James Greig, a solicitor with Morgan Cole, speaks in an unusual fashion about his extra-legal passion. “It doesn’t complement my work as such, but rather runs through it,” says the 41-year-old will and tax lawyer. At once Greig distinguishes himself from many of his fellow professionals, whose passions are often couched as a means to stress relief. No wonder, for Greig is a deeply religious man with a devotion to bringing the Bible to life.

Greig does this by conducting biblically themed tours of the British Museum, the British Library and the Ashmolean Museum. “I’ve been running the tours for 20 years,” he says. “I conduct perhaps four a year in London and Oxford on weekends.” He is never short of takers, explaining that “there’s a great deal of interest in the connections between archaeology and manuscripts and what the Bible says”.

The tour of the British Library and British Museum consists of an hour in the library followed by a 25-minute walk to the museum, where the party has lunch in the Great Court. “Then it’s two hours in the museum, with a half-hour tea break,” says Greig, who, despite qualifying initially as a solicitor, left the law in his twenties to be a church minister. He returned to the law five years ago, and joined Morgan Cole, the Thames Valley and South Wales firm, last year, but his fascination for Biblical archaeology is undimmed.

Greig found that the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code led to an upsurge of interest in the tours: “Despite a general decline in the numbers of people attending church, The Da Vinci Code tapped into an interest in the Bible felt by many people. They still ask, 'Is all this true?', and therefore want to know how stories in the Bible relate to the fascinating artefacts in the library and museum.”

Among those artefacts are the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest complete Bible in the world at 350AD, and the Codex Alexandrinus, the third oldest Bible. A measured man, Greig speaks with scholarly precision of the provenance of the manuscripts, and no less eloquent when talking of other highlights: “Upstairs in the British Museum you will encounter the Royal Game of Ur. This isn’t mentioned in the Bible but everyone used to play it. To think about how Abraham would have played the game with Isaac gives these characters life beyond their appearance in the prose of the Bible.”

Similarly, according to Greig, what is revealed by the Nabonidus Cylinder. “The cylinder is very small, dark brown, made of clay and covered in writing. It records a prayer by the King of Babylon, Nabonidus, who was a mystic working on a temple, for his ‘firstborn son, Belshazzar, the offspring of my heart’. People might say ‘so what?’ but before the discovery of the cylinder, by J. E. Taylor in 1854, there was a school of thought that Belshazzar of ‘Belshazzar's Feast’ and the ‘writing on the wall’ fame – as described in the Book of Daniel - was not a real person.”

Greig explains why this was so. “There was no reference outside the Bible to a king of the Babylonians of this name. Furthermore, the Bible claimed that Belshazzar died the night the city of Babylon fell to the Persians, where the Persian records claimed to have taken the King of Babylon captive. It seemed he was a character like Theoden in Lord of the Rings: not real, but still an important character in an influential story.”

But Taylor’s discovery casts a different light on Belshazzar, says Greig. “The cylinder confirms that Belshazzar was indeed real, that Belshazzar as regent could have been described as King while his father Nabonidus was still de jure King, and shows that Belshazzar's death and the capture of the last King of Babylon are not therefore inconsistent.” For Greig, this “means we cannot so easily write off everything in the Book of Daniel. What if it is also faithful in its description of the ‘writing on the wall’ which is the basis of the saying we use today for the doom of a political or society figure whose status cannot survive long?”

Greig’s enthusiasm for his subject is palpable. He also takes it to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, where again artefacts such as a Moses basket, a baby’s pair of socks from first century Egypt and first-century carvings give meaning to the stories in the Bible. How, though, does all this coalesce with Greig’s legal life?

“I feel I’ve an extra reason for doing well,” he says. “My faith runs through my life. I feel that I’m serving someone higher but to do so I must behave with a high level of integrity, respect and sensitivity towards my colleagues and clients. To quote a line from Gladiator, what we do in this life echoes in eternity.”

If you are interested in going on one of James Greig’s tours, contact him at james_greig@icoc.org

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