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INTRODUCTION: TRANSLATING BOOK

In early summer of 2013, on the heels of a week long seminar experimenting with new modes and media beyond print for training manuals with a group of bible translators from all over the world with the Nida Institute, I had the privilege of visiting Ravenna, Italy. The coincidence of reading Lev Manovich’s The Langauge of New Media, talking about the constitutive role of translation in the life of bible, and encountering the proliferation of books in the mosaics of Ravenna planted the seed for this project.¹ Several years before this, I had already become interested in the role of transforming book technologies on the cultural imagination of bible in antiquity. Yet, Ravenna put this curiosity into pictures in ways I had yet to imagine. As many have experienced, Ravenna is full of fantastic and vivid early depictions of Christian scenes in mosaic form from the 5th and 6th centuries of the common era. What surprised me as I began my reluctant tour through the ancient tourist sites was the prevalence of books in these early art forms. In fact, there were books everywhere, from the rolls in the hands of the saints around the baptismal font to the famous gospel cabinet in the funerary room. In the context of this discussion about bible as interface and the emergence of codex as a new book technology, there is one particular depiction of a gospel writer in the cathedral of San Vitale that highlights the co-presence of roll and codex in the interface repertoire of ancient bible users.² This particular set of mosaics is dated to the 6th century and the wall depicts all four gospel writers with their typical animal signs. The mosaic of Matthew depicts him sitting near a writing desk with a codex in his lap and a basket of rolls near the foot of the desk. Even as late as the 6th century, when codex has become the dominant reading and writing interface for most users of the world, high Christian iconography is entirely comfortable depicting the use of both roll and codex in the composition of their sacred writings. Bible may be inextricably bound to book, but these images expanded my conception of both bible and book.

Bible As Interface

Much like the situation depicted in the mosaics of Ravenna, the book is again undergoing a major technological transition as print wanes in its dominance and the internet and mobile devices transform our reading and writing technologies. With the entangled histories of bible and book, our emerging media age and its transformation of book technologies forces us to imagine bible as something beyond the book.³ The connections between the major technological transition from roll to codex in antiquity and the contemporary move toward the internet and mobile technologies as reading platforms encourage us to consider bible as an interface that affords an entanglement of nearness and distance through high surface area, collaborative capacities, and anarchic tendencies. I suggest bible as interface here to remind us that bible is more than a container of content to be consumed by a reader and can no longer be reduced to a book. Rather, bible as interface is a space constructed by the dynamic interplay of the material dispositions of the technological platform and the participation of the interested user. Animated by a Levinasian optic of proximity, an ongoing entanglement of nearness and distance, I will explore the many contact points of high surface area, the interruptive processes of collaborative capacities, and the irreducibility to a single original text or single proper use in anarchic tendencies through a media specific analysis of bible from ancient roll to digital API.

Locating Within the Conversation

Robert Kraft was an early pioneer in these questions about the relationship between our present technological transition from print to internet and the shift from scroll to codex in antiquity. Focused particularly on the notion of canon, Kraft articulated the possible impacts at work in these somewhat analagous transitions, worlds apart in terms of history and culture, saying “For many years now, I have wondered whether the technological change from the scroll format to the large-scale codex influenced, at least in some situations, perceptions about ‘the bible,’ and especially the extent to which the classical Christian concept of a closed or exclusive ‘canon’ of scripture depended on that development.”⁴ As early Christian writers worked to translate their literary craft from roll books to codex form, Kraft used his own experimentation with a barely emerging writing/reading technology, the internet, to explore how technological changes might have impacted a reader or writer’s relationship to books and text. In the piece quoted above, we can see the attempts to translate print structures such as footnotes into the internet “page.”⁵

