Some Thoughts on the Bible and Technology

by Francis Borchardt Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong

In the beginning was the word, and the word was God’s, and God’s word is the Bible. This romantic notion of the Bible and its divine nature may sound simplistic to anyone who has had some theological education, or studied the Bible in any sort of academic context, but I would guess that it is the dominant notion of the Bible for most Christians throughout the world. In fact, the idea that the Bible is a book that God has penned so that it is miraculously available in your own language at your local bookstore even subconsciously permeates many pastoral sermons and scholarly essays. The reason for this is that most people who encounter the Bible do not reflect on its origins in history or its transmission through history. Instead, they tend to focus on the contents of the Bible, the message it contains, and its applicability to their own lives. This is true whether the Bible is being discussed in the context of a Bible study, preached on in a Sunday service, or used as the basis of elaborate theological construction. Reading and interpreting a text, any text, really, in this way, carries with it a certain conception of immutability, timelessness, and existence outside of history. For a text to be continuously and ubiquitously relevant, it must be thought of as not belonging to a particular time or place or the product of a specific material culture. No wonder, then, that when most people pick up their leather bound Bibles with gilded letters embossed into the covers they do not stop to think why and how this, this thing… this material object… this conceptual entity, came to be. Today, I would like to change that focus. I would like to flip our normal approach to the Bible on its head, and interrogate with you how the Bible came to be, what it is, and what it has the potential to become. In this essay I will argue that we should think of the Bible as the product of technology, rather than a fixed entity on which technology acts, or which is simply communicated by technological means. That is, technology has, does, and will continue to shape the concept of “Bible” as long as something called by that title it is transmitted through history.

Now, when I talk about technology, for most of us, smartphones, .coms, LCD projectors, and myriad other late coming inventions that have only recently entered our lives are probably the ideas that come to mind. But technology is not made up only of the zeros and ones of binary code. It is not only a tablet, a television screen, or a search engine. I am not going to talk about those specific types of technology… yet. Instead, when I talk about technology, I mean something much broader that can be traced etymologically to the Greek word that lay behind the English term. τέχνολογος, the term related to the English word, usually describes the practice of an art, craft, or skill so as to systematize the matter or ideas being worked on. That is, technology, in my definition, is used to refer to the human process of creation or innovation through mastery of a craft. This process allows people to transform what exists already into things that have never before been seen or known. It is this definition I have in mind as I go forward arguing that the Bible is the product of technology.

There’s a second term that needs some definition before I go forward, though. That is, “the Bible”. It seems simple enough, right? We all know what the Bible is. A few of us might have even read it! But I would argue that the idea of “the Bible” is not so simple. This is why the entire subject of this speech is in some way devoted to redefining “the Bible”, or at least tracing its changing definition through its birth and transmission. Central to this goal is understanding something fundamental about the Bible that might subconsciously exist for many of us, but which is only rarely explicitly brought up: the Bible is a collection. We can recognize this in multiple ways. If we go to the etymology of our English word, and a large number of the words used for bible in other languages, too, we arrive at the Greek term τα βιβλία. Anyone who has had a few Greek lessons, and remembers them, can see that this is a neuter plural term, which roughly translates to “the scrolls” or more anachronistically, “the books”. So even the original Greek term does not refer to a single, undifferentiated entity, but points to its composite nature. That is, whatever we mean by “the Bible”, we are not referring to just one book, but many books brought together. If the etymological argument is not enough to convince you of the fundamentally composite nature of the Bible, we need only look at a phenomenon which persists to this day and with which we are all likely to be familiar: the plural nature of the collection we call “Bible”. That is, though Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox christians, to say nothing of the Jews, all have a collection of holy scriptures they refer to as the Bible, the collections themselves are all distinct from one another. Though the Jews and many Protestants share the same books in their Old Testament/Tanakh, these books are arranged in different orders, and classified in different categories. For example, whereas the Jews have three categories of Torah (instruction), Nevi’im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings), many Protestants usually distinguish four categories: Pentateuch, Historical Books, Poetic Books, and Prophetic Books. Further, whereas the Jews would have the book of Ruth follow the Song of Songs and be included among the writings, most Protestants would insert Ruth between the book of Judges and the books of Samuel. There are many such differences between these two collections without even delving into the fact that Protestants add an entirely separate collection, the New Testament, to the entity that they refer to as the Bible. Even though Catholics and Orthodox share with the Protestants this New Testament, an even greater chasm exists between the Protestant and the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments. Beyond similar organizational differences as I pointed out in the case of the Jewish Tanakh, the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments contain an additional seven and ten books respectively in their collections. Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Baruch, Wisdom of Solomon, and 1 and 2 Maccabees are contained in both Old Testaments, while the Orthodox alone also include the Epistle of Jeremiah, 1 Esdras, and 3 Maccabees. On top of this, the versions of books like Psalms, Esther, and Daniel also differ in remarkable ways when compared to their Jewish or Protestant counterparts. And the differences I have just outlined here only scratch the surface. If I were to venture outside of mainline Judeo–Christianity and into the realm of Oriental Orthodoxy, Mormonism, and more charismatic Protestantism, far more drastic differences could be shown between what various communities refer to as the Bible.

