Reflection for April 6

[The] Bible: not a book but a plurality of books, as its names in Greek, Latin and even Anglo-Saxon proclaim. The Greek Biblia is in the plural and the Latin and later scholarly Anglo-Saxons made a direct borrowing from the classical Latin word for ‘library’ when they called the bound volume which we call a Bible first a bibliotheca and then a bibliodece. It is a pity that other languages and modern Western usage have forgotten this earlier realism of the Western Church about its canonical sacred literature. What it reminds us is that there are many voices to be heard within the Bible (Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History).