Some 30 years ago I led a university expedition to the northeastern highlands of Ethiopia. Our aim was to explore this remote region and record the ancient churches, both built and hewn out of rock, their treasures and particularly their manuscripts. Ethiopian Christianity, which dates back to the 4th century, is largely a manuscript culture. We did not ask when we came to a church, “Do you have manuscripts?” but “What manuscripts do you have?” There were always the Gospels, the Epistles of St Paul, sometimes other books of the Bible, various services books and lives of the saints. In no church did we find a complete Bible. The reason was soon obvious. A manuscript Bible is vast and expensive. Only the richest monasteries might possess one, and it might well occupy several folio volumes. Not until printing was invented did it become possible for churches to have a whole Bible, and so to know the sequence and order of the books of the Old and New Testaments. Even after that time was needed for printing and paper to become so fine and small that it was possible to hold up a Bible and say “This is the Word of the Lord”.

For 1,500 years the greater part of Christian history, Bible and church had the kind of relationship that I found in Ethiopia. What is more, the books of the Bible were not exactly the same across the Christian world. The Ethiopian Bible today includes the Book of Enoch, which was influential on parts of the New Testament. The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, included books which were not in the Hebrew scriptures, and these became what we know as the Apocrypha. Although the generally accepted books of the Hebrew scriptures were largely recognised by the time of Jesus, it was only at the end of the 1st century AD that the Hebrew canon was finally closed. The New Testament canon was established only in AD367. The four Gospels and St Paul’s Epistles were recognised, but other books took longer to be acknowledged by the Church, and there were other texts not in the New Testament today which sometimes appeared as part of the New Testament. So it took almost three centuries or more for the Christian Bible as we know it to be recognised. The Bible did not drop down from Heaven, it emerged over a period of time, as Christians recognised the authentic witness to the revelation of God and, at the centre of that revelation, Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate. So for Christians the Word is always a person before it is a book.

Holy books — sacred scripture — always need interpreters. This is true of the Jewish commentaries and expositions. It is true of Christian commentaries, sermons and reflections. To say that the Bible is the Church’s book is to say that it reflects the common faith of the Church. It is that common faith and tradition which are embodied in the teaching of the Church; just as the scriptures are normative for testing new teaching both doctrinal and ethical.

For the Christian the scriptures point to Christ, and, as well as being read and heard publicly in the worship of the Church, they are to be used and pondered on reflectively. The author of the Letter of Barnabas, one of those books which was sometimes in, and in the end, out of the New Testament, tells his readers that when they have learnt the just demands of the Lord, as contained in the scriptures, the proper thing is to make them the rule of one’s life: “Love your Maker, reverence your Creator, glorify Him who ransomed you from death; be single of heart and exuberant of spirit.” We are to indwell the scriptures that the spirit of God may indwell us. As one of the best-known collects of the Book of Common Prayer puts it: all holy scriptures are written for our learning, and we are so “to read, mark, learn and patiently digest them, that, by patience and the comfort of God’s holy word, we may ever embrace and hold fast to everlasting life”.

The Right Rev Dr Geoffrey Rowell is Bishop of Gibraltar in Europe