Some Thoughts on the Bible and Technology by Francis Borchardt Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies Lutheran Theological Seminary, Hong Kong In the beginning was the word, and the word was God’s, and God’s word is the Bible. This romantic notion of the Bible and its divine nature may sound simplistic to anyone who has had some theological education, or studied the Bible in any sort of academic context, but I would guess that it is the dominant notion of the Bible for most Christians throughout the world. In fact, the idea that the Bible is a book that God has penned so that it is miraculously available in your own language at your local bookstore even subconsciously permeates many pastoral sermons and scholarly essays. The reason for this is that most people who encounter the Bible do not reflect on its origins in history or its transmission through history. Instead, they tend to focus on the contents of the Bible, the message it contains, and its applicability to their own lives. This is true whether the Bible is being discussed in the context of a Bible study, preached on in a Sunday service, or used as the basis of elaborate theological construction. Reading and interpreting a text, any text, really, in this way, carries with it a certain conception of immutability, timelessness, and existence outside of history. For a text to be continuously and ubiquitously relevant, it must be thought of as not belonging to a particular time or place or the product of a specific material culture. No wonder, then, that when most people pick up their leather bound Bibles with gilded letters embossed into the covers they do not stop to think why and how this, this thing… this material object… this conceptual entity, came to be. Today, I would like to change that focus. I would like to flip our normal approach to the Bible on its head, and interrogate with you how the Bible came to be, what it is, and what it has the potential to become. In this essay I will argue that we should think of the Bible as the product of technology, rather than a fixed entity on which technology acts, or which is simply communicated by technological means. That is, technology has, does, and will continue to shape the concept of “Bible” as long as something called by that title it is transmitted through history. Now, when I talk about technology, for most of us, smartphones, .coms, LCD projectors, and myriad other late coming inventions that have only recently entered our lives are probably the ideas that come to mind. But technology is not made up only of the zeros and ones of binary code. It is not only a tablet, a television screen, or a search engine. I am not going to talk about those specific types of technology… yet. Instead, when I talk about technology, I mean something much broader that can be traced etymologically to the Greek word that lay behind the English term. τέχνολογος, the term related to the English word, usually describes the practice of an art, craft, or skill so as to systematize the matter or ideas being worked on. That is, technology, in my definition, is used to refer to the human process of creation or innovation through mastery of a craft. This process allows people to transform what exists already into things that have never before been seen or known. It is this definition I have in mind as I go forward arguing that the Bible is the product of technology.
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