The Bible is not safe

Jesus stands on the front cover of Bruce Gordon’s new book, The Bible: a global history, gripping a thick, gold-plated book that is studded with jewels yet held together more by the golden threads wrapped around it than by any real binding. Even before the Bible graduated from being a collection of scrolls to a single codex, bound along one edge in the way we are used to seeing books today, it was being translated, shared, prayed, sung and debated over by people across the known world.

In confident, easy-to-read prose, Gordon takes us on a journey through time and space, showing how this book has transformed societies and historical eras, often in ways that the people distributing the word of God found very disturbing. This is a global history of Christianity, told from the perspective of a book that is living and active, dividing and uniting communities of readers around the world. 

Gordon’s opening chapters tell of the Bible’s journeys from the Middle East across Western Europe and North Africa as far as the Caucasus, India and China. He explains how a collection of letters and books became scripture, and why the Ethiopian Bible has up to 84 books while most Protestant Bibles only have 66.

Gordon walks the reader through debates over translations and explains why one version was more popular than another, with a young Augustine having the impertinence to tell Jerome that he could not use the new Vulgate Bible because Jerome had mistranslated parts of the book of Jonah.  

The core of Gordon’s narrative focuses first on Western Europe - especially Britain - and then on North America, covering individuals and places that readers will find familiar enough that it is difficult to lose one’s bearings. At the same time he introduces a multitude of anecdotes about non-Western cultures. While Roger Bacon was trying to correct errors in Latin Bibles from his home in 13th century Oxford, scholars in the kingdom of Askum were revising the Ge’ez Old Testament based on an Arabic translation from the Hebrew and monks on Mount Athos in Greece were integrating passages of scripture into a new form of mystical prayer known as Hesychasm.

The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution all took place in Western Europe, and Gordon does not disappoint with his lively yet balanced accounts of Wycliffe’s radical attempts to put an English Bible into the hands of his followers, Erasmus championing Greek manuscripts against what he saw as a corrupt Latin text, Martin Luther claiming that some biblical books were more important than others, and Anabaptists trying to interpret the Bible themselves, without the authority of the Catholic Church to support them.

The reliability of the Bible as the Word of God was questioned by sceptics such as Thomas Hobbes and Hugo Grotius during the Scientific Revolution as they began trying to understand who the original writers of the Bible were and launched a line of questioning that would finally come into its own in the 19th and 20th centuries. Change is usually hard, and Gordon points out that the King James Version, which today is so beloved by large numbers of Christians, was quite unpopular when it first appeared. English Christians preferred the Geneva Bible that they had grown up with, and it was not until the king forbade any more Geneva Bibles from being printed or distributed that the King James Version came into its own. 

Gordon uses the Bible’s journey through Puritan, Algonquin and slave communities in the North American colonies to remind us that the Bible is not a ‘safe’ book, but that it is has constantly been reinterpreted in unexpected ways. The same message emerges from his accounts of the Bible in China, Africa and Latin America, where it was cherished and interpreted quite differently than in Western Europe. Always a lively story, The Bible: A Global History uses the past to bring an old book to life for a 21st century world. 

The Bible: A Global History by Bruce Gordon (Basic Books) is out now