Paper

In my capacity as a school governor, I regularly get emails which feature this injunction:

"Please consider the environment before printing this email"

This is a continual source of amusement to me. Why would I print an email? And why would I do so after considering the environment?
Surely if I consider the environment I'd be even less likely to print an email? Even less likely than 0%. Well maybe not zero. I have very occasionally printed an email for someone that didn't have a computer. Despite the growing ranks of silver surfers, I know there are still people like that!

Another similar thing happens every day when I get an email from United Christian Broadcasters. They're obviously well up with technology - in fact I downloaded their app this morning. I do like their daily devotional email, which is usually the first thing i read in a morning, and often hits the spot. (you could subscribe to it here i think) But then further down the page it says, Can we send you a copy? Meaning they'd really like me to have the paper versions of the thing I just read for this quarter. How odd! What a waste of a tree that would be.

Somehow many people have an underlying assumption - I could even say prejudice - that a 'hardcopy' of some information is the superior format. This seems to come from years of conditioning that an electronic version is somehow temporary, insubstantial.

A dear friend bought a laptop and used it to compose his sermons. He would then print them out, and having preached he would stash the paper away in storage. Then he would delete the computer file. Exactly the opposite of what I do! If for some reason I can't use my iPad and I do have to print out a sermon, the paper version doesn't survive the day. But the digital version is there for when I search my computer the next time the same topic comes up. (Not that I believe in recycling sermons - just the paper it's written on).

Paper is very fragile stuff. Having a single paper copy of any document or book is not exactly reliable. It doesn't compare well with the book I'm currently reading, which I have downloaded on 4 separate devices, and can be recovered from Amazon's servers should I somehow lose all 4.

Paper as we know it hasn't always been around of course - it is a relatively modern technology. Before that there was clay tablets, papyrus, and parchment. All rather fragile - and so the only way an ancient document is likely to reach us is if it was copied. More copies mean more chance of a whole document surviving down the ages.

This is True for the New Testament more than any other book. There are some quite staggering statistics about this that people should know about. There is some information on this in the Alpha Course book. For instance, there are just 8 surviving copies of work by the Ancient Greek, Herodotus, from the 3rd century BC. These copies date from the 10th Century AD. Or take Livy’s Roman History, written 59 BC – 17 AD. Again we don't have the original, but we have about 20 copies dating back to 900 AD. So what are the figures for the New Testament? How many copies of the originals do we have, and how long after the events were these copies made?
Well there are incomplete copies dating back to within a few decades, not centuries of the events themselves, and the complete document from about 350 AD. But the amazing thing is the number of those copies. Not just a few - 10 or 20 which are enough for any other document to be considered perfectly legitimate. In fact there are 5000+ Greek, 10000 Latin, and 9300 other language versions in existence. The Bible really is far and away the most reliable ancient document. Nothing else is even in the same league. And yet people question it's origins and its veracity, while glibly accepting Roman histories on comparatively the flimsiest of evidence.




John 5:39-40
You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you possess eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

Location:Shed