If there’s one statistic everyone knows about the Bible, it’s that it’s the best-selling book of all time. Less known is that the best-selling artist of all time is a Swiss Bible illustrator; that the earliest illustrated Bible may well come from Ethiopia; or that the country that produces the most Bibles today is China, the same country that banned many Bible apps.
This is just a sample of “Bible superlatives” that reflect the Good Book’s global reach. According to Wycliffe stats, just over 50 percent of all languages have some portion of the Bible, reaching up to 98 percent of all people. For a set of books written in a small sliver of the ancient world, that’s a remarkable feat. And everywhere the Bible has gone, it has changed its readers and, in turn, been changed by them. As Bruce Gordon, professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale Divinity School, writes in The Bible: A Global History, “Every new Bible lay at the crossroads of cultures, and no translation existed without inheriting linguistic, theological, ritual, and political legacies” (55).
The Bible: A Global History
Bruce Gordon
For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. In The Bible, Bruce Gordon tells the astounding story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ radically different needs. God speaks with one voice, but the people who receive it are scattered and divided—found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages.
The Good Book as a Great Book
In telling how this ancient book of books has gained audiences that stretch into every corner of the globe, Gordon has done something unique. Yes, we get the usual coverage of the English Bible: Wycliffe’s controversial defense of putting the Bible in English, Tyndale’s inspiring sacrifice to give it to the plowboy, the towering achievement of the King James translators—it’s all here. But we get so much more. We get a history of Bible illumination; the Bible in the age of science; the Bible and global missions; and, notably, whole chapters on the Bible in Africa, Asia, and global Pentecostalism. This is a book that delivers on its subtitle.
The Bible’s value for its many readers is reflected in a range of splendid Bibles. This includes the 6th-century Rossano Gospels whose parchment was dyed purple and inscribed with silver ink. Jerome famously decried such opulence as sinful decadence. But this didn’t stop illuminators. Another famously illustrated Bible is the gigantic Codex Gigas, a Latin Bible from the 13th century weighing nearly 170 pounds and famous for its full-page depiction of a red-horned, green-faced Devil (from which it was nicknamed the Devil’s Bible).
The value of the Bible for its many readers is reflected in a range of splendid Bibles.
By the time of the Renaissance, a new set of Bibles appeared whose size wasn’t measured in pounds but in columns. Known as the great polyglots, these Bibles combined the biblical text from multiple ancient languages—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and so on—side-by-side in order “to demonstrate the breadth of God’s revelation and the frontiers of human learning” (150). The cost to make one of these great polyglot Bibles is the equivalent of about $30 billion in today’s dollars, comparable to the entire budget of NASA in the 1960s.
The Good Book as a Misunderstood Book
Far more than a history of particular Bibles, The Bible is a history of Scripture’s readers. Though consistently evenhanded, Gordon challenges popular misconceptions. He dispels what he calls “one of the greatest mistruths perpetuated by the Protestant Reformation”: the notion that “the Bible disappeared during the Middle Ages” (108). In fact, it was everywhere.
There’s a risk, however, of overcorrection. The medieval church wasn’t as unified as Gordon sometimes suggests. One only needs to read Wycliffe’s writings to see that the Bible wasn’t always a source of “a universal bond” among the medieval faithful (129). The upheaval of the Reformation sometimes masks the disunity of the time before it.
When it comes to the scientific revolution, far from being eclipsed by the new empiricism, the Bible was central to thinkers like Galileo, Newton, and Bacon. “The question with which these thinkers grappled,” Gordon writes, “was not really whether the Bible was still relevant in a world in upheaval but how it was so” (179). The Bible couldn’t be so easily shelved.
Even in places like the antebellum South and the European colonies in Africa, the Bible had a way of finding a welcome home among those it was used to subdue. In the South, slaves found hope in the exodus account and in the story of Jesus who was abused and brutalized but ultimately vindicated by God. In Africa, Desmond Tutu was known to say the white man came to Africa and said to the Africans, “Let us pray.” When they got up, the white man had the land and the Africans had the Bible—to which Tutu was known to occasionally add, “And we got the better deal!” (373). As a result, there are more Anglicans today in Nigeria than in the United States and United Kingdom combined.
The Good Book as the Laypeople’s Book
Of course, the Bible hasn’t spread on its own. It has been translated, published, and carried to new lands. Laypeople have often been at the forefront of such efforts.
Two organizations that deserve more credit for this than perhaps any other are the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Gideons. The former was inspired by the story of 16-year-old Mary Jones, who walked a reported 28 miles to obtain a Bible in her native Welsh. In its first 30 years, the society printed and distributed more than 8.5 million Bibles in 157 languages. The Gideons was another lay-led and lay-run Bible organization. Founded by two Bible salesmen in 1898, it has distributed over 2.5 billion Bibles in travel locations all over the world. Everywhere people go, the Bible has gone with them. The Bible has an amazing history.
Everywhere people go, the Bible has gone with them.
Gordon’s The Bible is a feat of good storytelling. Despite the narrative’s huge range, it never gets bogged down by any single character, place, or idea. If there’s one consistent thread, it’s the tension between the Bible as both a universal and a particular book. It always takes shape in particular places with particular people in their particular cultures—and yet it has a way of constantly breaking those bounds in new and surprising ways. From Gordon’s sprawling, fascinating history, we conclude the Bible isn’t just a global book but a living and active one too.