Day 38 -history of the word

 Yesterday Chris commented that technology enables this blog to reach people all over the place without me having to write it all down multiple times on paper and post it to people. That made me smile but it also made me think about all the people throughout history who wrote down the entire Bible by hand.  Way back I presume the Old Testament was written on papyrus or on clay tablets -which for a start cost money and secondly took a lot of time to do.  They were fragile and vulnerable to damage.  In order to be disseminated they had to be laboriously copied by scribes and carefully transported from place to place.  As time went on more copies of scriptures were made and technology moved on.  Engraved tablets became papyrus and then paper.  But by the time of the New Testament writing was still being done with a stylus or a quill. Dipping your feather into ink every minute or so is slow and laborious work.  Writing presumably was done outside where there was good light, or by the light of candles or oil lamps inside.  I dont often stop to consider the massive amount of man-hours which generations of people put into bringing us the scriptures.   

In the days of the monks who were responsible for copying many Bibles it apparently took one monk 15 months of solid work to transcribe the scriptures.  Imagine writing solidly with a quill and ink for 15 months.  That's commitment.  You wouldn't do that unless you were absolutely convinced of the value of the work.   If they were illustrating them with drawings and scrolls and illuminations it would obviously taken even longer. 

Even later, when we get to the wonderful invention of the printing press and the mass production of Bibles in the 1440s , the setting of the presses was such hard work. The English King James Version of the Bible contains 783,137 words (that's 3,116,480 individual letters) Every letter had to be taken out of a rack and set into a block on the press in the right order.  It was skilled and difficult work because the typeset had to be a mirror image of the final text.  It took 4 years to print and bind 180 copies.

Thanks to the huge dedication of thousands of individual people over hundreds and hundreds of years we now all have multiple versions of the Bible in our phones and on our laptops at the press of a button.  I wonder what those ancient monks would have thought about that? It really is such a blessing that we have easy and instant access to the Bible but there are still lots of places and people groups in the world that still dont have a written Bible in their own language. A friend of mine is currently involved with a project in Papua New Guinea which is hoping to translate the Bible into 33 languages which currently have no scriptures in their native tongue.  Thats 33 languages just in Papua New Guinea!  Its hard for us to believe in this day and age that there are still tribes in jungles out there who barely ever see an outsiders face and have never heard the name of Jesus.  But they are there. And so are the missionaries and translators working to bring them the good news.

Today lets be super thankful for the people who carefully and devotedly gave themselves to writing down the scriptures, translating them into hundreds of different languages, formatting them into increasingly accessible iterations.  And lets pray for those who are still doing that today. Bringing the word to those who dont yet have it until every nation tribe and tongue have had the opportunity to read it.