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The First Christians Didn’t Own Bibles · Theology Made Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made Podcast, I'm Jordan.
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  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we're going to look at how the first Christians didn't own Bibles.
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  SPEAKER_00: Do a quick inventory with me.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's probably a Bible on a shelf within 30 feet of you right now.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe several.
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  SPEAKER_00: The nightstand one,
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  SPEAKER_00: the study one with your college highlights in it,
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  SPEAKER_00: the little travel one someone gave you at graduation, And that's before we come.
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  SPEAKER_00: Count your phone, which is currently holding roughly 60 English translations, It's searchable.
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  SPEAKER_00: Searchable, cross-referenced, and read aloud on request by whatever voice you want.
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  SPEAKER_00: Looking for something deep?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Look no further than James Earl Jones.
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  SPEAKER_00: The average American home with any Bible in it has more than four.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the inventory from the other end of history.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the year 150,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Christian congregation in a mid-sized Roman city,
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  SPEAKER_00: 30 or 40 people meeting in a home might own a few squirrels between them.
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  SPEAKER_00: The whole church, kept in a chest, guarded like treasure, because that's really what they were.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the individual believer, the woman in the third row, she owned nothing.
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  SPEAKER_00: In all likelihood, she couldn't have read even if she did.
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  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part I want to mess with you a little.
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  SPEAKER_00: She may have known scripture better than you do.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first Christians didn't own Bibles.
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  SPEAKER_00: For centuries, almost no one did.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's start with the brute economics.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every book in the ancient books is written.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ancient world was made by hand.
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  SPEAKER_00: Before you could copy a line, someone had to manufacture the surface.
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  SPEAKER_00: Papyrus cut and pressed from Nile reeds,
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  SPEAKER_00: or parchment scraped from animal skin, soaked, stretched, and dried.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then, a Trainscribe scribe copied your text letter by letter,
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  SPEAKER_00: hour after hour, And Scribe's building.
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  SPEAKER_00: Billed by the line.
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  SPEAKER_00: So price out a Bible,
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  SPEAKER_00: a single decent copy of one gospel ran somewhere in the range of a month's wage for
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  SPEAKER_00: an ordinary worker.
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  SPEAKER_00: The four gospels together, several months.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, scale up the whole thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Both testaments.
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  SPEAKER_00: A complete Bible on parchment require the skins of a couple hundred animals and
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  SPEAKER_00: a scribal team working for a year or more.
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  SPEAKER_00: You're no longer talking about a book, you're talking about the price of a small farm.
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  SPEAKER_00: Which is why for the first several centuries,
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  SPEAKER_00: the complete, single-volume Bible barely existed as a physical object.
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  SPEAKER_00: The earliest ones we possess,
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  SPEAKER_00: the great codexes like Sinaiticus and Vaticanus,
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  SPEAKER_00: they come from the 300s And they were in.
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  SPEAKER_00: Imperial grade luxury productions.
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  SPEAKER_00: When Constantine wanted Bibles for the churches of his new capital,
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  SPEAKER_00: he wrote to the scholar Eusebius.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Commission 50 of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: It professional scribes on fine parchment delivered by government took
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  SPEAKER_00: an emperor's budget to put 50 Bibles in one city.
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  SPEAKER_00: Scripture in the early church came in pieces.
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  SPEAKER_00: A congregation owned a copy of Isaiah,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Psalter,
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  SPEAKER_00: a Gospel or two,
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  SPEAKER_00: some letters of Paul, the way a family might own a few precious heirlooms.
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  SPEAKER_00: But nobody owned the library.
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  SPEAKER_00: And even if you could afford a book, odds are you couldn't read it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Serious estimates put literacy in the Roman world somewhere around 10-15%,
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  SPEAKER_00: concentrated among elite men.
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  SPEAKER_00: The early church skewed poor, enslaved, and female.
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  SPEAKER_00: Celsus, a 2nd century critic, sneered that Christianity recruited Woolworkers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Workers, cobblers, and laundry women.
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  SPEAKER_00: He meant it as an insult,
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  SPEAKER_00: but it's also a demographic note that this was a movement of people
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  SPEAKER_00: who really didn't read.
