Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 4, 1992 TAG: 9201040207
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DAVID BRIGGS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BIBLE SCHOLARS DISCOVER THE EFFICIENCY OF COMPUTERS
The image is etched in popular television culture: A monk slavishly illustrating each character of the Bible is ordered to speed up production. His solution: a copying machine.Fast forward a few years and the same monk probably would do little more than put a copy on a computer disk.
For better or worse, Bible study has caught up with the computer age. Without ever picking up The Book or any book, biblical scholars can call up selected passages in Greek, Hebrew or English at the touch of a button.
The same biblical researchers who five years ago likely did their work at a library desk with concordances and various biblical translations spread out before them are more likely to be found today hunched over their computer terminals.
"About four or five years ago, it was more of a curiosity," said Mark Rice of Seattle-based Hermeneutika, which sells computer software to Bible scholars. "There's been a real turning point - '89, '90 '91. Basically, the case has been made and proven: Doing Bible study by computer is more efficient than doing it by hand."
Popular software programs such as QuickVerse, BibleSource, WORDsearch and MacBible allow clergy and other interested individuals to do fast searches for words or passages in the Bible. What can take hours with a concordance and a Bible can be accomplished in minutes on a computer.
For scholars doing more sophisticated research, software programs offer similar services for a variety of translations even in the original languages used by the biblical authors.
Not enough? How about a program that allows one to quickly find how a word is used in Greek literature, from Homer to the Byzantine period.
John Hughes, author of "Bits, Bytes and Biblical Studies," said that today, he could find twice as many references for a Greek word in 20 minutes as he could spending a week poking around a university library when he was a doctoral student.
David Lull, executive director of The Society of Biblical Literature, says that scholars who resist using computers are rapidly becoming a dying breed as they, like writers discarding typewriters for word processors, discover the efficiencies offered by computer-assisted research.
"As soon as you use it, you know it," Lull said. "It's just been like a prairie fire. It just took off."
But even computer enthusiasts admit there are some potential pitfalls.
"I guess thinking that it automatically makes you smarter and wiser, which it doesn't," Hughes chuckled.
With so much information so easily available, researchers may get overwhelmed by the volume and some may end up publishing articles that provide little more information than how many times a word appears in the Bible, as though such evidence in and of itself is important, said Robert Kraft, professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
"The computer has probably both speeded up research and slowed it down," Kraft said. "You tend to get overwhelmed with a whole lot of things. . . . We need to find ways to control that in a useful way."
Once that is done, even the medieval monks who slaved over every handwritten copy of the Bible may find their work reaching larger audiences as computer technology permits the work to be reproduced on a disk.
Scholars throughout the world who once would have been limited to looking under the glass cases in libraries and monasteries where the remaining copies of the older Bibles are stored would then be able to study the monks' calligraphy on their own office computers, Kraft said.
And there still is room for the printed Bible, even among ardent supporters of computer-assisted biblical research.
"If I want to spend some time with the Lord in devotional time, I think most people don't carry their computer," Rice said.
David Briggs has reported on religion for The Associated Press since November 1988. Briggs received his master's degree from Yale Divinity School in 1985.