Gospel Reflection for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Bible in the Time of Jesus
In the Gospel today, Jesus is handed not the Bible, not a “book”, but a scroll of Isaiah.
We are so accustomed to having the entire Bible printed in a single volume that we forget how radically different the Bible was in the time of Jesus.
For example, nobody could walk around with a Bible in their pocket. Nobody read the Bible cover to cover. The Bible as a single volume came later.
In the beginning, the Bible was a collection of scrolls. Because the scrolls of the different books of the Bible were expensive to own, almost all Jewish people only “heard” the Bible, they did not “read’ the Bible.
When the Bible was read, it was a public performance, not a private affair. Because the Bible was a collection of individual scrolls, it was not clearly apparent to people in the time of Jesus and the early Church which scrolls were divinely inspired Scripture, and which scrolls were not.
They were mixed together. Nobody had made a “list” of the Biblical books. Once books became more popular than scrolls, the Christians began to collect the “scrolls of the Bible” and put them together.
It was only at that moment that for the first time, they had to really ask the question: which books go in the Bible and which don’t?
Sorting out the books of the Bible took time, and the Catholic Church was able to accomplish this task with the Holy Spirit and a few great saints.
(From ePriest, January 2025)