Feature
Scripture in the Age of Google
The Digital Bible & How We Can Read It
by Robin Phillips
We are standing at a critical juncture in history, when the future of the printed word can no longer be taken for granted. It is appropriate therefore to ponder the implications the digital revolution might have for the Church's reception of Scripture. What might be the future of the Bible's role for the Church in a world where our communication technologies are changing so rapidly?
To explore this question, it may be helpful first to consider some of the effects of previous paradigm shifts in communication technologies. In the history of human literacy, the "book" has undergone four key transformations. These can be crudely sketched as follows.
According to the historian Frederick Kilgour, the first phase in the history of the "book" roughly spanned the years 2500 b.c. to a.d. 100, when men used a stylus to inscribe text onto clay tablets. The second phase of book-making technology began about 2000 b.c. and lasted to about a.d. 700, when a brush or pen was used to write on papyrus rolls. The years a.d. 100 to the present are the period of the codex, a term that has become almost synonymous with our term "book."
As these dates indicate, there was considerable overlap between the different phases of book-making technology. The fourth transformation, currently in overlap with the age of the codex, is, of course, the electronic book.
Within the era of the codex, there have been two important developments that helped give the written word the particular primacy it has enjoyed in Western culture. The first of these may seem trivial to us, but was of vital importance not only in affecting our relationship with the written word, but also in bringing reading to a wider audience. I have in mind the practice of putting spaces between words.
Word Separation & Silent Reading
When, in the eighth century b.c., man first began to move from pictorial symbols to an alphabetic text, writing was simply an adjunct of speech. Since we do not pause between each word when we speak, it never occurred to our ancestors to put spaces between their written words. They were simply transcribing what they heard. A corollary to this was that silent reading remained a relative anomaly.
In his Confessions, St. Augustine describes how he was surprised to stumble upon Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading silently:
When he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.
This was clearly something that Augustine was not used to seeing. If we think about it, the reason for this should seem obvious. When one reads a text without word separation, it is extremely difficult to get the sense of what is being communicated apart from actually hearing it. While people certainly did read aloud quietly to themselves, texts were normally read out loud to others, and this helped keep reading a public activity. The communal nature of reading, in turn, affected how people wrote. Authors expected their works to be read aloud, normally in a social setting involving discussion, and this expectation of interaction created boundaries to what they were willing to write.
Robin Phillips has a Master’s in Historical Theology from King’s College London and a Master’s in Library Science through the University of Oklahoma. He is the blog and media managing editor for the Fellowship of St. James and a regular contributor to Touchstone and Salvo. He has worked as a ghost-writer, in addition to writing for a variety of publications, including the Colson Center, World Magazine, and The Symbolic World. Phillips is the author of Gratitude in Life's Trenches (Ancient Faith, 2020), and Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation (Ancient Faith, 2023). He operates a blog at www.robinmarkphillips.com.
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