Sleeping with the Gospels
Not many Christians carry around Bibles anymore these days.
In my younger years, I can remember that it was standard fare to carry your Bible to church. Even in college, we would take our Bibles to the evening gathering of our campus fellowship. To have a worn, tattered Bible—due to regularly carrying it around in one’s backpack—was sort of a sign that one took their faith seriously.
Of course, those days are long gone. With the rise of modern technology, and the Bible’s ready availability on phones or tablets, the physical presence of a Bible book is becoming more and more rare. Yes, Christians still care about the content of … Continue reading...
A Curious Example of Early Christian Devotion to Scripture
I have argued in numerous places–articles, blog posts, books–that Scripture played a central role in the life of early Christians. They not only read and preached from these books, but they copied and distributed them in great numbers.
An additional (and rather curious) example of the role of Scripture in early Christianity was the phenomenon of the miniature codex. From the time of the third century, and especially in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christians began to create these little “pocket Bibles” that contained portions of Scripture and sometimes even held multiple scriptural books (e.g., see my analysis of P.Ant. 12).
The early Christians probably used the miniature … Continue reading...