Research

Keith Shepherd's research programme began in 2000 with a question about what happens to meaning when scripture crosses from one culture to another. The question came from personal experience. Having lived across four countries (Guyana, Barbados, England, Denmark), he had direct knowledge of what it means to carry one culture's meaning into another's vocabulary.

The research focused on three language crossings: Hebrew to Greek (the Septuagint translation), Greek to Latin (the Vulgate), and Greek to English (modern Bible translation). At each crossing, institutional meaning encoded in the source language failed to arrive in the target. Hebrew civic vocabulary became Greek devotional vocabulary. Greek governance terms became English religious terms. The cumulative effect: texts that were written as constitutional instruments are now read as pastoral letters.

Over two decades, this work produced Micro-Genre Theory (MGT), a formal framework for analysing and recovering the institutional content that translation strips from biblical texts.

Micro-Genre Theory (MGT)

MGT starts from one observation: when a Hebrew word is translated into Greek and then into English, the cultural institution inside the word often fails to arrive. The word translates. The meaning doesn't.

MGT treats genre as the architecture of meaning. Every word carries a micro-genre: a force profile that determines how it acts in a sentence, a paragraph, a document. Translation that ignores genre delivers the word and drops the force.

The framework has 68 articles organised as a formal constitution. It governs how semantic analysis is conducted across Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English texts. It includes computational tools for multi-language processing, lexicons for each source language, and a three-tier reasoning system that separates linguistic evidence from broader contextual claims.

MGT was built to answer a practical question: can you prove, using the source languages, that biblical texts carry governance content that modern translations do not transmit? The first book in the ACFD series is the test case.

The framework includes

Publications

ORCID: 0009-0006-5437-4472