This overview of different Bibles has not been offered to make a qualitative judgment on which is the most original, the most correct, or the most morally sound set of scriptures. Nor have I brought these forth to question the value any particular community ascribes to their Bible. Rather, I have tried here to illustrate the essential truth that the Bible is a collection, and it can be and is organized by divergent principles of collection in diverse communities. So, the Bible, in all its forms, is less like a book than it is a library. It houses, curates, and facilitates the reading of books within a certain institutional framework that imparts special value to the texts in the collection, and renders those outside inaccessible and/or marginalized. Just as with any university or divinity school library, the contents of the collection often limit and dictate the literature with which readers are willing and able to interact. Just as with university or divinity school libraries, there is an implicit assumption among users that what is inside the collection is the most essential material, and what is outside is more marginal, either because it is more narrowly focused or occasional in character. Just as with university and divinity school libraries, each context has a different principle of collection. So, if the Bible is a collection, as I have been describing so far, how was it collected? What technologies brought this collection together? What steps brought the Bible into its current state?

To answer these questions we have to go back, way back. We need to return to a time before the Bible even existed to get a peek at what the books that make up the Bible looked like to these early audiences. Though we may have different ideas in our heads about when and under what circumstances various “biblical” texts were written, the time before the Bible is actually probably a bit later than most of us might think. This is not a question of when Leviticus, Isaiah, or the Book of Daniel were composed. Rather, it is a question of when and under what circumstances a collection of writings could be identified by τα βιβλία or something similar, like αἱ γραφαὶ so as to distinguish those writings from other texts. Here we are not even looking for a time when a specific collection of texts that look something like the current Jewish or Christian canons come about, as that date would be far later. We are only looking to a time when some group of texts, whatever their identity might have been, could conceivably be identified as something like the Bible. This process seems to have been gradual, but not linear in its development, and surely cannot decisively be demonstrated before the late first century CE or even later.

A few classic texts are frequently pointed to as earlier examples of the concept of the Bible. But upon closer examination, they reveal notions of valued texts, or even scriptures, but hardly any notion of a collection of scriptures that are thought to cohere by some principle, and which can be distinguished from other literature. That is to say, while they may testify to a notion of the Bible, it is not like our concept. So, if we look at the Greek prologue to Sirach, which seems to be fairly accurately dateable to the year 117 BCE, based on its contents, we find some tantalizing evidence for a notion of the Bible. At three points in this brief prologue the writer refers to three bodies of texts. In lines one and two of the prologue, the writer speaks of the law, the prophets, and the others following them as sources of wisdom and paideia emanating from Israel. Again in lines eight through ten of the prologue the writer speaks of how his grandfather, Jesus Ben Sira, devoted himself to reading the law, the prophets, and the other ancestral scrolls. Finally, in lines 24

through 25 of the prologue, the writer compares his own translation of his grandfather’s work to the translations of the law, the prophecies, and the other scrolls. For many readers, both scholars and laypeople alike, these three categories of text closely resemble the three categories of scripture one finds in the modern Jewish Bible. The law, νόμος in Greek, is the term most frequently associated with the Hebrew word הרות in the Greek translation of the Jewish Bible. It seems likely enough that these scrolls can be associated with the torah given the context, even if the precise contents and extent cannot be pinned down. The prophets or prophecies likewise appear to be associated with some group of writings linked with prophetic speakers. It is not possible to discern the contents of this category, nor whether it conforms to the category of prophets as we know it in the Jewish Tanakh. Where the identification of texts gets especially difficult is the third category mentioned here, variously identified as “the others”, “the other ancestral scrolls”, and “the other scrolls”. As the lack of consistency in the terminology as well as terms used for identification themselves indicate, this category is rather ill–defined. It is impossible to tell whether this group might be associated with the Writings, the third category of books in the modern Jewish Bible.

