent, does that define or shape a person? How do we understand something like concupiscence?’ (ha, a word I’ve read many times, but can never say.) I think in some ways you've already answered what I was going to ask, but just in terms neurodiversity and what different kinds of minds or different ways of conceiving of a standard or baseline mind, in the early modern period - as far as that goes, do you see ways that sort of Lutheran or adjacent sort of translators versus others are, approaching kind of those very fundamental ideas about how human sinfulness and the degree to which a person is an agent… I mean, does that crop up in ways that are related to kind of these broader questions of neurodiversity at all?

Cressida Ryan

Yes, again, I think there's several stages in that. The work on sin, in particular, I think, is really interesting, as you said, and Latin does do the same thing to some extent, but the translations of the New Testament don't look identical. So I'm not sure I can explain it in a concise way, but there are definite differences in how Luther does this to how Jerome and Erasmus do. And I think what that's saying is, yes, they have realised there is a difference here to some extent, whether consciously or not, and are modelling that through the Latin. So I don't think there's any quick way of saying this is what the difference is, so much as there is definitely a difference.

There is definitely movement in terms of agents and action, and the process between those two, as well. So it's almost like you've got three: you've got the process of sinning, the sinner and the sin itself. And what happens if you take that to its extreme is that you've therefore got a third, removed from the person. You've got the person of the agent, you've got the action of sinning, and then you've got the sinners at the end. And the word ‘sinner’ is not used. There is a Greek compound -  so beautiful. I already said the New Testament has this enormous lexicon; very, very easily could have used words for ‘sinner’ and doesn't in the same way because it feels like it is much more about the process and the product. And it's interesting because whenever it's the support verb, whenever it's ‘commit a sin’, it is intransitive. You don't commit it against anyone. It really is ‘this sin is there and that's the problem.’ But when you've got the verb, then it can be transitive and you quite often get ‘before God and heaven’ and you get a prepositional phrase or some kind of oblique case to tell you who it is.

So sin is relational when it's in a verb sense and not when it's a noun. And that, for me, heightened my sense that the noun phrase was very much about understanding the relationship between the person committing the sin and the sin, rather than about the person committing the sin and the person against whom they sinned and the impact there. Both are important to the New Testament and my sense is that it deals with both. And that one of the things that happens in Luther's work is you see that difference much more clearly in the Latin, because he has at some level tuned into it, whether or not it's deliberate.

And I would personally want to argue that a lot of that had to do with the fact that he very strongly learned Greek through reading Sophocles. One of his right-hand men, Philip Melanchthon, had written lectures on why Greek tragedy is amazing and what he thinks of Sophocles’s Electra, et cetera. We know this material is there. We know it's in the teaching things. We know it's what they're talking about. We have a lot of work in the Corpus Reformatorum to say this is how they're using Greek tragedy in their writing to each other. So we know that this is how they are understanding things. And I don't think it's therefore a leap too far to say, ‘and we see it echoed in the way they've ended up constructing these words.’

And for me, one of the ways of proving that is actually dictionaries, in that if you look up a word like ‘sin’ in the available lexica, the examples you get are not Aristotle, even after The Poetics comes out and everyone knows much more about hamartia; they're Sophocles. It's Sophocles and maybe Plato, not Aristotle. And by working so thoroughly on the Greek of the 16th century, I'm getting a real sense of how much Sophocles informed the way people were thinking about these texts and therefore how much the ideology of Greek tragedy underpinned some of the Reformation thinking. So I think it is all there. It may not necessarily be conscious, but a lot of it has to do with things like instinct, pattern spotting, communication level, a lot of it comes down to some of the sorts of traits one might see in a neurodivergent population. And I think some of the things like aphantasia and focusing on words rather than images and on structure and on the hyperlexic aspect and in some sense also the hyperempathic aspect.

