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Why Christians Love Books

A Brief History

Article by Tony Reinke

Staff writer, desiringGod.org

The published works of John Piper brought together in thirteen volumes are scheduled
for release in March. Gather up some pennies and clean off some bookshelf space
because the whole set measures just under 8,500 pages (or three million words) in total
length.
Turning from paper to pixels, the total number of words on desiringGod.org right now
adds up to about 12.3 million (excluding our 120 published books). About 8.5 million of
those words (or 70%) are from Piper himself.
Add his books to all his other digital content, and Piper is responsible for at least 11.5
million published words. Start reading all of Pipers writings, nonstop, at the average
pace of 200 words per minute, you would be reading from now until Valentines Day
2020.
Shrug. What can we say? Christians are a wordy people.
Pipers output may be abnormal, but the bookish nature of Christianity is not. We can
trace our evangelical bibliophilia all the way back to the beginning of the Christian
church, writes Larry Hurtado in his new book, Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian
Distinctiveness in the Roman World.
What built the bookish tradition in the first three centuries of the church? And how
was it unique?

1. Early Christians embraced letter-writing.

We formally call them Epistles, but theyre really just what the people of the day
would think of as letters circular letters to be shared and read aloud. Christians
embraced letter-writing, as the letters of Paul, John, and Peter all attest.
We grow familiar with the Epistles, and we lose the distinctiveness of letters. But
Hurtado writes, I know of no other philosophical or religious group of the time that
exhibits an appropriation of the letterform as a serious vehicle for its teaching that is
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comparable to what we see in letters of Paul and subsequent Christian texts, such as the
letters of Ignatius of Antioch and other ancient Christian writers (121).
In the serious business of legacy-building, the ancient aristocrats were not using letters.
Christians were.

Christians will not stop writing until the earth is

submerged under a second global flood a tsunami
of truth.
This pattern didnt end in the first three centuries, however. The model was carried on
by the prolific letter-writing ministry of John Newton, for example. In eighteenthcentury England, several factors came together so that letter writing emerged as the
popular social media of Newtons day, and religious leaders like Newton turned to
pastoral letters, sometimes writing letters that rivaled sermons in both substance and
usefulness (Newton, 22).
Newton is a later example of the early Christian skill in capturing the potential of the
available social media of the day for edifying gospel purposes.

2. Early Christians wrote serious letters.

According to one foundational study, about 14,000 ancient papyrus letters from the
Greco-Roman era have been preserved. The average letter is 87 words long.
Essentially, these letters served basic and simple communication needs, says
Hurtado, such as assuring the recipient, I am well and I trust that you are, too.
A letter of 87 words just happens to be the optimal length for a good email, which
uploads the discussion to the digital age. Boomerang, an email marketing service,
tracked all the emails sent from their services in 2015 to determine an optimal length.
At the end of the year, they determined that the most effective sales emails were
somewhere between 75 and 100 words in length.
So perhaps we can think of the average length of a Greco-Roman papyrus letter and the
average length of an optimized email as virtually the same. (Nobody wants long
emails.)
Now, factor in the rare ambitious letter-writers of Rome, who took advantage of
elaborated letter-writing: Ciceros 796 letters range from 22 to 2,530 words, and
Senecas 124 letters range from 149 to 4,130 words.
The Roman word counts are dwarfed by the Pauline totals, though. Pauls letters include
2 Corinthians (4,450 words), 1 Corinthians (6,800 words), and the granddaddy, Romans

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(7,100 words).

Early Christians favored texts over temples. Pagans

built buildings. Christians wrote books.
No doubt conditioned by the lengthy writings of the Old Testament, Paul was a prolific
longform writer, and for his verbosity he gained the reputation as a small guy who
wrote huge letters (2 Corinthians 10:10). So when the Roman Christians first received
Pauls letter, they were probably more stunned by the letters length than by its
content (121).
Christians were not only letter-writers, they were serious letter-writers, and they
pushed written words to the limit, and beyond.