Using simple notation such as “—” to separate between a paragraph and the related notes, “===” to separate between notes and the next paragraph, and “\#/” to designate a note, Kraft attempted to translate familiar print structures into the continuous scrolled “page” of the internet. Without discrete page divisions with footers at the bottom of each page, as we would find in a print publication, Kraft invented a similar structure to keep the familiar construct of notes in his text. Though this notation was no longer demanded by the web writing platform chosen by Kraft, much like multiple vertical columns were unnecessary on a codex page, Kraft worked hard to translate structures familiar to print readers into this new environment of the web page. His performance of the difficulties and possibilities of this new medium provided an object lesson for the theoretical questions he posed about the relationship between book technologies and users of books.⁶ It is the both/and of Kraft’s approach that is most instructive for me both practically and theoretically. As Marshall McLuhan reminds us, all new media contain their predecessors, so it is no surprise that print artifacts such as pages and footnotes remain even in this web environment used by Kraft.⁷ Kraft also explored new terrain in the process of academic publication by producing his writing in a new form without having to eradicate or cease to participate in more traditional print forms of scholarly production. I continue in the line of questioning pioneered by Kraft, still wondering how the evolving material interfaces of bible, the technologies of bible as book, might “[affect our] perceptions about ‘texts,’ ‘books,’ ‘reading,’ and the like… .”⁸

Digital Materiality

Following in the footsteps of Kraft, I was hoping to both describe and perform the thesis that throughout its rich media history, bible has been an interface that provokes probabilistic production through the affordances of high surface area, anarchy, and collaboration. Yet, due to the confines of the dissertation genre, I will limit my explorations to the telling of this thesis and the description of interfaces rather than the construction of interfaces that experimentally embody these material affordances in emerging media environments.⁹ Beyond simply articulating a sustained argument in support of this thesis and handling several artifacts to demonstrate the operation of these affordances in the life of bible from antiquity to the present, this project will do some additional work through three specific aims.¹⁰ First, a sustained attention to the details of several bible artifacts, physical and digital, will highlight the materiality of bible and the participation of users in this materiality. I have introduced a few terms here that deserve further reflection, “materiality,” and “digital.” By materiality or material, I am signaling a focus on the moving parts and structures that make up the spaces of interaction between bibles and users, such as the size of a viewing area for a given bible manuscript or a bible on screen. I do not intend the term “material” to limit our discourse to the raw materials that make up a given interface, such as papyrus, parchment, silicon, and electricity, though these items do play a role. Instead, a focus on the materiality of bible here intends to highlight the characteristics and attributes of bible that are not reducible to the texts of and about bible or the predominant textual analysis typical of most biblical scholarship.¹¹ The texts of bible and their possibilities of meaning are not irrelevant to this study, but they are not center stage. The materiality at work in this project fits best the first aspect of Plate’s expansive definition of material religion, “bodies meet objects,” with a distinct focus on the properties and structures of bible as object that shapes the possibilities for user participation in interface with these objects.¹² Groups such as the Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts (SCRIPT) and the Institute for Signifying Scriptures paved the way in considering new methodologies in the materiality of the books that many religions call sacred, but little was done in those conversations to push this material analysis into the emerging materialities of computing and the internet.¹³ This study extends the discourse on the materiality of religious books, particularly the bible, into the emerging material landscapes of the digital.

With this approach to materiality, dethroning text as the primary focus of analysis and foregrounding the objects that constitute bible, it is easy then to see how we might develop a more thoughtful exploration of the materiality of the digital as Johanna Drucker has called for in her work on interface theory for the humanities.¹⁴ The term digital has come to represent a massive discourse that begins with the basic distinction between continuous (analog) and discrete (binary) phenomenon, particularly in reference to the binary machine language that is the basis for most forms of computing today. Yet, regardless of any meaningful distinction between continuous and discrete, digital has come to represent all things related to computing, the internet, and in a sense, anything that has a screen as its primary interface.¹⁵ With this broad concept of the digital in mind, when I speak of the materiality of the digital, I mean the attributes and structures of platforms, devices, programs, and other objects that shape the spaces of user activity in the world of computing. Careful attention to these digital materialities are as important for a critical study of bible as are the material structures of an ancient roll or a codex manuscript.