There is so much compassion in the New Testament. And the word that's generally used, it has to do with your σπλάγχνα (splangchna), your guts. And every time Jesus feels compassion in a parable, I wince because the Greek is ‘he was gut wrenched’. Again, it's passive and it's visceral. And that it's very hard to translate that in any effective way. My students learned to just write, ‘he was gut wrenched’ because then I'd be happy. But if it was for examination purposes, they wouldn't. They'd come up with something more anodyne. But it's almost impossible to express what that's like.

And sometimes it takes not translating, but just experiencing the text to really get that sense. And for me I think that's part of the neurodivergent experience is the ability to experience text without necessarily being able to articulate it at a kind of core level. And I think what we see in some of the tussles you get in the Reformation work is, ‘well, how do we articulate that? What does it mean to try and say it?’ And you get a lot of code-switching as a result.

We see it in the New Testament. We see Mark, for example, will often put a Greek word into Latin without really thinking about it. So: centurion. ‘Roman military leader.’ No a century isn't 100 men, but it's still got the word ‘hundred’ in centurion. In Greek, it can I be ἑκᾰτοντάρχης (hekatontarchēs) , ‘leader of 100’, which is a kind of calque, but getting the numbers wrong, or κεντυρίωνος (kenturiōnos), which is what Mark uses. So what does it mean to just take the Latin because you can't find the Greek because it just doesn't work? And then what does that mean when you then translate it back into Latin for the Reformation, because we're now dealing with a different kind of Rome to be importing the Romans.

So a lot of these games of ,what does it mean to try and absorb cultures and reflect cultures back?' And 'when do you just have to borrow the other culture's word because yours can't do it?' Feels to me like a model for what it can sometimes look like for neurodivergent communication, when are you crossing those boundaries of borrowing each other's worlds to make best sense of it and expressing what is otherwise largely inexpressible.

And that - I've done some work on a Latin play, as well, called Ignoramus, published in 1615. The word Ignoramus means ‘we are unaware’. The play nominalised it, gave us the word in English as a noun. It's about a lawyer in France. He's an idiot. It's brilliant. He gets exorcised at one point and that brings you to this whole thing of, ‘what is it madness? Is it education? Is it religion? Do you need to be exorcised? et cetera.’ But the text is also in what we call macaronic: it's in a real mashup of languages and it almost feels like ‘we're just going to communicate’. All that stuff about implicatures that I mentioned, about word choice, about grammar, it all goes out the window. It's just about getting the message across.

But it's also cut with a lot of Shakespearean-type comic mess and misunderstanding. And again, a lot of religion and pseudo stuff, which for me picks up a lot of the issues around neurodivergent people thinking so differently, communicating so differently, what does it mean to have that interpreted as being possessed by a devil, being a witch or something, and needing exorcising, and how much of what we see in the New Testament maps onto some of those narratives? So I have been beginning to think about that side of what the early modern texts, translations, religious work might mean within a more neurodivergent context.

Bridger Bartlett

That's so wonderful. And, once again, I think you've sort of gotten to the topic of my next question, because the last thing I wanted to ask you about - not really directly about the Bible or Sophocles, but just because I'm excited about it as somebody who works in English literature – is: I know you've previously worked on Ignoramus, so I'd been hoping to ask you if, after working more with neurodiversity, you have new insights on that. I'd like to invite you to generally speak more about that. But since you've already said something, I think maybe another thing I'll add is that I'm super interested in how you've used that word ‘idiot’ to talk about him and whether you see that word at play. I'm just specifically curious because I've done a little bit of work that talks about the fact that as a legal term, the word ‘idiot’ was sort of, in this period, in transition from being primarily, like, a term meaning 'lower-class' to the disability-associated term. And the way that it's sometimes indicated is that you have people who think they're really educated trying to speak classical languages and not doing so very well. And it's kind of bridging both the versions of being an ‘idiot.’ So, that’s me getting into my interests when I'm supposed to be asking you questions. But perhaps if that gives you something more to talk about, I'd love to hear specifically about angle on it, or anything else about Ignoramus and neurodiversity.