On top of the problems concerning the contents of any of these categories, we have to reckon with what is actually said about them. Despite being named three times in this prologue, they are never discussed as “the Bible” (τα βιβλία), “the scriptures” (αἱ γραφαὶ), or any other similar terms. No discussion of holiness surrounds these texts either. Instead, what links all these texts is their provenance among Israel and their value as transmitters of wisdom and paideia. Further, and most telling, is that both the translator’s own work and that of his grandfather are on several occasions favorably compared to and included among these texts. This indicates that the textual categories are not fixed entities, but open ended groupings. So, even if this passage is charitably read as an early indication of higher value being associated with certain categories of Jewish texts, it does not quite reveal a concept analogous to our view of the Bible. It lacks both the unified character of a collection, and the perceived separation between the one body of texts from those outside of it. Conceivably in this context, any text could be, and arguably should be added to Israel’s literary heritage as a source of wisdom and paideia.

We can observe similar phenomena in several other texts. One roughly contemporary writing, from sometime in the second half of the second century BCE is 2 Maccabees. At 2 Maccabees 2:13–15, which is part of a probably–forged letter claiming to come from Judean leadership during the time of the Hasmonean rebellion against the Greeks, the compositional voice remarks that Nehemiah constructed a library in which he collected scrolls about kings, prophets, the writings of David, and letters from kings about votive offerings. It goes on to remark that Judas, the leader of the rebellion, also collected scrolls, and exhorts the ostensible addressees in Egypt that they should send people to retrieve these writings if they are in need of them. While it is true that Judas’ collection is entirely inexplicit, and Nehemiah’s collection seems a bit haphazard, this has not stopped some scholars from positing an early sense of a Bible consciousness similar to ours in this case. After all, here the analogy of a library or collection is presented as a reality, and almost all

of the texts mentioned as part of this collection are actually referred to in the preceding letter as the sources for contemporaneous practice of sacred rites. Further, the exhortation to send representatives to collect any of the scrolls of which they might be in need suggests a certain value to the library collection. The combination of these qualities could come close to signaling something like the concept of Bible I outlined above.

However, to come to such a conclusion would be to ignore the rhetorical context of the ostensible letter and the symbolic place occupied by the library in this construction of Judas as rightful leader of the Jews. Because the rhetorical context of the ostensible letter is to convince the Egyptian Jews to whom it is written to share in the celebration of the feast of purification of the Jerusalem temple by observing the feast of fire, it is only natural to refer to the archival records that support the continuity of such a feast with events in the past. This is why 2 Maccabees refers to the memoirs of Nehemiah, the records of the prophet Jeremiah, and the Persian royal letters concerning the sacred fire. These archival sources notably overlap significantly with Nehemiah’s collection mentioned in 2 Macc 2:13–15, and suggest that the contents of his library are more likely mentioned as historical support for the celebration of the feast of fire than they are as texts of especial value. Further, the founding of a library in Jerusalem by both Nehemiah and Judas works less to create the concept of a literary collection along the lines of our modern Bibles than it does to compare these figures to the great leaders of their time. By noting the Nehemiah and Judas amassed collections of scrolls, the compositional voice is subtly putting them on the same level as the Ptolemaic and Attalid kings who constructed the famous libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon. Most importantly, the texts referred to in the context of the library are never spoken of as scriptures or even given any especial value in the letter at all. So, though 2 Maccabees, like the prologue of the Greek translation of Ben Sira, may mention some sort of literary collection held among the Jews, it too fails to elicit a sense of internal cohesion and external exclusion that we would expect from our concept of the Bible. Again, I do not want to suggest that there was necessarily no concept of the Bible for the composer of this text, only that if there was, it was radically different from our own, both in structure, and in contents.