Grounding Emerging Anxieties

A second aim of this study is to offer an alternative to the pervasive anxieties surrounding emerging technologies such as internet reading and bibles on screens. Jeffrey Siker’s recent book Liquid Scriptures brings to bible in particular a growing anxiety about books on screens and a nostalgia for well ingrained modes of reading and knowing fostered by the likes of Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turkle.¹⁶ Most certainly, we need to attend to the social effects of any emerging technology, both positive and negative, and I applaud Siker, Carr and Turkle for challenging our culture’s tendency to uncritically embrace emerging technologies. Yet, rather than simply lamenting the loss of a particular way of relating to books and bible, looking for enduring affordances that connect older familiar technologies to emerging platforms can help build capacities in users to participate in new interfaces in meaningful ways even as they may helpfully challenge the value of more traditional uses. I will use three related approaches to help offer an alternative perspective to the common resistance to so called “new” technologies. First, whenever possible, I will refer to emerging technologies instead of new technologies or new media.¹⁷ The language of new and old sets up a potentially dichotomous relationship between technologies that can lend itself to overly simplistic hierarchical evaluations. Focusing on the ongoing emergence of technologies signals both that each iteration of a technology is somehow connected to what came before it and that this process of technological evolution is never finished.

Material Media Translation

Second, to support this focus on emergence, I propose a palimpsestuous notion of “material media translation” to describe the relationship between technologies as they emerge. In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan points us toward the cracks in the reign of print, that illustrious descendant of the codex, in the face of an emerging electronic age. McLuhan reminds us that technologies (media) are extensions of ourselves and that the message of every medium is its effect on our social relations.¹⁸ Instead of focusing on the content delivered and consumed by any new technology, McLuhan emphasizes the impact of technologies on human relationship with the world and one another through a “change of scale.” He writes,

What we are considering here, however, are the psychic and social consequences of the designs or patterns as they amplify or accelerate existing processes. For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.¹⁹

Here, McLuhan challenges our binary tendencies between new and old and suggests that emerging technologies build upon existing technologies and bring a change in speed, size, or pattern, etc., which connects existing technologies with those that are emerging. For example, it is precisely this change in existing processes we find in the amplification of non-linear access from the emergence of the codex to the ubiquity of internet search. McLuhan suggests that the content of every “new” medium is another existing medium.²⁰ Just as the codex performed the multiple columns per page of a scroll, so internet search performs and amplifies the print index. I refer to this phenomenon of media building upon and containing its predecessors as material media translation. The language of translation is helpful here because it signals that all media transformations involve a negotiation between new and old with inevitable loss and gain. I use the phrase “material media” to qualify this translation to differentiate this process from the common process of translation of texts into other forms of media such as sound and film. In material media translation, it is the materiality of the technological interface that is translated, not simply its “content,” whatever that might entail.

In our book technology tradition itself, we have a material metaphor for this process of material media translation, the palimpsest. A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been written on, erased, and then written on again. In normal use, a palimpsest may seem like a new manuscript, showing few or no hints of its previous life and use. Yet, upon closer examination, the erasure of the previous writing is never complete and continues to shape the space of the manuscript, even if unnoticed by the typical user. The instructive part of palimpsest for material media translation is that no technology begins on a blank page and even if a new technology may seem to stand on its own, the echoes of its predecessors always lurk. In our analysis of emerging technologies related to bible, each “new” technology writes over an existing technology (or many technologies) with only partial erasure. Thus, material media translation enacts a kind of palimpsest. For example, though the codex erases the linear scrolling access of the roll, it retains the multiple vertical columnar structure even though not demanded by the structure of the codex page. Below is an image of a page from Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus,²¹ a fifth century manuscript of biblical texts in Greek, washed and written over in the 12th century with Greek translations of the fourth century Syriac writings of Ephrem the Syrian. This beautiful material enactment of palimpsest, two column miniscule Greek translations of Syriac over single column uncial Greek biblical texts, illustrates the process of emerging technology building upon existing structures to make something new without completely erasing what preceded it.