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  SPEAKER_00: So how does a movement built on texts thrive on people who can't read them or afford them?
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  SPEAKER_00: And it became a religion of the ear.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was designed that way from the beginning.
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  SPEAKER_00: Look at how the New Testament talks about itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Revelation opens with a blessing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And notice the grammar, because this comes up a lot.
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  SPEAKER_00: Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear.
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  SPEAKER_00: One reader, Plural here's.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's the assumption.
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  SPEAKER_00: Assumed setting of every book in your New Testament.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul's letters end with instructions like, have this letter read to all the brothers.
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  SPEAKER_00: And see,
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  SPEAKER_00: this is read also in the church of the,
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  SPEAKER_00: and fill out the blank of the name of the church.
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  SPEAKER_00: When Paul writes to Timothy about pastoral priorities,
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  SPEAKER_00: the list starts, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paul's letters weren't mailed to your mailbox.
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  SPEAKER_00: They were performed.
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  SPEAKER_00: A courier,
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  SPEAKER_00: like Phoebe,
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  SPEAKER_00: who carried Romans,
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  SPEAKER_00: would stand in the assembly and deliver the letter out loud,
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  SPEAKER_00: likely having rehearsed it with Paul's phrasing and emphasis in mind.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church experienced Romans the way you experience a speech,
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  SPEAKER_00: together, in one sitting, at the pace the reader set.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this grew straight out of the synagogue,
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  SPEAKER_00: where Jesus himself stood up,
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  SPEAKER_00: was handed the Isaiah scroll, found his place, and read aloud to the room.
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  SPEAKER_00: Public reading was the ancient delivery system for scripture,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the early church kept the tradition going.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it worked because ancient people had something And we've sort of.
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  SPEAKER_00: Of lost, a well-trained memory.
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  SPEAKER_00: In an oral culture, hearing was keeping.
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  SPEAKER_00: Congregations heard the same psalms sung week after week until the psalms lived in them.
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  SPEAKER_00: New believers memorized long stretches of teaching before baptism.
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  SPEAKER_00: Early Christian writers quote scripture constantly,
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  SPEAKER_00: often loosely,
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  SPEAKER_00: the way you quote a song you've heard 500 times,
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  SPEAKER_00: because they were quoting from the ear,
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  SPEAKER_00: from memory, from years and years of listening.
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  SPEAKER_00: The average early Christian couldn't check a reference, but she could finish her sentence.
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  SPEAKER_00: And here's a detail that tells you everything about how precious this arrangement was.
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  SPEAKER_00: Reading became an ordained church office.
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  SPEAKER_00: By the 3rd century, century, churches had an official Called The Lecture.
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  SPEAKER_00: Lector, the reader, a young man, sometimes very young, whose Entire Sacred Rock.
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  SPEAKER_00: Role was to stand up and read scripture aloud to the assembly.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cyprian,
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  SPEAKER_00: the bishop of Carthage in the 250s,
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  SPEAKER_00: wrote letters announcing lector appointments with real pride.
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  SPEAKER_00: He appointed one young confessor named Aurelius,
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  SPEAKER_00: a teenager who had survived torture for the faith and told the church that a man
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  SPEAKER_00: who had been faithful under interrogation Well,
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  SPEAKER_00: he deserved to be the voice they heard the gospel in.
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  SPEAKER_00: Think about that career path.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the early church, reads well in public was a spiritual office adjacent to martyrdom.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the books the lector read From regarded.
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  SPEAKER_00: Guarded accordingly,
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  SPEAKER_00: which brings me to the most, I think, revealing crisis in this whole story.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the year 303,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Emperor Diocletian launched the last great persecution,
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  SPEAKER_00: and his opening move was aimed at objects.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first edict ordered churches demolished and scriptures handed over to be burned.
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  SPEAKER_00: Roman authorities went door to door demanding the books.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, there's two things about that.
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  SPEAKER_00: First, notice what the empire had figured out.
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  SPEAKER_00: You could strike at Christianity by confiscating its books.
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  SPEAKER_00: Precisely because there were so few of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Burn a church's chest of scriptures and you cut a whole congregation off from the text.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody had a backup on the nightstand.