The contemporary material evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered in and around the site of Khirbet Qumran 70 years ago, is even more emphatic regarding the lack of a concept of Bible. Although it is fairly certain from these findings that a rich concept of scripture prevailed in the community, the concept seems to have been explicitly open–ended, and to have followed no discernible principles of collection. Among these findings texts of all types can be found, from rules governing the membership in the community, to prayers, and even commentaries and attempts to perfect the ancestral writings passed down to them. These are found at times even on the same scroll. Whatever was the nature of the library at Qumran, it was not anything like our Bible. The distance between our concept of the Bible and their concept of scripture is in part due to the pervasive idea of continuous revelation through exegesis in this period, and especially in this community.

The closest one might get to our concept of the Bible in this early evidence is in the writings of the late first century CE Jewish historian, Josephus, who is a contemporary to the evangelists. In the prologues to his Antiquities and his treatise Against Apion, he evinces a rather clear and conspicuous concept of scripture, which distinguishes it both from the writings of foreigners, and most importantly, from other writings of the Jews. For example, at Antiquities 1.5 he calls the sacred books of the Jews the Hebrew Scriptures (τῶν Ἑβραικῶν… γραµµάτων). This is because, as he states in Antiquities 1.13 and Against Apion 1.1, the writings are holy (ἱερῶν γραµµατῶν; ἱερῶν βίβλων). According to Josephus’ statement in Against Apion 1.29, these writings are holy because they are the product of the compositional efforts of the high priests and prophets. Again according to his prologue to Against Apion, the contents of this collection of Jewish scripture can even be enumerated and identified. At Against Apion 1.38–42, Josephus states that the Jews have 22 books, and that five belong to Moses, thirteen come from the prophets and tell the history from Moses to Artaxerxes, and four contain hymns and precepts. So, in the case of Josephus we begin to see the emergence of an idea that a specific collection of texts is especially important due to its holiness. While it is true that the entire presentation serves Josephus’ rhetorical purposes in both of these prologues, and that the collection Josephus speaks of is apparently different from any of our known Bibles, at least the idea comes close to the concept of Bible with which we work.

More significant is just how rare is Josephus’s conception of scriptures. No contemporaneous or near contemporaneous texts match Josephus’ idea of a set scriptural collection, and even those that do provide some sort of enumeration of scriptures, like 4 Ezra 14:44–46 (94 scriptures, 24 public, and 70 reserved for the wise), seem to open the door for future revelation presented in writing that would trump what has already been revealed. I would argue, in agreement with biblical scholar Robert Kraft, that one of the reasons for this has to do with the material circumstances in which nearly all writings, including scripture, were experienced at the time. The collection of texts that comprised scripture was always going to be fluid in these circumstances because scripture appeared on scrolls, whether made of parchment or papyrus.

The scroll was a technological innovation of the late third millennium BCE in Egypt. In many ways it was an improvement upon the use of clay and stone tablets of earlier periods in Egyptian and Mesopotamian literary production. More written material could be fit into a condensed space, and entire narrative compositions could be fit into one continuous roll. It is true that especially in the case of shorter texts, scrolls were bulkier, and therefore less portable than clay tablets. It is also the case that they were less durable. However, the ease with which papyrus could be produced, and the lack of need for inscriptions made it a very good medium for writing. This was especially true of long texts, which could not fit on single clay tablets without the tablet reaching unwieldy size. That said, there are certain features of scroll culture that influence the way literary texts could be experienced. For one, while it is very easy to read sequentially through a scroll, it is difficult to jump from one place to another. This is because one must roll one side of the scroll while unrolling the other in one simultaneous motion in order to move through the scroll. So, by

the time one reaches a specific point in the text, the entire process must be reversed in order to reach the place from which they began their search. Another aspect of scroll culture that influences the experience of literary texts is that the longer was the text, the longer, heavier, and less maneuverable was the scroll. Thus, one might find one or two compositions on the same scroll, but hardly ever three or more. The Nahal Hever scroll of the book of the 12 prophets is an outstanding exception. While such a production would be technically possible, it would not be convenient for use. Such a scroll could only be moved with difficulty, and one could only find an individual text after extensive searching. It was far more convenient in scroll culture to separate individual texts into their own scrolls. But, this has a side effect. It creates the impression that each text exists on its own, separate from any sort of context. This means that the possibility of envisioning any set of texts as a coherent collection, as a Bible, would be rare indeed. Instead, in scroll culture, even if certain scrolls tended to be kept together because of thematic or generic ties, the concept of a collection could not be firmly established in a physical way. A scroll in such a collection could always be removed. Two new scrolls could always be added. Beyond this, even if a catalogue like the Pinakes of Kallimachus in the library of Alexandria were established, maintaining an order of reading was simply not possible. This is probably why the 6th century CE Babylonian Talmudic tractate Baba Bathra 14b apparently needs to argue for a specific order in which the scriptures are to be read. Without the teaching of these rabbis nobody would have known! So, it should come as no surprise that if there was a Bible to speak of at all while scrolls were the dominant technological medium of transmission, it tended not to be distinguished from other literature in the same ways as we would expect today.

