The Bible after Gutenberg
Gutenberg destroyed the Bible. Yes, he was the one who made it publicly available in the common language of the time, but in the process he converted the Bible from an audible message to black and white text. In the Christian world, the Bible has never recovered. It became a book rather than story told by an inspired narrator. All of the inflection, the pauses, the substituted words and the added ones, all the emotion was wrung from the message until at last we ended up with nothing but theological fodder and homilies. The ebb and flow, the dynamics of melody, the word plays in sound and form, the subtle hints at character development were abandoned. Now we just read it, putting our own emphasis wherever we wish. And most of the time, the book just sits on the shelf, nothing more than a dictionary of prooftexts for religious arguments. The modern electronic Bible is even worse. One step further removed from anything living, the Bible is now a collection of ones and zeros, as sterile as digital mathematics could possibly be.
There is a reason why Judaism follows the yearly Parashah, why everyone in the Jewish faith speaks the same passage year after year. Judaism attempts to retain the essentials of an oral religion. If it were ever forced to be only available in written form, its life would be buried in a grave of printer’s ink, just like the Christian Bible. In this regard, a scroll is not a written text. It has to be handled to be understood. It has to be created by hand. Every letter must be transmitted through the life of the scribe. The Hebrew Bible actually isn’t a “Bible” at all. It is a work of art, personalized, crafted, a fine literary wine aged with the marks of the quill.
Unfortunately, Judaism en toto also seems to have succumbed to the convenience of print. But the Stone edition of the Tanakh is not the Bible of Jewish belief. It is an adumbrated representation of the interactions of a living God and His living people. It cannot communicate what happens in community. While the rabbinic tradition has resisted converting the text into systematized theology (something Christianity promulgated from its true progenitor – Plato), it has not been able to avoid the dark side of the printing press. Life is in community, not in justified margins. Judaism retains what used to be standard practice for Christian worship, that is, responsiveness. No longer avant-garde, responsive reading, the last vestige of the auditory Bible, has been replaced with inane “praise and worship” music, typically with little or no actual biblical foundation. Most of it is the religious version of country western melodrama. It just “feels good.” For all its popularity, one must wonder if God finds any homage in the quasi-theological sap from this tree.
Back to moveable type. What a tragedy! Of course, the Bible (the most popular and highest grossing book ever published) is now available to millions. But at what cost? Now I can meet my evangelism goal by handing out pocket New Testaments, without any attempt at all to actually be involved in the life story of my prospective recipient. Each month I have to fill out a report that includes the tally column “number of new salvations,” (one wonders what “old” salvations might be). The goal is the total, not the transformation. And, for that matter, is “salvation” something that can be counted once and registered eternally? How is that possible when human lives are dynamic spiritual journeys? Today, tracts replace ties. Religious leaders are spiritual politicians. Prophets are extinct. The story becomes a movie, filled with actors. The Greeks had a word for this: hupokrisis–acting of a theatrical part, literally, holding a mask before your true face. Dare we say that the Bible today is the epitome of hypocrisy. Layered with denominational and theology masks, covered in marketing disguise, no one attempts to speak the story. Even expository exegesis isn’t expositive. It’s collected in commentaries and academic journals for others to review. Jeremiah is jaundiced, Isaiah apoplectic, Amos aghast. It’s just too much. God reduced to pigments, dispersants, and resins (printers ink). I guess we’ve forgotten that the world came into existence through a sound, a voice, not a table of contents.
The invention of the printing press was one of humanity’s great achievements. It ranks right up there with writing itself (a Phoenician contribution). It completely altered the world as we know it. Too bad. The world as we know it is less personal, less individual, less communal, and less God-fearing than ever. One might reasonably ask if printing the Bible didn’t contribute to the exile of God from the world?