Figure 1: Image of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus 1v²²

Affordances

Third, to highlight the palimpsestuous nature of material media translation of bible from various book technologies to platforms that push beyond book, I will focus on a particular technology’s affordances. Affordances as a concept were first introduced in 1977 by James J. Gibson, a perceptual psychologist, to describe the possible interactions with an agent made possible by an particular environment.²³ An important aspect of Gibson’s invention of affordances is their relational nature. An affordance is a possible relationship between the physical properties of a “surface” and an organism encountering that surface.²⁴ Take for example, a reader using a codex as a surface or environment, as Gibson calls it. The physical properties of a codex include flexible pages bound together on one long side with a cover on the front and back. These pages have writing on them. On one level, this codex affords reading for the reader. More specifically, the codex affords non-linear access to text for a reader because of the physical properties of binding on one side and flexible pages instead of being rolled up in one long sheet from one end to the other as in a roll.

Donald Norman brought Gibson’s notion of affordances into the world of human-computer interface design and focused the concept on those actions “perceived” as possible or likely by a user of an interface by combining the operations of affordances, signifiers, and constraints.²⁵ Rather than exploring any action made possible by the relationship between the physical properties of an environment and the capacities of a user, Norman focused more on the possible uses that would make sense to a user when encountering an interface.²⁶ Understandably, Norman is focused on intuitive and useful interface design, with primarily the designer in mind and wanting to facilitate affordances that are readily apparent to a user. One of the reasons I will stay closer to the more generic notion of affordances offered by Gibson as we discuss bible as interface is to distance our discussion from the singular intent of the “appropriate” or “proper” use of a technology as determined by the designer.²⁷ The concept of affordances will allow us to discuss the possible relationships between bible and user across several different technological environments.²⁸

Suggesting New Capacities

A third aim operative in this exploration of bible as interface is to demonstrate new capacities and new literacies demanded of biblical scholars to critically study bible as our technological landscape shifts. Here I am inspired by the work of John Miles Foley’s Pathways Project,²⁹ the Academic Book of the Future Project,³⁰ and the ongoing work of the Experimental Humanities @ Iliff working group.³¹ As bible interfaces proliferate in a technological landscape that prioritizes the production of more interfaces though APIs and other programming frameworks, my close handling of emerging bible interfaces beyond the book points toward new languages, new tools, and new mechanisms of close reading that will need to become a part of training biblical scholars of tomorrow. Learning basic skills in emerging technologies such as Python, XML, JavaScript, and APIs will give scholars powerful tools to further analyze and ask new questions of the antique data set with which they have worked for centuries. Without these literacies, the careful critical edge of biblical scholarship will decline as bible exceeds the boundaries of book as we know it. In this study, I only begin to signal the kinds of capacities we will need to continue to explore the rich life of bible and its use. More than articulating a specific set of tools necessary for an emerging generation of biblical scholars, I hope to practice a process of inquiry that can be expanded and adapted as quickly as the technologies with which we work.

Defining Bible

One last definition is in order before I provide a basic roadmap for where we are headed in the rest of the project and that definition is of bible. At its basic etymological and translational roots, bible means book. When referring to sacred writings, the neuter plural of βιβλιον was most often used, τα βιβλια, which slowly transitioned to a feminine singular in Latin, which is where we get the singular “bible” referring to the collection of Christian sacred writings.³² From its roots, bible is a material artifact even at the linguistic level, being related to the papyrus material from which roll books were made in antiquity. Before we ever get bible as collection of sacred writings or as generic authoritative work, we have bible as book technology. Though etymology does not determine the meaning of words, this historical entanglement of form and content in the construction of the word “bible” already anticipates the work we are doing here regarding bible as more than the content it might contain.³³ With a nod to this technological etymology, when I use the term bible in this project, I am referring to the technologies that afford the use of Judeo-Christian sacred writings. I refer to “use” of sacred writings to signal that there are many uses of bible beyond simply reading, but my analysis here will be primarily focused on readerly type uses, even if some of the emerging bible interfaces we consider might challenge our conceptions and boundaries of reading. Though the important distinctions between conceptions and use of bible in the different Judaisms and Christianities that emerge from antiquity are absolutely worth considering, I will save that work for future explorations and will make no claims about the content boundaries of these sacred collections.

