(This post was originally written as part of a series of Bible Journaling blogs for a site and app called Journal Owl)
In this article, we will deep-dive into the history of how readers of the Bible have digested the Word over centuries and what that means for us who wish to engage with the Bible in creative ways today.
First things first
Whether you are brand new to the idea of Bible Journaling, or you have old dusty boxes of filled-to-the-brim journals hidden away in your garage, there are two key things that you need to understand about this practice. 1: The Bible is the essential and major source for the life of faith of any believer. 2: The Bible is alive. It moves its readers into action, and it multiplies within their hearts causing them to create more space for it to exist in their lives (a.k.a. journaling).
1: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” - 2 Timothy 3:16-17. As a Christian, the Bible is a crucial part of our daily diet: a staple food. The Word of God is what causes us to respond creatively with our hands to what we experience within our hearts.
2: There is a second foundational assumption that Bible Journaling is based on: The Bible is alive. “The Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” -Hebrews 4:12. In this Scripture we see that the Bible is not something to be passively observed. It does not leave its readers untouched. Instead, the Bible truly has the ability to come alive and have transformative effects on us.
The same God who created you with your gifts, talents, and skills is the One who is inviting you into a conversation about the Word. He will not ask you to be anything that you are not. The only thing you need to be to try Bible Journaling is: hungry for the Word.
Getting into the Word is similar to getting onto a bicycle. It just won’t go very well the first time, but it is a skill that you can practice and hone. But our God is kind and merciful, and we can even ask him to give us a desire or hunger for His Word if we struggle to have it. This can look like a simple prayer asking him to increase your appetite for the Bible. Martin Luther (we will hear more about him later) also famously wrote the following about the book of Romans: “The more frequently you engage yourself with this letter, the more valuable and appetizing it becomes!”
How can we allow the Bible to come alive for us as well? Should reading the Bible be a monologue or a dialogue between us and God? Is there any way that we can respond to the text that we read? Do we read the text or do we let the text read our lives? How can we make sense of what we have read? Taking a look back at the history of Bible Journaling will help us to answer these questions.
Bible Journaling redefined
One spiritual practice to see the Word ‘come alive’ is called Bible Journaling. Even though this specific name is gaining quite some popularity today, we will explore in this article how the concept of Bible Journaling has been around for centuries.
Today, when we speak about Bible Journaling we imagine a believer sitting down with a journal notebook and their Bible, and a mass of art supplies to either use in a notebook or in the margins next to the Bible text. But Bible Journaling is firstly not a scrapbooking activity, or at least: that’s not what it used to be. It is clear that the Creator God who we read about in Genesis has also placed the seed form of creativity inside humans. With a modern understanding of what it means to Bible Journal, we would expect to find pages that people wrote or painted on that are snuck into the covers of Bibles - but this is not always the case.
Bible Journaling actually refers to any creative way of engaging the Word. It is about allowing the Holy Spirit to direct you to process what you have read in new and fresh ways. It is allowing the Word to come alive inside your heart (and hands!).
To journal about the Bible is to creatively respond to the text that you have just read or heard. People have been responding to the written word of God for as long as it’s been in existence. The history of Bible Journaling is an unexpected treasure map. The ways that older generations went about this dialogue might have looked very different from what we would categorize as Bible Journaling - but that just indicates a beautiful invitation for us to think more creatively about how we engage the Word.
Understanding the history of Bible access
In order for us to have a thorough understanding of the history of Bible Journaling, it is important to start with the history of access to the Bible. Three factors are important to consider here: literacy, paper, and access to the Bible.
1: Literacy is one part of the reason why Bible Journaling as we know it doesn’t go back that far. Reading and writing are often assumed to be a normal part of daily life that has been around forever. We like to imagine Adam writing Eve a love note on a fig leave! But before the Middle Ages (500 - 1500 CE) illiteracy was very common. The few who did have access to learning how to read and write came from wealthy families. They would go on to use this uncommon skill to serve society in matters such as law and church leadership.
2: People also did not have access to limitless supplies of papyrus (or other materials used to make paper), which led them to create sculptures, buildings, and carvings on stone to tell their tales. Paper was not invented until 105 CE, and paper as we know it only became common in the 19th century.
3: Another possible reason why Bible Journaling looked different through the ages, is because of limited access to the Bible. The Bible was a book that could only be read by a select few for the longest time. Clergy, the leaders in churches, were the only ones who were deemed qualified to even touch a Bible. The Word of God was otherwise accessed by hearing when people would go to churches and hear the clergy read from the Bible. As we will see below, in most oral cultures around the world, people then used imagery (sculpting, drawing, painting, carving) to help them retell and remember these stories.