This all changes with two technological innovations of the first centuries CE. The first of these inventions was the codex. This is the general form in which we find books and pamphlets today. It involves taking papyrus, parchment, vellum, or some other writing material and folding it in half so that four faces are formed by a single sheet. This invention allows for dimensions of both portability and utility that would have been unavailable in scroll culture. In terms of portability, stacking several folded sheets on each other allows for exponentially greater space for text in a relatively consistently measured package. As for utility, the codex form allows for specific texts to be sought out of sequence. If one wanted to look at a verse found on the first folio of the codex, and to follow that with a verse found on the third folio, it is no longer an arduous ordeal of simultaneous rolling and unrolling. Instead the search could be achieved in a matter of moments, simply by flipping the leaves over. An added benefit is that this could even be done with one hand! Yet, the codex in its earliest incarnation does have its drawbacks. The most important is that there is a limit to the length of any text that could be included in a codex. Because codices are assembled by putting one folded leaf of writing material over another, each successive writing sheet added decreases in usable area. More and more area becomes necessary just to cover the distance between the front and back of the codex. This means that beyond eight to ten leaves a new volume would need to be started. That is not a very convenient situation, and in some ways returns to the problem of tablets. This is why the codex in its early days is a popular medium for note–taking and abbreviation, but not as popular for longer literary texts.

The major transformation for written culture in the West really occurs when the quire is invented. The quire provides a simple fix to the codex, allowing it to be much more useful and nearly as portable as the codex in its earlier form. Simply put, a quire is a set of sheets of writing material, perhaps eight to ten, folded upon each other. These sheets are then bound together, usually with thread, just like a codex. The genius of the invention comes when people realize that each quire, as a unit, can be bound to multiple other quires to form a larger codex. So, instead of needing to start a new volume after the outside sheets of the quire begin to become shorter, scribes and copyists could simply start a new quire and attach all the quires at the end of the process in order to form a larger and complete codex. If one looks at well made hardbound books today, one still sees this practice followed. Individual pamphlets of 16–32 pages are bound together to make up the book. Because of this invention, longer texts could be included within the codex, just as they were on the scroll, only this time with greater convenience and portability. Even more importantly, multiple texts could be included in the same codex with relative ease. It is this feature which gives rise to a momentous turn in the concept of the Bible. That is, the codex with multiple quires allows for all the writings in the collection to appear in a single volume, bound between two covers. In short, this allows the Bible to look like a book.

This type of Bible, called a pandect, first appears in the fourth century CE. The earliest testimony to the pandect comes from Eusebius in his Life of Constantine 4.36. Here Eusebius claims that the Roman emperor Constantine commissioned 50 such Bibles, no doubt as part of his effort to regularize nascent Christianity and bring it under the watchful eye of the imperial government. Such a publication project is unlikely to have been all that common given the relative effort and expense involved in book production and the small reading audience at the time, but Athanasius also speaks of supplying such Bibles to Constantine’s successor, Constans. These testimonies provide evidence for how a technological innovation in the material conditions of the text could become even somewhat widespread. More importantly, though, because the entire collection could appear between two covers, and because the codex could only be added to or removed from with great difficulty, each pandect that was produced provided its users with a concrete sense of the Bible. It is no longer only a concept like we see with Josephus. It is a physical specimen with real borders and a material relationship between the disparate writings contained therein. Added to this, because of the utility of the codex, one could move very quickly from one text to another by flipping pages, using bookmarks, and the like. This material relationship between the texts invites and encourages the users of the texts to draw connections between them that might not have been conceived of at an earlier stage in the transmission of scriptures.