Making a Path

Though some terms remain to be more fully explicated in the coming portions of the study, such as interface and proximity, we have enough of a background now to articulate the plan for what follows. With the help of Johanna Drucker’s work on interface theory and the Humanities, I will begin with a look at interface as a way of interrupting the reduction of bible to the content it contains and direct our attention to the relationship of user and platform in the construction of bible as a space of encounter that provokes probabilistic production. Having a working notion of bible as interface, I will then use the idea of proximity in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of human subjectivity as an optic to argue for bible as an interface that affords an entanglement of nearness and distance through high surface area, collaborative capacities, and anarchic tendencies. The remaining chapters will trace this entanglement of nearness and distance as evidenced by high surface area, collaborative capacities, and anarchic tendencies through the bible interfaces of roll, codex, Kindle, web, extensible markup language (XML), mobile app, and application programming interface (API). All along the way, we will see the material media translation at work in these emerging interfaces, which will foreground the materiality of each of the interfaces and the capacities necessary to critically engage them.

1. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002). ↩

2. For our purposes here, the larger category of book denotes a technology that involves the fastening together of discrete pieces of material to gather and set boundaries for a writing or collection of writings, which is primarily governed by the structure of the page. This broad definition of book encompasses roll books, palm leaf books, codicies, and Kindle books. A codex is one particular book technology that uniformly folds pieces of material, usually papyrus, parchment, or paper of some sort, and fastens these folded bundles together at one edge to form a spine. See Roberts and Skeat, The Birth of the Codex, 1, for a discussion of this definition, where they add “usually protected by covers.” Because of the codex’s predominance as a book technology since as early as the fifth century C.E., in today’s parlance, book and codex are used interchangably. ↩

3. Here again, given the broader definition of book I put forth above, bible beyond book suggests something more than simply bible beyond codex, even though codex has come to dominate our cultural imagination of book. ↩

4. Robert Kraft, “The Codex and Canon Consciousness,” http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/other/journals/kraftpub/Christianity/Canon, accessed on April 24, 2017. ↩

5. Even the fact that we call web objects pages suggests the durable presence of the codex and print on our media sensibilities. Yet, as Walter Ong noted in his Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 133, there is a secondary orality at work in the “scrolling” we use to navigate these “pages” of the internet. The language we use to talk about emerging technologies provides a strong reminder of the palimpsestuous nature of media translation. ↩

6. This draft electronic writing eventually gets published in print as chapter 14 in Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Hendrickson Publishers, 2002). ↩

7. Mcluhan, Understanding Media, 10. ↩

8. Robert Kraft, “The Codex and Canon Consciousness,” http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/gopher/other/journals/kraftpub/Christianity/Canon, accessed on April 24, 2017. ↩

9. Early experiments in the construction of interfaces as a part of this project can be found at http://aproximatebible.postach.io. Though largely hidden to the reader, I am still taking Kraft’s lead in small ways by composing my dissertation in a syntax developed for web writing called markdown (https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax, accessed on June 10, 2017) and then converting markdown to Word document formatting using a command line document converter called pandoc (http://pandoc.org/, accessed on June 10, 2017). ↩

10. Thanks to Benjamin Peters for demonstrating this helpful structure of combining a single thesis with multiple aims. ↩

11. My approach to materiality as a challenge to the dominant textualism of both biblical scholarship and the study of religion has been formed by S. Brent Plate’s development of methodologies in material religion in works such as “The Skin of Religion : Aesthetic Mediations of the Sacred,” Cross Currents 62, no. 2 (June 2012): 162–80 and A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014) as well as Manuel Vasquez’s explorations of the limits of textualism in More Than Belief: A Materialist Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ↩

