Searching for Scriptures
29/07/12 05:37
Sometimes I see expressions of faith in places where others see nothing. I discover faith in the actions of people in contexts where no one else seems to be looking for faith. People’s priorities for the investment of their time and money are, to me, expressions of faith. The simple formula, sometimes applied by pastors, doesn’t work for the simple reason that the institutional church is not God. The fact that an individual might choose some activity other than worship in any particular church is not, in itself, a rejection of God. Indeed, it is true that there are some very faithful believers who aren’t regular church members. On the other hand, the practice of religion is not a solitary, isolated phenomenon. To be religious is to share your faith with others.
Recently, in a flurry of summertime cleaning and organizing, some volunteers in our congregation decided to organize the books in the church library alphabetically by author. For those of us who were used to searching the library that had previously been organized by category, the result appeared to be random chaos. Sets of commentaries that had resided together for decades were spread out around the shelves in what appeared to be a random pattern. Books with multiple authors were hard to find. There are many books that are familiar to me that have multiple authors and I know only some of the authors.
Outside of a discussion about the best way to organize a library, there are some other interesting observations that came to me as I gazed at the books on the shelves in our church library. I noticed that the Bibles are not all together. Even in a system that organizes books by author, one might expect to find all of the Bibles together in the same place. After all, don’t we believe in a single scripture? I think, upon closer examination, that the Bibles are shelved in the order of their publishers, with Nelson coming before Zondorvan.
I, of course, began to try to figure out the belief structure of the library organizers. These are people of faith who give freely of their time to help their church. They are attempting to do good and provide leadership in an institution devoted not only to sharing faith, but to the process of teaching and learning about faith. Our library is specifically a teaching library, organized to support and enhance our Christian education programs. These people of faith were shelving Bibles in multiple locations. Perhaps they were expressing their belief that there are multiple authors of our sacred scriptures. Perhaps they were trying to encourage library users to search for the truth. More likely, they weren’t thinking about Bibles in a different category than any of the other books.
I doubt that those who were working in the library would claim any statement of faith from the order in which the books are positioned on the shelves.
Scriptures have been at the heart of our faith – and at the heart of many controversies of faith for as long as they have existed. The oldest texts were written in Hebrew on scrolls. The first five books of what came to be known as Torah each had an individual scroll. The scrolls were enormous. Hand written – and sometimes hand painted- letters took up a lot of space. Those five books and the other 19 that make up the core of the Hebrew Torah circulated for a thousand years, or perhaps more, by being copied and passed down from community to community. The notion of individual ownership of any text had not yet occurred to anyone. The accuracy of the copies varied.
Then, during Roman times, a new technology was invented: codex. Codex was a process of writing on both sides of the paper and then binding the paper into a book. Chapters and divisions followed. This technology existed around the time that the Christian scriptures, written in Greek, emerged, but it is unlikely that the first versions of the texts were recorded in such a manner. At least we are fairly certain that the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John circulated independently for a significant amount of time before being drawn together in a single volume. The letters of Paul circulated as letters – passed from congregation to congregation and copied over and over – for centuries.
Through a series of councils church leaders proposed a single version of the Bible, with the Old Testment in Hebrew and the New in Greek. Shortly afterward, the translation of both texts into Latin followed. All of this happened before the compilation of a single Codex containing all of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The official Latin scriptures of the Roman Church weren’t standardized until around 600 AD. The oldest copy of the Hebrew Scriptures in Codex form that is know in our time dates to after 900 AD.
In 1384, John Wycliffe produced a manuscript of the complete Bible in the English language. His copy was hand written and he paid with his life for having created it.
If the Codex manuscript was the first technological revolution in Bible publishing, the second must have been Gutenburg’s invention of the Printing Press in 1455. The first book mechanically reproduced by the device was a Latin Bible. Multiple copies of books with identical text became available. Copies of the Bible that can be owned by individuals and families are only a part of the last quarter of the church’s history.
Issues of translation and inaccuracy of reproduction were known much earlier, but the invention of the printing press produced an attempt to discover the most ancient and most accurate texts. In 1516, Erasmus produced a Greek/Latin Parallel New Testament. The Geneva Bible, the first English language Bible with numbered verses (and the Bible of the Pilgrims who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony aboard the Mayflower) appeared in 1560.
