Why we should all be using printed Bibles
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
It’s not uncommon in churches, when the time comes for the Bible reading, to see people reach not for a printed pew Bible, but for their phones, to read the Bible on a phone app. Since the pandemic, people have become even more nervous about picking up a printed Bible in church—despite the lack of evidence of any risk, this is a hangover from the first regulations in March 2020, when it was thought that Covid-19 could be transmitted via surfaces.
When I was in a session at New Wine a couple of years ago, the speaker at the morning Bible study (Miriam Swaffield) commented that she thought it was better for people to read print Bibles than read them from a screen. It made me sit up, since I say this frequently when teaching in different contexts, but this was the first time I had heard someone else say it from ‘up front’. When I commented on this on social media, I was taken back by the torrent of reactions—I hadn’t realised that this was quite such a controversial suggestion!
Electronic texts are very useful for certain purposes. I probably spend 98% of my time working with the electronic text of the Bible on my computer, because I am often looking for particular texts and wanting to copy the English or Greek into something that I am writing. (It isn’t very easy to find the seven occurrences of ‘cried out in a loud voice’ using a specific grammatical construction in the Book of Revelation in a printed text!) And I will often read on my phone (using the same app, Accordance) when I want to read along in Hebrew or Greek in a church context.
Some people read on their phone because it is easier to make the type size larger (this concerns people of a certain age!)—for the sight-impaired, this is really important—and electronic texts allow you to read in different translations easily and compare them. But I suspect that the reason why most people read the Bible on a phone app is because
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