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  SPEAKER_00: Second, notice what happened next.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some clergy handed the books over to save their lives.
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  SPEAKER_00: The church came to call them traitors, the handers over.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's the word that gives us traitor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Others refused and died as martyrs, executed for the crime of guarding manuscripts.
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  SPEAKER_00: The fight over whether the handerovers,
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  SPEAKER_00: the traitors, could ever be forgiven Split North Africa.
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  SPEAKER_00: African Christianity for a century.
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  SPEAKER_00: People don't die for an ordinary household object.
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  SPEAKER_00: They die for something rare, communal, and irreplaceable, and that's what a Bible was.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now put the pieces together, because this reframes a phrase we use all the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: When we say someone knows the Bible,
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  SPEAKER_00: we mean private ownership plus private reading,
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  SPEAKER_00: quiet time, a highlighter, an app streak on you version.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the most individual activities in the modern Christian faith.
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  SPEAKER_00: For roughly the first 1,500 years of Christianity,
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  SPEAKER_00: for the overwhelming majority of believers,
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  SPEAKER_00: knowing scripture meant something else entirely.
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  SPEAKER_00: It meant showing up.
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  SPEAKER_00: It meant hearing Isaiah in the same room as the widow who heard it 80 more times than you.
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  SPEAKER_00: It meant the Psalms arriving as songs,
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  SPEAKER_00: the gospel arriving as a voice,
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  SPEAKER_00: the letters of Paul arriving all at once and out loud instead of one verse at
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  SPEAKER_00: a time.
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  SPEAKER_00: Scripture was an event that happened to a community at a set time in a shared place,
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  SPEAKER_00: which means the woman in the third row in the year 150 who never owned a book
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  SPEAKER_00: and never read a word was not scripture -deprived.
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  SPEAKER_00: She had heard the whole of Mark performed probably many times.
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  SPEAKER_00: She could sing more songs from memory than most seminary graduates.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Word of God dwelt in her,
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  SPEAKER_00: but the only way it could dwell on anyone then—richly and by ear." And I want
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  SPEAKER_00: to be careful here because this is the part where the episode could curdle
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  SPEAKER_00: into nostalgia.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I don't do villains and I don't do golden ages.
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  SPEAKER_00: The printing press was a mercy and wonderful.
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  SPEAKER_00: Widespread literacy is a mercy.
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  SPEAKER_00: The fact that you can read Habakkuk tonight in your own language alone for free Is a $500.
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  SPEAKER_00: 500-year-old miracle that martyrs like Tyndale paid for.
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  SPEAKER_00: And no early Christian would have wanted undone.
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  SPEAKER_00: They would have wept at your nightstand.
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  SPEAKER_00: But they might also notice what it cost us.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because when scripture moved to being a private possession,
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  SPEAKER_00: not as much a shared event,
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  SPEAKER_00: we traded the ear for the eye,
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  SPEAKER_00: the assembly for the app,
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  SPEAKER_00: and along the way,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Bible says,
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  SPEAKER_00: became something an individual verifies along rather than something
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  SPEAKER_00: a community Rehears this together.
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  SPEAKER_00: Together.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first Christians were never alone with the Bible, but together in community.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tonight, that Bible within 30 feet of you will most likely stand at shelf.
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  SPEAKER_00: No judgment.
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  SPEAKER_00: Mine too some nights.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here's a small experiment, courtesy of the third century.
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  SPEAKER_00: This week, get scripture the way the first Christians got it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe just with your family or a couple friends.
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  SPEAKER_00: And have someone read a chapter to you out loud.
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  SPEAKER_00: Don't skim anything, but just sit, listen, and hear.
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  SPEAKER_00: At someone else's pace, The way Alondra will woman in Carthage heard it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Back when the words were rare and the room was full.
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  SPEAKER_00: First Christians didn't own Bibles, and the word ran wild through the empire anyway.
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  SPEAKER_00: We own millions of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: So, what's our excuse?
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  SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks for listening to the Theology Made Podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you found this interesting,
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• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And hey, share it with a friend.