way interfere with the positive roll that allegory could and did play in the life of the Church
throughout the middle ages.
Gutenbergs invention in the mid-1400s changed everything. It affected at least three different
but overlapping areas in the history of Bible reading and interpretation: 1) the very individuals
who actually had access to reading and interpreting the Bible; 2) how the Bible was actually read;
and 3) how the Bible was interpreted. As a result, the printing press was the foundation upon
which the people of the story became the people of the book. Lets examine each of these three
areas in more detail.
First, concerning the change of access. Before Gutenberg, Bible reading was confined to the rich
and/or religious elite who--either through wealth and/or through religious training--had access
to the laboriously handwritten, and thereby very costly, scrolls--and later books--that were the
Bible. Gutenbergs new technology changed all of this by taking Bible making out of the
scriptoria and into the printing press houses. The reading of the Bible subsequently moved out of
the exclusive domain of the elite and into the hands of the masses when the less expensive
mechanically printed books eventually became available to everyone. This change of access was
also one reason for the demise of the story approach to the interpretation of the Bible. No longer
was the Bible interpreted mainly through the storytelling of the Catholic priests/storytellers
(again, primarily through allegory). Indeed, allegory had flourished because it leant itself so
readily to the limitations of hand-written manuscripts as well as the social situation of the non-
reading masses. Now with the printing press came the possibility, for the very first time, that any
person could read and interpret the story for his or her self. A priest was no longer needed to read
the Bible nor to interpret it. This was a revolutionary development. It is not surprising, then, that
one of the very first things that the reforming Luther did was to translate the Bible into German.
Significantly, his translation was not into the high German of the elite but rather into the low
German of the common people. Why? Because now the new technology of printing allowed
everyone the opportunity to read the Bible for themselves and thereby to grasp the reality of
theological concepts like sola scriptura and the priesthood of the believer. Thus, in a very real
sense, the new technology available to the Reformers made the Reformation possible. For
example, Luthers insistence on the priesthood of the believer--theologically possible since
Pauls writings--was technologically possible only with the advent of Gutenbergs invention.
Second, concerning how the Bible was actually read. Gutenbergs new technology ushered in one
of the greatest changes in learning: not just mass-produced books, but books that were read
silently. The hand-written books of the middle ages were read out loud by those few privileged
individuals who had obtained both literacy and copies. Now the increasing availability of printed
texts brought with it a strange silence and a solitary learning. Thomas E. Boomershine notes:
"The sounds of the Scriptures continued to be read aloud but increasingly in a normal voice
without intonation. The availability of texts made it possible for private reading of the texts to be
a normal context for study and interpretation. The accreditation of interpreters shifted from an