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 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.

“Many Christians are more curious about whether or not their dog will be in heaven than seeing the face of Jesus there.” If you can’t say amen, say ouch. That’s from my friend Cameron Cole’s new book, Heavenward: How Eternity Can Change Your Life on Earth (Crossway). Cameron is founder of Rooted, a ministry dedicated to fostering gospel-centered student ministry. True to this opening statement, he says, “To long to be in heaven is to long to be with Christ.” In his book, he aims to stoke the fires of our longing for eternity with Christ. Sometimes I’ll explain hell this way: If you don’t want to be with Christ, then you won’t want heaven. Or, if you’re too much in love with this world, or expecting too much from this world, you won’t want heaven. Or if you think you’re basically good and the world basically works well for you, you might not see the need for heaven—or at least not hell, where God judges the sins that seem to go unpunished on earth. Even so, we were made with eternity in our hearts. Cameron writes, “Our hearts were made for perfect love and perfect fellowship. Nothing short of this standard will quench the pain and yearning, and nothing close to this standard will come to us in the fallen earth.” Cameron joined me on Gospelbound to tell his heavenward story, how he envisions heaven, the biggest barriers to living the heavenward life, and more.

Much deserved

On the one hand, NBC Nightly News was the only evening network newscast to acknowledge that there were dueling protests on occasion of the first anniversary of Hamas’ barbaric Black Sabbath attack against Israel. On the other, the network both-sidesed the protests. Watch the report in its entirety, as aired on NBC Nightly News on Monday, October 7th, 2024 (click "expand" to view transcript): NBC NIGHTLY NEWS 10/7/24 7:12 PM LESTER HOLT: The (10/7) anniversary met with remembrance and rage in the U.S., with pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators marking the attack and the deadly war it sparked in Gaza. Stephanie Gosk has our report. STEPHANIE GOSK: Demonstrations growing tonight on the anniversary of the October 7th attacks, fueling familiar tensions across the country, especially at Columbia University. How do you feel with this demonstration going on here on campus today? STUDENT: I feel unsafe as a Jew. We are a group of people just supporting and mourning the loss of lives taken. That's all we want to do, is to mourn. GOSK: Pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many with faces covered, calling for an end to the war. PROTESTER: People are dying. We're doing nothing about it. GOSK: Outside the gates, pro-Israel demonstrators waved flags and prayed for the hostages amid heightened security. First-year grad student Sara Kashani says she considered not studying at Columbia. SARA KASHANI:  It's hard, as a proud Jew and a proud Zionist, to commit to a school that doesn't value you as a person. GOSK: While for many today was a day of remembrance, recognized by President Biden with a candle lighting ceremony in The White House, nationwide, universities have been bracing for protests. At USC, and the University of Maryland. STUDENT: On this day in particular it's very difficult for the jewish community. STUDENT: This is our chance to make sure that our campus community is actually aware of what's happening in Palestine. GOSK: In the last year, schools have struggled balancing freedom of speech and safety on campus. University presidents testified on Capitol Hill. MICHAEL SCHILL: I'll be the first to admit our existing rules and policies are falling short. GOSK: The clashes at colleges reflecting growing antisemitism and Islamophobia in the country. More than 10,000 antisemitic incidents in the last year. And a 69% increase in complaints about islamophobia. Tonight there are dueling protests in New York including here in Times Square. There’s a large police presence and they’ve set up barricades to prevent confrontation. Lester. HOLT: All right. Stephanie Gosk tonight, thank you. With a summer behind us, viewers are supposed to forget the anti-semitic violence and eliminationist rhetoric that emanated from these protests. Viewers are also expected to forget that these protests often descended into physical violence.  NBC, which once praised the resolve of anti-semitic protesters at Columbia, is back at it again. Per Gosk’s reporting, “pro-Palestinian protesters” simply call for an end to the war, versus a literal end to Israel itself.  The biggest tell in the report is the lumping in of the 10,000 reported anti-semitic incidents with the 69% increase in complaints about Islamophobia. What does this even mean? What goes into these actual complaints? We don’t even know. Viewers are just supposed to accept these data at face value. On the day that the world remembered the barbarism of Hamas’s October 7th pogrom, NBC chose to provide moral equivalence to those who call for the elimination of Israel. Decency compels us to say “Never Again”. Apparently, NBC feels compelled to say, “So What?”  

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Too weird.