Cressida Ryan

Sure, thank you. It has given me a chance to bring together a whole bunch of things. I mean, I've talked 18th century, 16th century, and now I'm putting myself back in the 17th. It's joining all those things up and thinking much more holistically about ‘what have they all got to do with each other?’ And it does come down to a lot of these same principles of ‘What is communication? How do we construct people? What is the relationship between literature and real life?’ So I think it's the same ideas, even if it's different contexts.

With Ignoramus in particular, well, the word ‘idiot’ is an interesting one. In Greek, an idiot is a private citizen. It's somebody who doesn't engage in the radical democracy of 5^th-century Athens. And that for me is always really powerful because ‘it's not all for me now.’ And how that process moves is something I've wanted to look at. And ‘where is being private something that's not acceptable within a political environment?’ And in the New Testament, the adjective linked to it ἴδιος (idios) very much just comes to mean ‘one's own,’ and that baggage is very much lost. But I don't think forgotten, particularly not when we're looking at the early modern period who are reading words, texts, together and we'll have the whole weight. So for Ignoramus, absolutely, you get him spouting babble, pretend Latin. I've directed it a couple of times. It's so much fun because you just get to make up all these crazy, ridiculous dances and songs and set them to tunes that you might otherwise know because it doesn't make any sense. I think once I had somebody bring on a Hoover to exorcise him with because we were trying to drag out the nonsense and it was very much about ‘who is he possessed by when he's spouting all this stuff?’

So it very much comes down to… The New Testament, you get a lot of it, John in particular, λόγος (logos), ‘the Word’ is key. And so anything to do with λέγω (legō), you've got this wonderful interchange in Greek where you get a stem and when it's got ‘L-blank-G,’ put in an ‘E’ and you get the verb, λέγω (legō), ‘I speak’, put in an ‘O’ and you get λέγω (legō), the noun. And that works across a whole bunch of routes. So you end up playing lots of games and the more you see those, the more it affects your overall picture. And that means that both speaking and words then become really difficult to use.

But you've got another word in Greek, λαλέω (laleō). Now that sort of means ‘chatter.’ It's much lower-register in classical Greek. And by the time you get to the New Testament, it's mainly used to the demons. When Jesus is engaging with possession in the Gospels, he'll tell the demons not to chatter. And that's what you'll get. Very, very occasionally, though, you also get a discourse with God. And it feels like, it's really hard to work out what does it mean to be possessed by the Word. It often comes out in this very different language for speech to what you get elsewhere, because it's got to stay away from the Johannine concept of λόγος (logos). And when you're looking at something like what language, then, does in the early modern periods and Ignoramus and playing around with the Latin, the French, the whatever else is going on, the English, all kinds, Portuguese crops up, all kinds of things... This concept of ‘what is speech, what is possession, what's the relationship between speech and possession’ becomes absolutely critical to understanding the play.

So I'm not sure how much he's called an ‘idiot’ per se, and given the number of languages the play uses, it would be quite hard to pin that down. But you've definitely got this concept of ‘what does it mean to be on one's own, possessed, using language differently, babbling’ in the way that you've just described ‘idiot’.

I suppose the other place I take that is then thinking back to teaching again: what's the relationship between needing to think of those frameworks, rehearse language, and neurodivergence and the role of drama. Well, I'm a big fan of the Jesuits. You've got the Ratio Studiorum, comes out in 1599, which is kind of the international curriculum. And drama has a slightly odd role in there. The Jesuits absolutely love drama and they will teach through drama and the rest of it, but they also kind of ban and restrict it. And I've been trying to work out what that tension is about. And the particular example I'm interested in is actually a Jesuit college in Spanish-controlled Netherlands at the time, mid 18th century, called St. Omer's. And St. Omer's put on big plays every year to take out to the people as evangelization tools.