3. Early Christians wrote a lot.

Early Christians wrote not only letters, but also books.
Early Christianity was distinctively bookish, not only in the place that the reading of
certain texts held in their gatherings, but also in the sheer volume of production of new
Christian texts, writes Hurtado. And this composition of texts was a remarkably
prominent feature of the young religious movement. If we confine our attention again
to the pre-Constantinian period, you can readily get a sense of the efflorescence of early
Christian literature by casting your eye over the table of contents of volume 1 of the
valuable catalogue of early Christian literature by Moreschini and Norelli. There are at
least two hundred individual texts mentioned there, dated to the first three centuries
(118).
These two hundred texts published by being carried and copied by hand! are
comparatively astonishing in the Roman world, writes Hurtado. The number and
substance of the writings produced is all the more remarkable when we remember that
all through this early period Christians were still relatively few in number and small as a
percentage of the total Roman-era population. In fact, to my knowledge, among the
many other Roman-era religious groups, there is simply no analogy for this variety,
vigor, and volume in Christian literary output (119120).
It was not the custom of religious movements to adopt letter-writing. And it was
certainly not the custom of religious gatherings to publish volumes of texts from such a
small and budding movement.

4. Early Christians favored texts over temples.

The variety, vigor, and volume of books by Christians became even more remarkably
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countercultural when set in contrast to the dominant religious milieu of the GrecoRoman world.
The Christians approached religious devotion by text, not by temple, Hurtado points
out. For other religious movements of the day . . . there are the remains of numerous
shrines and dedicatory inscriptions, but no texts. For early Christianity, however, there
are no known church structures or inscriptions prior to sometime in the third century
AD, but there is this huge catalogue of texts (119120).
Early Christians favored texts over temples. Pagans built buildings. Christians wrote
books.

5. Early Christian writers were not motivated by fame

or money.
The variety, vigor, and volume of books by early Christians is also astonishing because
those writers were amateurs. Unlike Roman philosophical texts, early Christian letters
and books were not written by professional writers in comfortable accommodations.

Early Christian writers were not elites or

professionals. They wrote on the run, in prison, and in
exile.
This is especially so for the earliest texts, such as those that make up the New
Testament, given that Paul and other early Christian authors were neither professional
writers nor of the wealthy and leisured classes with slaves to attend to their needs and
with copious free time, writes Hurtado. Even the second-century writers such as
Justin, who is reported to have styled himself as a Christian philosopher did not
belong to the leisured, wealthy, and well-connected circles of contemporary pagan
authors such as Fronto or Celsus (128).
Early Christian writers were not elites or professionals. They wrote on the run, in prison,
and in exile. Indeed, in the case of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, we have writings
composed by a Christian en route to execution in Rome! Furthermore, throughout the
period that we are focusing on here, the motivation of Christian writers was not so
much personal fame, and certainly they had no hope of fortune (12829).
Many Christians write today prolifically some professionally, but many are literary
amateurs. We do it for love of crafting words, love of seeing beauty, love of speaking
truth, love of serving others, and love of glorifying God. And all of us write in spaces far
more comfortable than where the first Christians spilled ink.
The path to fame and wealth, for 99.9% of Christian writers today, will never be found
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in writing orthodox books. For most Christian writers, writing is a calling that feels a lot
like a side-job (at best). This is more normal than we realize.

Bookish
Christianity is bookish. Books, letters, and literacy form an ancient bond between the
publishing in digital media, and the co-opted social media in the earliest days of
Christianity (letters). We are still a people of the Book. We are readers. We are writers.
We are forward-looking people, bookish people, and we will not stop writing and
publishing until the earth is submerged under a second global flood a tsunami of
truth (Habakkuk 2:14; Isaiah 11:9).
Early Christians embraced the technology of the day, and used it for serious truth. They
wrote long, and they wrote a lot but they didnt wait until life was comfortable to
write. Their writing habits were counterintuitive to the image-building pattern of the
Greco-Roman world. And this is our heritage today: We are bookish people people of
words, words, words, in service of the God who is holy, holy, holy.

Tony Reinke (@tonyreinke) is a staff writer for Desiring God and the author of three books: 12 Ways
Your Phone Is Changing You (2017), Newton on the Christian Life: To Live Is Christ (2015), and Lit! A
Christian Guide to Reading Books (2011). He hosts the popular Ask Pastor John podcast, and lives in
the Twin Cities with his wife and three children.

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