This limited access to the Bible is evident in Scriptures like this one in the letter of James 1:22 “Don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.” In today’s age, we could reword this verse to “Don’t just be readers of the word”, but James said “Don’t just listen to the word” because the majority of people would hear the word, not read it.
The printing press was automated around 1430 and from then onwards, access to printed Bibles became easier. In 1522, a monk named Martin Luther published a translation of the New Testament from Ancient Greek to Contemporary German. From that point onwards, Luther dedicated the remainder of his life to translating the rest of the Bible into a language that common people could have access to.
Does this mean that Bible Journaling only started after the 1500’s when Bibles became widely accessible? Some would say yes, but when we look at history we can see many traces of how people also journaled, responded to, and created because of hearing the Word.
Bible Journaling, but not on paper?
These three factors help us to understand why and how it is possible that there are different historical traces of Bible Journaling - that are not on paper or in books... Ever since the first disciples, people have been moved by hearing or reading the Word to create all kinds of wonderful things. The scope of creatively responding to the Word is much wider since it ranges from practices like painting and writing poetry to the composing of music and even architecture.
It’s similar to when you hear a quote that you don’t want to forget, so you quickly grab a pen and paper to write it down or enter it into Notes on your phone. Think of family photo albums or recipe books. People write down / draw down the things that they wish to remember. When we Bible journal, we pen down something that we learned from the Word of God that we do not want to forget. Bible Journaling is in essence just that: writing down and creatively showing what you experienced when reading the Word. Why? Because we want to remember and dwell on the goodness of God.
If we argue that Bible journaling has to always be on paper, then it is clear that for these early believers, the world was the canvas.
A look at Bible Journaling through the years
Let's explore the long-forgotten history of how many followers of Jesus have engaged with the Word through centuries. How did people try to remember the goodness of God? Interwoven with these accounts, you can find dates stipulating the origin of the Bible as we know it. This will help us understand where the shift came towards Bible Journaling as we know it today. It’s important to note that this is by no means an exhaustive list, rather it is the beginning of a journey of discovery into history to find accounts of Bible Journaling. The aim here is not to mention the most famous or note-worthy examples of people engaging with the Word, but to show that there were in fact many different ways of Journaling the Bible and to get our creative juices flowing as we ponder on new ways to do just that.
1200-165 BC -The Old Testament sacred Scriptures were written and distributed among the clergy.
Jewish believers would hear the twenty-four scrolls of their holy texts (some of what we know as the Old Testament) read to them by clergy, and they would try to remember as much of it as they could. The Hebrew bible was with the people in their synagogues where it was read to them and memorized.
There are only a few interesting archaeological inscriptions and artifacts from this time that could be seen as the very first moments when people responded creatively to the Bible. But those that we do have are astonishing! These include stone carvings depicting the story of Jonah, a Lion-and-Calf bowl (Isaiah 11), and reliefs that show images of the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25). It is clear that people were creating imagery and visuals to respond to the Biblical accounts that they heard - the earliest forms of Bible Journaling.
33 CE -
After the time when Jesus walked the earth, His twelve disciples and the crowds were very faithful in responding to His Gospel message and the Great Commission. Christianity spread throughout the world in the following two millennia, and it is still spreading today. What this means is that we can see traces of people responding creatively to the Word throughout the whole earth. There are fingerprints of the Bible throughout history.
Christianity was first spread through oral accounts, as we learned above, and we find many traces of imagery (sculpting, drawing, painting, carving) used to retell the accounts of Jesus.
50 - 100 CE -The New Testament Scriptures and Jesus accounts were written and distributed.
96 CE - An Early Church Father, Clement of Rome, a disciple of Peter, wrote a letter to the church in Corinth where he comments on what we would consider Old and New Testament texts. This can be seen as Bible Journaling, because he reflected on the Scriptures and then responded by sharing his interpretation: “Jesus Christ our Lord, in accordance with God’s will, gave his blood for us and his flesh for our flesh, and his life for our lives”. This is almost like reading the Word and grabbing your notebook journal to document some thoughts and revelations that you’ve had about it.
There were also many theologians and philosophers from this time who were literate, or who had scribes, which brought about a large amount of written sources on the faith - and more specifically, the Scriptures.