And I was working on one. We don't know who the author is. I'm pretty sure it's from 1642. Can't quite put my finger on why, but I'm pretty sure it is. It's really bad literature. It's not fun read. It's short. It tells a story of Artaxerxes. But it's not great literature and it's very repetitive. And why, in a college that's so known for its great plays, why is there this short, anonymous, really-not-very-good piece about Artaxerxes? And once I'd read the Ratio again, it's very clear what it does is practice every element of the second-year Latin syllabus. It's an aide-mémoire for the boys going into their exams, done through drama, which they presumably performed. And it got me thinking about, well, ‘what does it mean to rehearse language so that you remember it, organize a conversation, the kind of echolalia-type ideas to be able to repeat people because it's trying out.’

There's a Greek textbook that does the same nowadays, it tries out a word in every different form to sort of see what it feels like and make sure you remembered it. That teaching of ‘let's try this out in every different way and then you'll have learned’ it comes through really strongly in this play. And for me, it's therefore almost inherently a neurodivergent teaching tool in terms of doing all the things of reinforcement, wordplay, rehearsing, the direct; you can tick off the syllabus so you know what you're learning and how it's used in practice, showing a worked example rather than giving people an abstract. It sort of does all the things that for me, good neurodivergent education could include. It's just dreadful literature.

Bridger Bartlett

That's so interesting. Wow, I still have so many more questions, and I see so many connections with what I do and what I teach. But this has been such a thought-provoking, incredible hour of conversation. Is there any other points that you'd like to share or anything you wish I'd asked?

Cressida Ryan

Anything else? I don't think so. I mean, I've gone all over the place, right? Great skill, obviously. But I think it all comes down to me to wanting to overthink. I would say to my students, ‘I'm overthinking so that you don't have to. I want you to work out at what point you lose me in a conversation because that will help you know where your own thinking goes.’ And particularly when I've been working with a lot of neurodivergent students, I think it's really important for them to build a sense of self that says ‘this is how far I want to take something, this is how I differ, and to have that safety to overthink and work out how far their thinking can go.’ And I really enjoy pushing things to the absolute extreme. And I think that's what a lot of the literature does too. Something like Ignoramus has pushed this to the absolute extreme and therefore it becomes really rich to engage with as an experiment, as well as a piece of literature that James I absolutely loved. Every gentleman had a pocketbook copy until the end of 18th century, and then it wasn't put on again, quite frankly, until I did. But also, that's really interesting. Why is this so out of its time? And the history of language learning and teaching network for me is really important here, because we look at ‘how does education change from kind of 1500 onwards, and where is something so of its time, it doesn't translate onwards?’

And I do think there's something very powerful there to be thought about in a neurodivergent context - that we know that this is a mode of existing that is not new, but what that mode looks like and how society conceives of it has varied massively. And I'd never want to go and retrospectively try and diagnose people, but I can look at things. At the moment, it happens to be a lot of the witchcraft stuff for various coincidental things that come together, including Ignoramus and the New Testament. What does it mean to assume that behaviour that we might nowadays say is linked to neurodivergence or ways of thinking or ways of communicating or expressing oneself, which we might have deemed religiously dangerous in the past might now be understood as neurodivergent and what can we learn more about how all that works through the literature that represents it and through looking at those models?

So if I overthink how the language works and then apply it in lots of different directions, what else have we learned and how can then I back apply that to a structure for supporting students, increasing people's understanding of literature and countering that question I started with of, well, ‘of course the 13 year-old-boys in my Latin class when I was first a teacher could learn Latin.’ We just hadn't figured outhow to make it work for them yet. And now I'm kind of on that pathway of doing it, I suppose.

Bridger Bartlett

Awesome. Well, Crescent Ryan, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. This has been such a brilliant conversation.

Cressida Ryan

Thank you, Bridger. Really nice to meet you.