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.”
Evangelicals tend to approach the Bible as mainly a devotional book, something to be read and understood for the sake of furthering spiritual growth. Gordon’s history by no means discounts this approach. It demonstrates, though, that throughout most of Christian history, the Bible was heard, performed, or seen, not read.
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.
First, Gordon considers the Bible as an object of devotion. The process of composing and assembling biblical books into what we know as the canon was gradual, reflecting the worship, devotional, and reading needs of the early Christian community. In total, though, it launched a communication revolution, in that the resulting Bible was meant for all, literate or not.
By the fourth century, the codex had replaced the scroll as the predominant biblical format. As a result, the Bible came into its own, since it was now easier to transport. Scriptoriums arose in monasteries or households, where scribes copied the sacred text in ascetic acts of devotion. As Gordon notes, “By the fifth century, the Bible as book had become an incarnation of the divine, its physical presence in the world.” The medium was inseparable from the saving message.
Throughout the medieval period, the very material form of the Bible evoked a sense of the sacred. To see or touch a Bible, to chant its words or raise it aloft in a holy procession, conjured feelings of awe and reverence. Irish monks, influenced by Byzantine tradition, adorned Bible covers with jewels, illuminated biblical manuscripts in gold, and embellished their Bibles with images of animals and plants and elegant geometric patterns.
In the later medieval period, the stained-glass windows in great cathedrals visually narrated the biblical story from creation to redemption to consummation. The Bible was spoken in the Mass, heard in popular preaching, and performed in processions and stage plays. “Without a doubt,” writes Gordon, a scholar of the Reformation, “one of the greatest mistruths perpetuated by the Protestant Reformation is that the Bible disappeared during the Middle Ages.”
Next, Gordon examines the Bible in translation. As Scripture emerged in book form, so did competing versions.
Jerome’s well-known Vulgate translation appeared late in the fourth century. Even before then, the Bible, in whole or in part, had been translated into Syriac and Persian in the East, Egyptian Coptic in North Africa, and Latin and Gothic in the West. To be sure, Jerome’s translation prevailed in the Catholic church, but a vast multitude of Old Latin versions persisted alongside it for half a millennium.
In the 15th century, approximately 70 vernacular translations existed, belying Martin Luther’s claim that no one had access to the Bible before his 1521 German New Testament translation. “By the end of the Middle Ages,” writes Gordon, “vernacular Bibles had never before been so widely owned and read.”
As the Bible became more accessible in more languages, it also became a lightning rod for disagreement. And as sola Scriptura became the Protestant baseline of authority, it also helped fuel the proliferation of Protestant groups claiming fidelity to their interpretation of the Bible.
Gordon dedicates an entire chapter to the widely cherished King James Version (1611). To this day, the KJV remains the most widely read version around the world, its memorable words and phrases firmly engrained in the cultural heritage of the West.
Unlike its predecessor, the Geneva Bible—with its Reformed emphasis and controversial annotations—the KJV was produced without notes or commentary. Unbeknownst to many who grew up with the KJV, its language was purposely antiquated (thee and thou had already disappeared from common parlance) to give the appearance of solemnity and refinement. The “strangeness” of the KJV “conveyed the holy and transcendent,” writes Gordon, just as Latin had done for Catholics of earlier eras.
By the mid-19th century, however, as the Bible received increasing scrutiny, the KJV became less a book of faith than a literary treasure of England, prompting T. S. Eliot to comment, “Those who talk about the Bible as a ‘monument of English prose’ are merely admiring it over the grave of Christianity.”
Beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, British, American, and European Protestant missionaries undertook ambitious translation projects to make the Bible available in local languages. As is well known, the results were mixed.
On one hand, missionaries could not shed their Western prejudices and identification with colonialism and imperialism. In some cases they used the Bible to oppress and suppress traditional cultures. On the other hand, in translating the Bible into mother tongues, missionaries provided Indigenous peoples with tools for questioning the claims of Western superiority. Converts found themselves in the text of Scripture, claimed the Bible as their own, and interpreted it through the lens of their culture. In Africa, Gordon notes, “the overall success” of translation efforts “can hardly be overstated.”
One of the most confounding and contentious translation issues concerned proper names for God. China serves as one example, with its polytheistic culture lacking any conceptual equivalent of the Christian God or the Trinity. In the 16th century, Jesuits settled upon Tianzhu (“Lord of Heaven”), though no Catholic translations of the Bible appeared in China until two centuries later.
Then, in the 1840s, members of a joint Protestant American and British translating team disagreed passionately over the correct name for God, igniting what became known as the “term question.” So intense was the dispute—the Americans favored Shen (“Spirit”) whereas the British favored Shandi (“Sovereign on High”)—that two separate Bibles were published in classical Chinese. In 1919, a more reader-friendly Bible appeared in Mandarin, again in two versions that reflected the naming impasse.
Translators faced similar difficulties in Africa. How transferrable were the names of African deities into Christ-ian theological contexts? One proposed solution, which today appears in 30 African languages, was the Bantu name Muhungu (later Mungu), connoting a distant creator. Jesus received the name mwana wa Mulungu (or “child of Mulungu”).
Last, Gordon addresses the Bible as a mode of personal communication. Indeed, a major theme in the last two-thirds of the book, which covers the ages of Puritanism, pietism, evangelicalism, and Pentecostalism, is “the Bible’s promise of a personal relationship with God.” As Gordon frequently points out, believers have long found themselves in the Bible’s pages, believing that God, with the Holy Spirit’s aid, was speaking to them directly.
Puritans promoted a culture of personal Bible reading, diary-keeping, and meditation. Pietist and evangelical women spoke of identifying with particular biblical figures. Methodists situated themselves in the biblical narrative through the hymns of the Wesley brothers.
Even as proslavery advocates appealed to Scripture, African American slaves intoned Bible-based spirituals of resistance and freedom. Hong Xiuquan, the apocalyptic leader of the murderous Taiping Rebellion in China, interpreted his visions by reading the Book of Revelation. The Liberian prophet William Wadé Harris saw himself as a successor to Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.
Pentecostals claim to hear God speaking directly through the Bible. In their view, the supernatural occurrences in Scripture—gifts of the Spirit, exorcisms, healings, Spirit baptism—are as real today as they were in New Testament times. “The physicality of the Pentecostal encounter with the Bible,” writes Gordon, “is intimate, a full transformation of the whole person into life in the Spirit.”
The Bible is a remarkable work of original synthesis, weaving many strands of scholarship into a coherent and lively narrative. One could point to minor oversights. For example, Gordon omits the prodigious efforts of Wycliffe Bible Translators, an evangelical organization that has translated the Bible into more than 700 languages. More could be said, too, about the potential implications of our shift toward reading the Bible on electronic platforms.
More substantively, 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.
David W. Kling is a professor of religious studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of The Bible in History: How the Texts Have Shaped the Times and A History of Christian Conversion.
This article appeared in the September/October 2024 issue of Christianity Today as "The Bible in Time and Space".
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