I felt I had to draw attention to this; I've been saying it for years and it is so good to see someone else, independently saying it.
"And furthermore, much as I give thanks for the printing press and the Internet, these media are a mixed blessing in creating the illusion that we can read the Bible in our 'prayer closets,' in isolation from community. In the ancient world, writing materials were very expensive, so copies of scriptural works were difficult for individuals to obtain, and most Christians would have been unable to read anyway. As a result, the early Christians studied Scripture in community, pooling resources to obtain copies of books and reading them aloud together, in community."
It is the case, I think, that in giving us our own personal and relatively cheap Bibles, the moveable-type printing press has contributed enormously to the individualism of the post Reformation world. In fact Evangelical piety [and also Catholic breviary and similar piety] is seen in this light to be a cultural possibility that just wasn't there without that technology to make it possible. It kind of puts into perspective things we take for granted. It would, for example, make it harder if we primarily heard the scriptures in a communal setting, to hear the 'you' in most of Paul's letters as a singular. The daily quiet time is a cultural product, not a set-in-stone biblical practice. That's not to say that there are not good arguments for it, just not totally applicable to everyone, everywhere, everywhen arguments. For many Christians in the first thousand years and more of Christianity, exposure to scripture was [at best] something that happened two or three times a week when you went to the market town to buy and sell and the local church had services at which scripture was read and perhaps there might have been opportunities to talk about them informally afterwards. IT would have meant working hard at committing passages to memory and it increased the responsibility of those who read aloud [hence the office of Reader, revived by Anglicanism in the Victorian period] and those who had a teaching role. Of course, for many there had to be a translation too.
What are the effects also of losing the human voice from our interaction with scripture? And of scripture being recontextualised from an object in church which is liturgically venerated to one which we have at home and for which the churchy ceremonial seems inappropriate? The possibility of seeing scripture as somehow paradigmatic with books on natural history and philosophy and other 'textbooks' must surely have been influential in getting us to where we are now.
Wrt the loss of the human voice, I think it is significant. In Bible study groups I usually encourage reading out loud because it slows the pace of assimilation down [for most people] and in so doing gives time for the imagination to work, for significant details to be acknowledged and significance to begin to be weighed. We should remember that the gospel stories, at least, were told before being written down, In fact that I think is significant for the form they take; the pericopae of the gospels are well polished stories that have the well-roundedness of many repetitions as story. They are in scripture because experience showed that these are the stories that 'told well' with economy, beauty and enough multi-layering to bear returning to many times. Textual criticism of the Gospels may be missing an important point in treating them as texts in the first place. I know an oral stage is acknowledged but I am not aware of much that really takes the effects of that seriously. I may be wrong and I'm happy to be told where to look for this.
The recontextualising of scripture into domestic and other 'real life' settings, must surely lead also to reinforcing a sense that we own and in some way stand over scripture. I know that many would be appalled to think that we might but I can't help thinking that domestication might refer, in this case, not only to placing scripture in the domestic sphere. The flip side, and the reason for pursuing the project of 'domestication', presumably, is that interaction with scripture becomes a more everyday event, potentially more transformative of individuals over time. But every development has its dangers as well as its commendations. It also decisively undermines hierarchical pretensions, for good and ill...
With all this in mind, I wonder what happens in Islam when their scriptures begin to be read in vernacular and individually ...
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