So, when we turn to our earliest pandects, the fourth century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and the fifth century Codex Alexandrinus, we are observing some of the earliest material evidence for a concept of the Bible as a book. In Sinaiticus, for instance, we can imagine that readers might turn between The text of Genesis and the Letter to the Hebrews chapter 11 to look more deeply at the examples the latter text cites as paradigms of faith. Or, in Vaticanus we could envision users reading between the Book of Daniel and the Gospel of Mark to see the many connections there. In Alexandrinus we can suppose that readers

would be delighted to cross reference 4 Maccabees and 2 Clement. All of this is because the Bible is now a… Hold on a second. Did I just say that Alexandrinus, one of these great pandects that finally provides us with firm borders for the concept of the Bible, contains 4 Maccabees and 2 Clement? How can that be? Neither of these texts are part of any of the major modern versions of the Bible that I mentioned earlier, yet they can be found within the two covers that I argue help to create the idea of a discreet collection, separated from what is outside. These are not the only anomalies in Alexandrinus. Also included are a letter of Athanasius on the nature of the psalms, a summary of the psalms by Eusebius, the first letter of Clement, and the psalms of Solomon. Alexandrinus is not the only pandect with a seemingly strange presentation of texts, either. Sinaiticus includes the Letter of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas in its New Testament, and omits Amos, Hosea, Micah, Baruch, and the Epistle of Jeremiah. Vaticanus too omits a number of texts, including 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and the book of Revelation.

From this little survey we can see that, while the codex and quire allow for the concept of Bible as a book, they do not create the conception of a widespread collection agreed upon by all users, even within particular faith communities. These examples show that, even with the pandects, each conception of the Bible depended upon the copy being used. This is confirmed all the more when looking at later pandects, such as the 7th century Syriac Codex Ambrosianus B, the 10th century Aleppo codex, and the 11th century Leningrad Codex, none of which agree on the contents in their entirety. Added to this, due to the limitations on literacy and handwritten book production at the time, there do not seem to have been that many pandects produced, based on our extant manuscript evidence. For example, there are only 11 so–called complete Greek Bible manuscripts in existence. Far more common was to produce codices of smaller collections, lectionaries, or excerpted readings. This means that one of the crucial aspects of our concept of the Bible, that is being familiar with the contents, and being able to conceptually separate them from other texts was still elusive except in a few cases and on a very local level. It was only after yet another technological innovation that this aspect of our concept of the Bible would change.

That important technological innovation is the moveable type printing press, most famously associated with Johannes Gutenberg. In 1454, Gutenberg created his first edition of the Latin Vulgate following mostly on the text associated with the 4th century church father, Jerome. In printing this edition Gutenberg was able to produce multiple copies, most scholars think it is between 150 and 180, of the Bible that were exact replicas of each other. This is thanks to the moveable type printing press. No longer would readers be dependent on the skill of the monk or secular copyist to write in a clear hand. No longer would the reader need to rely upon the decisions of whoever produced the book to find out what writings were actually in the Bible. Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type printing presses regularizes and popularizes identical texts of the Bible throughout the Christian world. In the first edition, each Bible had pages of 42 lines arranged in two rectilinear blocks throughout the text. The font and number of words per line was identical throughout each copy and across the whole printed run. Perhaps most importantly, the texts

included in the copies of the Bible were not only the same, and in the same order, but they were identical to the word and letter. It is only with Gutenberg’s invention that this becomes possible.

While it is true that these Bibles were exceedingly expensive in these early runs, estimated at about three years wages for an office clerk, the major contribution of Gutenberg is not the copies of the Bible he produced himself. Instead it is the introduction of the ability to reproduce identical texts of the Bible for readers and audiences. Through this innovation our conception of the Bible really comes into being. It allows Luther’s vernacular translation a century later to spread far and wide. It provides the means by which the King James Version could become the most popular Bible in the world. It is even what allows for the Bibles most of us are holding in our hands at this moment. Although different versions of the Bible still exist today, due to text and translation decisions as well as divergent community canons, the concept we typically have of the Bible as a book containing an unchanging and immutable text arises out of Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press in the 15th century.