200 CE -The Muratorian Canon, which resembles the New Testament the closest, was compiled. Even though the Bible as we know it was now in existence, it would be another 1300 years before the public has access to it. In the following examples, normal lay people did not yet have access to the Bible in written form. Unless they were clergy, they heard the Bible read to them in churches and responded with these actions to remember.
400 CE -
One of the oldest archaeological signs that we can see of people expressing Christianity was engraved in a stone with the words “Christ Born of Mary” that was found in 2021 in Northern Israel.
Beyond stone carvings or buildings made by the laity, we have evidence that those who did have access to Bibles engaged in it creatively. Scribes were used to rewrite and replicate the scrolls of Scripture that existed to make new copies, and we find beautiful imagery on these that put the story into a visual piece of art. We call this an “illuminated manuscript” - You can think of it as placing a beautiful artwork border around a page of text. These images were not only for aesthetic reasons: This was one of the first steps towards ‘translating’ the Bible for the common person. Only, it was not translated into a different language, but from text to image, a different medium altogether.
800 CE- The Book of Kells was put together: a picture book that tells the stories of the New Testament. This shows a very early form of Bible Journaling in a sophisticated style.
1105 CE- These elaborate stone carvings were done at the monastery at Noravank. This is a beautiful early example of how people expressed messages of faith through architecture and sculpting.
Today, we have access to many beautiful artifacts from this time in history that point to engagement with the Bible, or at least the Gospel oral narratives, like limestone carvings of angels found in churches.
1519 CE - Scholars and teachers of the Bible like Martin Luther engaged with the Bible in creative ways when they taught their students. The first similarity to what we would recognize as a Journal Bible is commissioned to be printed by Luther: Bibles with wide line spacing, and big margins on the sides where he encouraged his students to take notes.
1522 CE - Bibles became commonly accessible to the public. This was the first time in history that common people could directly journal from / respond to the Word, and not through the secondary hearing of the Word preached in a church.
An early form of Bible Journaling existed in that early print runs of Bibles included artworks such as this one to illustrate the narratives.
When Bibles became a common household item, people cherished it so dearly that they would never consider writing in it. Families would display their Bibles on tables in the hallways, and the Family bible would have a page with a kind of family tree. The Bible became the most valuable possession in the household, and people stored other valuable paper products inside it like marriage certificates and family photos.
As books started to become more affordable, people started the practice of marginalia or margin notes. Believers started to write the date of reading, thoughts, or comments in the margin next to the Scriptures that they read.
1700 CE - A practice called “extra-illustrating” became famous. This meant taking apart books to add your own images and rebinding them. It was in many ways the earliest form of what we know as scrapbooking. People would not yet do this with the Bible, since it was seen as a holy text, but we see extra-illustrating done with many other kinds of books. When it came to Bibles, they would add such pages in between the pages loosely.
1990 CE - Wide Margin Bibles became a popular purchase, and a new market arose for avid Bible Journalers (or Note-takers!)
2023 CE - In a world filled with smartphones and devices, there are now also many modern variations of this ancient spiritual practice. Bible Journaling today takes on new forms through mobile applications, and video content on Youtube.
Since most people have access to the Bible and paper today, Bible journaling has also come to closely resemble the idea of Bible scrapbooking. But in the same way that these glimpses into history we looked at here are very real accounts of people engaging with the Word, it can be said that every modern Christian song, painting, building, or book that exists is still a form of Bible Journaling!
Everybody can do it!
Now that you have a thorough understanding of the beautiful history of how other believers have utilized the tool of Bible journaling, there is just one thing left for you to do: Explore how you would want to go about responding creatively to the Word yourself. As we have seen by taking a walk through history, you do not need to be an artist or have the budget for supplies to become a person who engages with the Bible in creative ways. This is a wonderful and freeing realization. There is not one correct way to respond to the Word.
If you are still unsure about where to start, you can engage with others to find out about ways that they engage with the Word. JournalOwl is the perfect place to do just that. Through our extensive programs, we encourage believers to explore different ways of digesting the Word and engage with others in critical discussion on what they find. You can attempt video clip journaling or voice journaling (you talk, we type).
Bible Journaling can also be defined by the words of Colossians 3:16 "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord."
Will you be able to bring what you read into your workplace? Do you want to attempt symbolizing a Bible story that you can walk through in your garden? Or will you make a Mosaic tabletop that tells your favorite miracle story? Will you tell your grandchildren about His goodness? What are the marks that you are going to leave on the canvas, that is the earth, to remember the goodness of God?
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