Scroll, Manuscript, Book, Tablet

On Sunday mornings, when I have Group Time with my Sunday School preschoolers, I open my Bible to the correct reference and say, “Here is the place in the Bible where I find this story.” And I tell them the day’s Bible story. Always. I always say that!

One Sunday morning, I told the children how Nehemiah helped people build a new wall around Jerusalem. At the end of the story, one kid said, “Where do you get all the stuff you tell us?”

Huh? “Do you mean where do I learn about the stories I tell you?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Astonished, I lifted the open Bible from my lap and said, “Here. In this Bible. They are stories I read in the Bible.” (I say it every time I tell a Bible story- “Here is the place where I find this story.”)

“Well,” he said, a little skeptically, “who wrote it?”

I hesitated a moment, not quite sure if the book of Nehemiah is just about him, or did he write it himself. In that short lull, where I guess I looked a little uncertain, another kid said, “Look in the front. That’s where they tell you who wrote it.”

By that time, I had flipped back to the beginning of Nehemiah and found the information. Yes, Nehemiah wrote the book. I held up the pages of the book of Nehemiah. “This part of the Bible was written by Nehemiah. Other people wrote other parts of the Bible.”

The other teacher added: “There are lots of books that are part of the Bible. They were written by different people. Then someone took all the books, and put them together to make our Bible.”

There weren’t any more questions. Some were satisfied, I guess. One, at least, mulled it over.

In Sunday School, with the kids, I use a Bible. At home, I’m more inclined to use the computer. I love my online access to the Bible, with its many versions. If I want to know how King James translated a verse, he’s just a click away. I can jump back and forth between translations, books, verses. I can find and read three or four verses in the time it takes me to find just one reference in a book-style Bible.

But somehow, this shortcut seems, well, inappropriate? UnChristian? Too “modern” for the ancient words I’m reading?

Holding a Bible in my hands just seems right to me. But really, the Bible in book form is rather a modern invention itself. Did church leaders scoff when Gutenberg’s first printed Bibles were available? Probably. Did they choose to continue reading the hand written, hand illuminated Bibles that monks had turned out after years of work? Did early, early church leaders shun those hand written manuscripts in favor of the scrolls they were accustomed to studying? Maybe. Do people who prefer a King James translation think that studying Scripture on the computer is misguided? What about readers of the New Revised Standard or New International Version or Holman Christian Standard Bible?

I have a Bible app on my phone. It’s what I usually use in worship service. I’m trying to get beyond the apprehension that I might look like I’m messaging somebody, or checking my e-mail, or playing Words with Friends.

So will the words that come out of my mouth
    not come back empty-handed.
They’ll do the work I sent them to do,
    they’ll complete the assignment I gave them.
Isaiah 55:11(The Message)

I suppose there are already Sunday School teachers who are sitting down with preschoolers and children and youth and pulling out their iPads, their tablets, their Kindles, and reading Scripture and telling Bible stories. I’m quite sure that kids today have figured out that the words in the copy of Harry Potter or Where the Wild Things Are that they have at home are the same words as on their electronic devices. So it follows that Bible content is Bible content, whatever the medium. If I say we have to do it the same way we’ve always done it, am I being faithful to the wrong thing? I’m trying to not be an old lady about this. (And really, I do know that King James didn’t translate the Bible himself. He got some translators to do it, during his reign.)