Now that we have reached the stage in this survey which has brought us to the present conception of the Bible, let us look into the future to see how technology may once again change what we think of as the Bible. Here we are entering the world of digitization. Many of us probably have used some version of a digital Bible, whether on our smartphones, tablets, or computers. I, for instance, almost exclusively encounter the Bible through these means when I am not working directly with manuscripts. Whether we encounter the Bible within the context of a program native to a device, like Bible Works, Logos, or Accordance, or we use popular websites like BibleHub, Bible Gateway, or Frankenbible, reading the Bible in this way once more fundamentally changes the way we experience the text. Consequently, it is likely to change what we think of as the Bible. Let us think together about a few of the differences introduced by encountering the Bible digitally.

The most prominent difference is likely to be that we are able to search the text with far greater speed, and using far more precision than we ever would have before. Because almost all digital Bibles include, and even prominently feature a search box, this becomes the main access point to the Bible. Rather than flipping through the pages of our print codices to get to Daniel 7, we simply type that term into the search box, and there it appears before us, just as we wanted. Even more striking, and probably more common, instead of reading Daniel 7, we might just type “son of man” into the search box, and thereby find, not only Daniel 7:14, sitting there on its own, but the numerous places in the synoptic gospels where the phrase is used. Depending on which program we use we might even see other texts not commonly included in Bibles as part of this search. The effect of this search function as the primary means through which we access the Bible is to decenter these writings as literary texts, and to refocus them as repositories of information or search terms. That is, when reading in this way, we lose the fact that these are ancient works of poetry and narrative and we transform them into loci of specialized meaning to be applied to a specific modern purpose. I want to be clear here that I am neither condemning this type of access to the Bible nor am I arguing that this approach is entirely novel. Excerpting scriptures and other important texts has gone on since antiquity, as

the Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate. I only want to point out that one of the most common ways we read the Bible in digital form once more fundamentally reformats our thinking about what the Bible is. It does so because it encourages and normalizes an approach to text that previously required far more effort and was therefore more restricted.

A second difference between digital Bibles and the print Bibles that form most of our ideas about the Bible is the nearly constant presence of the multitext. While not all digital Bible programs and websites present the option, most allow for multiple parallel versions of a text to be presented on the screen/window at once. So, if we want to read Daniel 5, we can simultaneously do so in Aramaic, Greek, English, and Tagalog. Even more prevalently, if we want to read only in one language, we can see different translations and versions and compare them. So if I want to look for the most beautiful wording of Psalm 23, I can look at the King James Version, the New Revised Standard Version, and the Jewish Publication Society translation all at once. Some programs and websites even include notes and commentary tracking along with the text as we read. Just as in the previous set of examples, the practice of reading and comparing different texts and translations, or reading with commentaries is not new. Commentaries on scriptures exist from antiquity and polyglot Bibles are nearly as old. But the frequency with which the text is read in this way shifts the focus of our reading from a specific rendition of a biblical text to many texts at once. It resets our expectations of what we want to see when we read a Bible. Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is different from the standard way in which we conceive of Bibles within post–Gutenberg print culture.

A third change I would like to bring up is the unbinding of the Bible. As I have tried to show in my presentation, the concept of the Bible has historically in large part, depended on the physical presence of texts together in one place. This copresence of texts has created a sense that some texts belong together and can be interpreted together, while others are excluded. But when we read the Bible digitally, those boundaries disappear. While some programs and websites are limited to only biblical texts as their focus, many include databases of other ancient literature within their search functions. Further, even those programs and especially websites that feature only Bible texts (by whatever definition we might use), have all sorts of textual and graphic material framing the Bible. This can be something as simple as the program’s menu bar, or something as complex as an advertisement to visit the Holy Land on a pilgrimage. The cumulative effect of these texts and images constantly surrounding the biblical text is that the Bible no longer has the borders that the codex gave it. In some ways it returns the experience of the Bible to how scriptures were experienced in scroll culture, as Eva Mroczek has so elegantly argued. It will be especially interesting to see how this shapes the conception of the Bible in the succeeding generations which are far less print centered.

I would like to conclude with a simple restatement of the idea that I offered at the beginning. The Bible as a concept is not, and never has been immutable. It has been in flux throughout history, in large part due to the material features of text presentation. In this way, technology has shaped the concept of the Bible from the beginning, and will continue to do so. I offer this thesis not as a warning, but as an opportunity to

reflect on the ways in which the Bible will continue to be shaped by current technologies and whatever unforeseen technologies might arise. The Bible is resilient, even if it what we mean by “the Bible” is not.