When I was a young Jesus Freak (in the 1970's) I used to see fellow Christians marking up their Bibles assiduously during sermons or teaching. I tried that, too, but found it made the Bible unreadable for me, My attention was drawn to the markings and not the text.
For the last so many years I have stopped marking in my Bible in any way at all except light pencil marks that are erasable to show the beginning and ending of passages that I have copied. Now I keep everything of interest in a notebook and I copy the passages I want to learn.
Before the 1500s, all copies of scripture we manuscript: hand written. I am in the process of making my own manuscript of the Bible, and I have learned that it is a very slow process. The manuscripts, being all hand produced and sometimes beautifully decorated, were extremely costly to produce and very expensive to buy. It would be unthinkable to mark them up.
As Bibles are relatively inexpensive now, if you want to mark yours up, go right ahead, but I am treating mine with care so that it will last. I read (and copy) the Bible for at least two hours a day, and I am going very slowly, and only touch the text with a pointer rather than my fingers in order to keep the pages clean. But I have pages and pages of notes and copies of the text to aid me in my studies.
