This was a plot device in a recent film. Even naming the film in this thread would be a spoiler.
The Book of Eli
If you opened that spoiler, and still want to see the movie, don’t open this one Man in post-apocolyptic world has last copy of the Bible left after a nuclear war, memorizes it, and fulfills his holy mission by reciting it back to a man in a print shop who transcribes it as part of an effort to re-create a library of the world’s classic books.
But there’s one more spoiler that I won’t even include in a spoiler box. The temptation would be too great and the spoiler too much spoilage.
Shoot, I went to Biola U, La Mirada, CA, USA, and there was a Romans class that traditionally had the exemption that if you could sit down and reasonably write Romans from memory, you passed.
I assume that with all the scripture memorization going on in different parts, it could be reassembled.
With all the copies that exist it would be surprising if we lost it. With all the commentaries and research publications we have, even if all copies of the Bible vanished, we’d have no problem at all restoring it. In several variants, no less.
Here’s a very similar but different question that I have asked. Many works of literature from the ancient world have been lost, but we have summaries of them, and occasional quotations. the Little iliad, The Returns, several ancient Greek plays (like Phaethon).
So what if we never really had the Bible. What if the Jews had been wiped out, and the early Christians, too. Maybe a meteorite struck the ancient Near East. In any event, all we had were Josephus and Eusebius and portions of the Talmuds and suchlike. How close would our reconstruction of the Bible resemble the Real Thing?
The problem with this hypothesis (and I may be verging on GD here) is that all books are written by people. If such a book had ever existed, who would have written it? People, based on how they interpreted the Word however it may have come to them. As such, it would be subject to corruption, or utter and complete fabrication, from the get-go.
I am not aware of any cases in scripture where God was said to have written anything, with the possible exception of the 10 commandments on the tablets given to Moses. (However, I am far from a religious scholar so I do not pretend to speak with authority on that.)
Well, if you’re an orthodox Christian, you believe that Jesus was God. It has always seemed to me odd that we have no canonical account of anything actually written by Christ (although, according to Luke, he could definitely read and write). There are apocryphal letters attributed to Christ, such as the letter to the Armenians, but nothing in the New Testament that is either supposed to be by him (which is pretty odd, when you think about it), or affirming that he ever wrote.
On the other hand, we do have things that he was definitely supposed to have said. In classier printed Bibles, these direct quotations from Jesus were printed in red, precisely because they were supposed to be the Words of God. Including, notably, the “Our Father”. There’s a reason this is called “The Lord’s Prayer” – he prefaces it, in his sermon, by saying “this is how you should pray.” So the New Testament quotations are supposed by Christians to be, if not the written Word of God, at least his dictated words.
This question reminded me of Fahrenheit 451, and the ending (I’m assuming no spoilers) that talks about the ability of humans to recall everything they’ve ever read, under the proper conditions (hypnosis, perhaps?). I don’t know how much actual science there is to that–probably not much, I guess–but if Bradbury was going from a theory he’d heard of, perhaps the ability is somewaht real and might solve the problem.
