



The Bible
A Global History
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
“A marvelous work of scholarship and storytelling" (Wall Street Journal), offering a global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book
For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture.
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. The Bible has been a tool for violence and oppression, and it has expressed hopes for liberation. 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.
Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible tells the story of this sacred book through the stories of its many and diverse human encounters, revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yale Divinity School history professor Gordon (Calvin) delivers an ambitious study of how a collection of prophecies, poems, and letters became a sacred text that has shaped cultures. Styling the Bible as a migrant, he describes how diverse writings—the rabbinic Bible, the four Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles—coalesced into canon through "worship, reading, and devotional practices," then were spread by "merchants and colonizers" to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. There, local communities adapted the "alien" book through a mix of cultural blending, reinterpretation, and even rebellion. For example, theologians in 20th-century China drew comparisons between Confucianism and biblical texts, Native Americans centered themselves in biblical stories (a group of 18th-century Mohican converts renamed themselves Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, declaring themselves "patriarchs of a new nation of believers"), and a charismatic 20th-century Baptist catchetist in the Democratic Republic of Congo formed the "Kimbanguist" movement, which rejected "the God of the missionaries" but revered Christ. Smoothly capturing a sprawling and complex history, Gordon frames the Bible as a cultural artifact and a dynamic site where identity is negotiated; a force that binds communities; and an arena where foreign influences are contested. The result is a fascinating look at how the "most influential book in the world" came to be.