Being Christian: Baptism, Bible, Eucharist, Prayer

by Rowan Williams

The Christian listens for God and listens in the company of other believers to those texts that, from the very beginnings of the Christian community, have been identified as carrying the voice of God. Our visual model of Bible-reading is probably still very much formed by the idea of a person sitting alone in a room with a bound volume. But that is a very modern and minority approach to the Bible. In the early Christian centuries it is almost certainly the case that most churches could never have afforded a complete text of the Bible. If you think of the vast expense of copying out manuscripts in the ancient world, and of the number of manuscripts you have to copy out to get a complete Bible, you will understand why the ancient world was not awash, as we are, with spare Bibles. People learned the Bible. They recited it to one another. They copied out stretches of it, often from memory. That is why there are so many slightly faulty quotations from the Bible in early Christian literature, because not even then were people’s memories perfect. They assembled collections of Sunday readings. But complete Bibles? Probably only in the biggest churches and certainly not in the pocket of the individual Christian. Putting several dozen scrolls into your pocket would never have been very easy, in any case. Now I say this not to deny the importance of all Christians having a Bible in their pocket with which they are familiar, but to point out that very often we make a set of assumption...