The Bible

‘Wonderful’ JOHN BARTON

‘A stupendous intellectual achievement’ ANDREW PETTEGREE

‘A stunning love song to the Bible . . . this will be a classic’ CHINE MCDONALD

The remarkable story of the most influential book in human history.

The Bible is the world’s best-known text. Yet, it is a book that never was – its original form does not exist and probably never did. What we have is the inheritance of generation after generation of Christians who have sought to hear God speak. Available in over three thousand languages and taking innumerable forms, each version is a revelation, evolving as a reflection of its own culture and moment.

Bruce Gordon traces the Bible’s astounding journey from its emergence as a codex in the second century, to the Reformation, to the spectacular growth of Christianity in the Global South today. For centuries a source of inspiration, it has also been a tool for violence and oppression, weaponised in the name of colonialism, and it has expressed hopes for freedom in the struggle for liberation. Found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages, it has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, a product of more than two thousand years of wandering, restlessness and change.

Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible is a sweeping history of this sacred book told through the stories of its diverse human encounters in search of the divine – revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.

Author Biography

Bruce Gordon is the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School. He taught at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland where he was professor of modern history and deputy director of the St. Andrews Reformation Studies Institute. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and the University of King’s College, Canada. He is the author of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin, a biography of the Genevan reformer, and Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet. He has written widely on early modern history writing, biblical culture, Reformation devotion and spirituality, and the place of the dead in pre-modern culture.