The King James Version was first printed in 1611 with 80 books. In 1885 the official version removed the Apocrypha and the 66-book version known to many Protestant Christians appeared. It is poetically brilliant and a wonderful version to read out loud. But it is hardly the first or most authoritative version of our scriptures.
These days we have new technologies to study the Bible. I have four different translations of the Bible on my cell phone. Digital reproductions mean that we no longer need rooms full of shelves to have access to books of faith.
A single “best” way to organize books will not emerge in our lifetimes. Librarians will remain essential to our ability to find information for the foreseeable future. The best search engines still do not trump experience and wisdom. But, as the song says, “The times, they are a changing.”
I wonder who else will notice the new organization of the church library. I hope a lot of people do. That would mean that a lot of people are using the space. I fear, however, that no one else will notice. This may be something that only matters to an increasingly quirky, aging pastor. This might be one of those places where I see things that others do not.
Recently, in a flurry of summertime cleaning and organizing, some volunteers in our congregation decided to organize the books in the church library alphabetically by author. For those of us who were used to searching the library that had previously been organized by category, the result appeared to be random chaos. Sets of commentaries that had resided together for decades were spread out around the shelves in what appeared to be a random pattern. Books with multiple authors were hard to find. There are many books that are familiar to me that have multiple authors and I know only some of the authors.
Outside of a discussion about the best way to organize a library, there are some other interesting observations that came to me as I gazed at the books on the shelves in our church library. I noticed that the Bibles are not all together. Even in a system that organizes books by author, one might expect to find all of the Bibles together in the same place. After all, don’t we believe in a single scripture? I think, upon closer examination, that the Bibles are shelved in the order of their publishers, with Nelson coming before Zondorvan.
I, of course, began to try to figure out the belief structure of the library organizers. These are people of faith who give freely of their time to help their church. They are attempting to do good and provide leadership in an institution devoted not only to sharing faith, but to the process of teaching and learning about faith. Our library is specifically a teaching library, organized to support and enhance our Christian education programs. These people of faith were shelving Bibles in multiple locations. Perhaps they were expressing their belief that there are multiple authors of our sacred scriptures. Perhaps they were trying to encourage library users to search for the truth. More likely, they weren’t thinking about Bibles in a different category than any of the other books.
I doubt that those who were working in the library would claim any statement of faith from the order in which the books are positioned on the shelves.
Through a series of councils church leaders proposed a single version of the Bible, with the Old Testment in Hebrew and the New in Greek. Shortly afterward, the translation of both texts into Latin followed. All of this happened before the compilation of a single Codex containing all of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The official Latin scriptures of the Roman Church weren’t standardized until around 600 AD. The oldest copy of the Hebrew Scriptures in Codex form that is know in our time dates to after 900 AD.
In 1384, John Wycliffe produced a manuscript of the complete Bible in the English language. His copy was hand written and he paid with his life for having created it.
If the Codex manuscript was the first technological revolution in Bible publishing, the second must have been Gutenburg’s invention of the Printing Press in 1455. The first book mechanically reproduced by the device was a Latin Bible. Multiple copies of books with identical text became available. Copies of the Bible that can be owned by individuals and families are only a part of the last quarter of the church’s history.
The King James Version was first printed in 1611 with 80 books. In 1885 the official version removed the Apocrypha and the 66-book version known to many Protestant Christians appeared. It is poetically brilliant and a wonderful version to read out loud. But it is hardly the first or most authoritative version of our scriptures.
These days we have new technologies to study the Bible. I have four different translations of the Bible on my cell phone. Digital reproductions mean that we no longer need rooms full of shelves to have access to books of faith.
A single “best” way to organize books will not emerge in our lifetimes. Librarians will remain essential to our ability to find information for the foreseeable future. The best search engines still do not trump experience and wisdom. But, as the song says, “The times, they are a changing.”
I wonder who else will notice the new organization of the church library. I hope a lot of people do. That would mean that a lot of people are using the space. I fear, however, that no one else will notice. This may be something that only matters to an increasingly quirky, aging pastor. This might be one of those places where I see things that others do not.