Epilogue

There’s an image worth holding, at the close of a book like this one.

Imagine a reader, some years after he’s finished the book. He’s sitting in a chair, perhaps in the early morning, perhaps in the late evening, with his Bible open on his lap. The Bible is the same Bible he had when he started. It’s, perhaps, more worn than it was. Some of the pages have been marked. A few of the margins carry the kind of small notes a reader makes when he’s stopped at something he wants to remember.

He’s reading a passage. It’s a passage he knows. He’s read it many times. The English is the English he’s always read. But he’s reading it differently than he once did. He’s reading slowly. He’s sitting with the small word at the beginning of the verse. He’s thinking, quietly, about what the original might have carried. He’s letting the cultural distance settle before he lets the verse mean what it means. He’s hearing, behind the verse, the long tradition of readers who’ve read these words across the centuries.

He isn’t, in this moment, doing scholarship. He isn’t running an academic exercise. He’s reading his Bible the way he now reads it. The reading has become a habit. The habit has become a part of him. The book is somewhere on a shelf, probably — he hasn’t opened it for a long time. He doesn’t need to. What the book wanted to give him, he has. He doesn’t have to be reminded of where the toolkit is. The toolkit is in his hands.

He is, on this morning or this evening, doing the thing the book was hoping he would do. He’s reading scripture as the people of God have been reading it for two thousand years — patiently, with care, with the original setting in his ear, with the long memory of the church listening alongside, with humility about his own modern assumptions, and with the great hope that the words he’s reading were given so that he could draw nearer to the One who gave them.

The book isn’t in the room. The book has done what it can. What’s in the room is the reader, and his Bible, and the God scripture testifies to. That is all the book ever wanted to be in the room.

The work of forty-one chapters has stood on the work of many others. The book is grateful, in a way no acknowledgment can fully express, to the scholars whose decades of careful research made the recoveries possible — the linguists, the textual critics, the cultural historians, the theologians, the patristic specialists, the translators. Some of them are named in the chapters; many more aren’t. The For Further Reading appendix at the back of the book points to a small selection of them. The bibliography behind those pages is much larger than what the appendix shows.

The book is grateful, too, to the traditions that have carried scripture through the centuries — Jewish and Christian, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern. The recoveries the book has been making aren’t new. They’re recoveries that one tradition or another has been preserving the whole time. The book has tried to honor that preservation honestly, without privileging any tradition over the others, because the gift belongs to all of them.

The book is grateful, most of all, to the reader who carried it through forty-one chapters. The book asked him to slow down, to read carefully, to sit with words he didn’t know in languages he doesn’t speak, to hold cultural settings he’d never imagined, and to consider readings that may have been new to him. The book knows this isn’t a small thing to ask. The reader who’s done that work has done something that matters. The book is glad he did it. The book hopes he’ll keep doing it — not by reading more books like this one, but by reading his own Bible, the one he had when he started, the way he now reads it.

A final image, smaller than the first.

The Bible is closed. The reader has finished his reading for the day. The chair is empty. The day is beginning, or the night is. The scripture he’s been sitting with is in him, somewhere — not as data, but as the kind of presence that comes from sitting with words for a long time. He walks out of the room. He goes about his life. The Bible stays where he left it, ready for the next time he opens it.

The book is somewhere on a shelf. The toolkit is in his hands. The reading is older, and richer, and closer than it once was.

That is what the book has been for.