12. Plate, Key Terms in Material Religion, iv. ↩

13. See http://script-site.net/ and http://iconicbooks.blogspot.com/, accessed on June 11, 2017 for more information on SCRIPT. The Institute for Signifying Scriptures can be found at http://www.signifyingscriptures.org/, accessed on June 11, 2017. ↩

14. Johanna Drucker, “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013). ↩

15. See Gregory Grieve, “Digital” in , Key Terms in Material Religion, ed. S. Brent Plate (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015), 58-60, for an example of the digital being more about computing than any sense of discreteness that would be perceivable by users. ↩

16. Jeffrey S. Siker, Liquid Scripture: The Bible in a Digital World (Fortress Press, 2017). Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2010). Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2016). ↩

17. Media and new media are vastly expansive terms that can encompass things such as technologies, art, books, and even bodies. Understanding that it is a drastic reduction, I will use media and technology interchangably in this study. For excellent examples of considering the connection of emerging technologies to the technologies that gave rise to them, see Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002) and Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). ↩

18. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7-8, writes, “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium-that is, of any extension of ourselves-result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” ↩

19. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8. ↩

20. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8. ↩

21. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8470433r ↩

22. Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus 1v view 15, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8470433r/f15.item taken from the iOS app Gallica by Bibliothèque nationale de France https://appsto.re/us/FhPFH.i. ↩

23. James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” in Perceiving, Acting and Knowing: Toward an Ecological Psychology, ed. Robert Shaw and John D Bransford (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum ass., 1977) and later expanded in James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York, N.Y.: Psychology Press, 2015). ↩

24. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 125, writes, “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” A critical piece of Gibson’s theory is the relational nature of affordances and the way affordances problematize any binary between subject and object. An affordance is not simply a property of an object or of a subject, it is a possible relationship of encounter between participants in the encounter. We will see that this notion of affordance has affinity with the operations of interface. ↩

25. Norman 2013, 145. ↩

26. In the first chapter of the revised and expanded edition of The Design of Everyday Things, 12, Norman tells the story of his relationship with Gibson and their fundamental disagreements about the interpretive role of the brain in the relationship between agents and objects. Norman is clear about his indebtedness to Gibson and the important contribution Gibson made to helping designers pay more attention to the information offered by the physical world. ↩

27. In Norman’s definiton of signifer, The Design of Everyday Things, 14, we can see this emphasis on the proper at work. He says, “For me, the term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator that communicates appropriate behavior to a user.” This signifer as indicator of “appropriate behavior” is different than an affordance, which is a possible relationship between a surface and an agent, a platform and a user. Norman does allow for accidental or unintentional signifiers, yet, his emphasis on understandability as connected to the communication of “appropriate behavior” could lead toward design governed by determining mechanistic consumption rather than provoking probabilistic production. ↩

28. My approach of tracing the affordance of proximity across many bible interfaces throughout history is informed by N. Katherine Hayles’s “Media Specific Analysis” methodology demonstrated in “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis,” Poetics Today 25, no. 1 (March 20, 2004): 67–90. ↩

29. http://www.pathwaysproject.org/, accessed on June 12, 2017 and John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition and the Internet: Pathways of the Mind (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). ↩

30. https://academicbookfuture.org/, accessed on June 12, 2017 and Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner, eds., The Academic Book of the Future (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). ↩

31. http://library.iliff.edu/humanities/, accessed on June 12, 2017. ↩

32. LSJ, s.v. “βιβλιον” and Michael D. Coogan, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 75. ↩

33. See Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1983) for more details on the role of bible in the rise of the codex, Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997) for the role of the codex in the emergence of Christian reading practices, and Timothy Beal, The Rise and Fall of the Bible : The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) for the role of emerging media transitions in our cultural imagination of bible. ↩