The Bible: A Global History

Wall Street Journal:  ‘The Bible’: A Book on a Mission, by Barton Swaim (reviewing Bruce Gordon (Yale Divinity School), The Bible: A Global History (2024)):

“One hundred years from my day,” Voltaire is supposed to have remarked, “there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.” Things haven’t worked out that way. The Bible is the foundational Scripture of a religion claiming a third of the planet’s population. Millions of copies are printed and sold every year, in hundreds of languages. Millions more are downloaded as apps and audiobooks. The Bible is printed and read illegally in some places, mocked and vilified in others, argued over everywhere. Its texts are studied, memorized, preached, interpreted and reinterpreted in churches, seminaries, small groups and prisons in every part of the world.

In “The Bible: A Global History,” Bruce Gordon chronicles the Christian Bible’s progression from a collection of ancient Hebrew and Greek texts—our word “Bible” is derived from the Greek biblia, “books”—to its present status as, in the author’s appropriately ambiguous phrase, “the most influential book in the world.”

Mr. Gordon, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale, is an accomplished historian of the Protestant Reformation; his 2009 biography of John Calvin is the finest modern life of the reformer. “The Bible,” in many ways a history of Christianity itself, is a marvelous work of scholarship and storytelling. Mr. Gordon chronicles the Christian canon’s beginnings and the early efforts to collect manuscripts into codices. He describes the Bible’s profound influence on the largely illiterate population of medieval Europe and its transformation into a source of individual spirituality in the Reformation and after. He relates the cultures of Bible-reading that sprang up in Europe and the New World and finally the Bible’s spread to India, Africa, South America and East Asia by the work of numberless translators, zealots, preachers and missionaries. ...

That the Bible and Christianity have diminished in importance over the past century is one of those things every Western social and political observer knows, or thinks he knows. Mr. Gordon’s global perspective preserves him from that error. For decades an array of Christian faiths, all holding to the divinity of a resurrected Jesus Christ, have undergone explosive growth in China, Africa and South America. These traditions, Mr. Gordon writes, “identify with parts of the Bible often ignored by Western liberals, particularly passages about healing and spiritual warfare, as well as apocalyptic expectations and readings that generate a palpable suspicion of the secular world.”

Mr. Gordon’s history frequently upends the liberal account of religious decline, nowhere more so than in his explanation of the Bible’s role in the so-called Enlightenment. That “so-called” is the reviewer’s, not Mr. Gordon’s, but his narrative avoids the usual equation between biblical adherence and intellectual shallowness. Galileo, for example, who was forced by ecclesiastical authorities to renounce his ideas on a heliocentric solar system, didn’t view himself as departing from biblical orthodoxy. “Despite his final forced recantation,” Mr. Gordon writes, “the story of Galileo is about different attempts to claim and defend the Bible. His was a revolution from within rather than an external attack on scripture itself.” The question with which Galileo and other thinkers of his era grappled “was not really whether the Bible was still relevant in a world in upheaval but how it was so.”

Mr. Gordon’s narrative teems with long-suffering scholars, translators and missionaries but also with schismatics and sociopaths moved by biblical texts to do remarkable, and sometimes terrible, things. Always, however, the result is that the Bible advances further into societies formerly resistant to it.

Christianity Today:  Tracing the Bible’s History Through Time and Space, by David W. Kling (Miami; Author, The Bible in History: How the Texts Have Shaped the Times) (reviewing Bruce Gordon (Yale), The Bible: A Global History (2024)):

In one of his many insightful essays, the late missiologist Andrew Walls asked whether one could detect a coherence or continuity over 2,000 years of Christian history. He proposed that one theme stood out most: the ultimate significance of Jesus. Beyond that, he noted that Christians have affirmed the same sacred writings, instituted some form of baptism and Communion, and displayed an awareness of their historical connection to other Christians.

Walls didn’t prioritize the influence of these other enduring facets of the faith. One wonders, though, whether this framing understates the centrality of the Bible. After all, Scripture is the source of what we know about Jesus, the two basic Christian rituals, and the “communion of the saints.”

In all its variety, Christianity is a religion of God’s address to humanity, communicated through the words of Scripture. Indeed, as Bruce Gordon argues so eloquently in The Bible: A Global History, the sacred text “is the story of a life force,” rooted in our “ongoing effort to hear God.”

Gordon’s substantial book is a welcome first. Much contemporary scholarship on the Bible’s history has focused on questions of how it came into existence and whether we can trust its historical claims.

To be sure, Gordon engages these issues. But they are secondary concerns in a narrative emphasizing how the Bible was produced, copied, adorned, illustrated, memorized, printed, marketed, commodified, distributed, annotated, translated, sung, and interpreted across the ages.

Gordon’s compelling, sensitive, accessible, and balanced work is a Christian people’s history of the Bible through time and space. It’s a story of how Christians have lived in and through the text in countless ways, both “positively and negatively,” through “all the human senses.” ...

Reading Gordon’s work, three major themes come to the forefront: We see believers treating the Bible as an object of devotion. We see them translating the Bible into different languages, idioms, and cultural contexts. And we see them engaging with the Bible as a channel of personal communication from God. ...

The Bible is a remarkable work of original synthesis, weaving many strands of scholarship into a coherent and lively narrative. ... Gordon concludes with a promising, if somewhat underdeveloped, claim that “the Bible’s global history is a reason for hope.” To support his assertion, he notes the increased accessibility of the Bible on the global stage, the numerous translations that enable people to see themselves within its narrative, and the multiple readings of Scripture and niche Bibles that speak to the needs of particular communities of faith.

These developments reinforce Gordon’s thesis that “every claim to the clarity of the Bible, from Augustine and Martin Luther to Billy Graham, has been immediately challenged.” There’s no question that Christians have long disagreed civilly and sometimes violently over beliefs and practices derived from Scripture.

But if the Bible is “the greatest story ever told,” if it offers grounds for hope, surely the ultimate reason is just what Andrew Walls has proposed: the significance of Jesus and the gospel message. Is it possible to separate the (admittedly messy) story of the Bible’s history from the one whose life, death, and resurrection brought it into being? Those are the perennial questions at the heart of Gordon’s splendid book.

Editor's Note:  If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.