Now consider how hard it was to write a message in Bible times. Writing materials were expensive except for the rich, who wrote in gold, or colored inks and dyes. Poor folk scratched small thoughts on broken bits of clay pottery.
Note that some scrolls like the book of Isaiah took 17 sheets of parchment. And the Isaiah scroll is 24 feet long and ranges from 10 to 10.6 inches high with 54 columns of text.
John likely wrote on papyrus or parchment. He made a pen out of reeds and made ink from soot, gum, and water.
Using the King James Version as a measure, we find that The Book of John contains over 18,000 words, a good-sized novel, all likely scratched on hand-made paper, with homemade ink and pen.
According to Google, there are 609,269 words in the Old Testament and 179,011 words in the New Testament, making a total of 788,280 words.
Every word of The Word was written with difficulty, yet the people writing each part felt their experience was important enough to record for others.
John closes with this. “There are so many other things Jesus did. If they were all written down, each of them, one by one, I can’t imagine a world big enough to hold such a library of books. (John 21:25, MSG)
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