How many books have been written about Jesus?

By John Pearring

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/053020.cfm
Acts 28:16-20, 30-31
John 21:20-25

In a single day, we might have five or six fairly significant and memorable things happen to us. That’s a swag, of course, but let’s just average five.

Most of the things we remember at the end of the day will be mundane experiences, but with a twist. Like popping up two perfect pieces of toast — no burnt parts, butter is soft and at the ready — and you grab the still hot toasted pieces. You just can’t get over how nothing went wrong. That’s memorable.

Among the five memorable things, there’s likely one big deal. Some one thing that we should jot down in a journal. Big deals usually involve others — a communication that either sets us on edge or brightens our day. You know, a phone call from someone we love; or, more trauma oriented, someone we don’t like; or, a message we didn’t want to hear. 

Daily memorable things are probably not earth-shattering. But they are something we can talk to our wife about, or mention to one of our children, or share with our friends. “I was at the car wash today, and the dagnabbed sprayer just kept going and going. I cleaned, washed, rinsed, and waxed the entire car with only 8 quarters!”

I figured out how much space it would take to write about the things that happen to us. Five things a day would take up to two pages of explanation. That comes out to 1,825 items in a year. Let’s say we wrote an entire book on each thing, as preposterous as that sounds. I’m trying to visualize a claim made by John from the gospel today. 

There are also many other things that Jesus did,
but if these were to be described individually,
I do not think the whole world would contain the books
that would be written.

Over a three year period, if we wrote an entire book on five memorable things in our lives every single day, that would add up to 5,475 books. 

Seems like a lot of books. But it’s not. According to Wikipedia, 2.2 million books are written worldwide every year. Now, if we use our three year time period, that’s 6.6 million books. 

Why the three-year time table? According to the Apostle John, he didn’t think the whole world would contain the books that could be written about what Jesus “did.” I’m assuming John meant during Jesus’ three years of ministry. To associate our calculations above, five significant things a day by Jesus adds up to 5,475 books. That’s not going to be too hard for the world to contain.

That’s not what John meant, though.

John penned 21 Chapters in his Gospel. Was he only referring to scripture books? No, but it isn’t possible to say that describing individually every single thing that Jesus did in his ministry could be that overwhelming for John to say, “I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.” 

Isn't that just hyperbole? Maybe not. Consider the years of articles and books written about Jesus.

By book in Jesus’ day, of course, we mean scroll. There is, however, a mathematical way to calculate the number of scroll/books that have been written from Jesus’ time to ours. John wasn’t just referring to his day. I believe he pointed to the volumes of writing over time.

Every year over year, during the last two thousand years, the writing of scrolls and books has increased on average 1% per year. Hypothetically speaking. We can use the current 2.2 million books written per to estimate the actual number of books written every year since Jesus’ resurrection. 

I did the math. At 1% per year, the total comes out to 4.4 trillion books written worldwide over 2,000 years. 

How many of all those books are about Jesus? 

Taking another short cut, I used the actual number of items in the Library of Congress — 136 million books, codices, and scrolls — as the fraction of what might account for the number of Jesus-like books in the world. Why? Hey, we’re just guessing here. So, divide 136 million by 4.4 trillion, and that means .0031% of all books ever written are about Jesus. That sounds fair. 

How many essays have been written about Jesus in 2,000 years? They’re kinda gospel-sized writings.

The answer to that is incalculable. But I’ve been incalculable all along, so let’s imagine the internet’s composite of stuff written about Jesus. We could then consider every news article, and every blog, and every kind of publication that’s out there ever written about Jesus.

According to Science Focus, an online magazine hosted by the BBC, the composite of information in the entire world is something like parsing out 1 trillion items times the 1.2 Petabytes of data stored on Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. Use 1 trillion as a multiplying, because Google, et all, comprises just the information in the commercial cloud. We need to account for the information stored on individual computer drives not hosted in the cloud. We’re now talking about Zettabytes, which are 1,000 times larger than Exabytes, which are 1,000 times larger than Petabytes.

So, if you take my earlier swag of .0031% of all written items as the general percentage of information written in the world specifically about Jesus, then you’d have a method of visualizing the number of items written about Jesus.

For brevity, the number is 4% of just one Zettabytes or 40 Exabytes. I did some more math that calculates printing out 40 Exabytes onto 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper. I figure 40 Exabytes of pages would cover the earth 2 layers deep.

Looking at what John said, then, he’s almost right. Two layers of pages all over the world, however, isn’t covering the earth with books. But, if you realize I’ve only done this pages calculation on the currently existing digitized data, the coverage of Jesus’ individual events happening in his three-year ministry, and a factor of only 1% per year growth in writing over 2,000 years.

Consider also that Jesus more likely came close to 100 significant interactions with people per day over his 3 years of ministry. The viral nature of his impact, just through personal contacts, which personally contacted someone else, and so on, would surely explode Jesus’ impact beyond any other living being in human history.

Now we're talking some deep stack of pages — if you had a hankering and enough paper to perform the task. John’s hyperbole has come to fruition, then, since books, unlike money, does grow on trees.

There are also many other things that Jesus did,
but if these were to be described individually,
I do not think the whole world would contain the books
that would be written.