The Bible: A Global History

By Bruce Gordon

Basic Books 2024

The Bible: A Global History, the new book by Bruce Gordon, is two books. One of them, The Bible: A Global History, is written by Bruce Gordon, who has an appointment in Yale University’s history department, and it tells the sweeping story of how the book we know today as the Bible became the most widely-translated and widely-disseminated text in human history. The other of the two might be called The Bible: The Triumph of the Living Word, written by Bruce Gordon, the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School, who opens that other book with lines like “The Bible is God’s word to humanity, but that is only part of the story.”

The most important thing to note about these two books is that they can never – absolutely never – be the same book. 

The Bible is not “God’s word to humanity,” obviously. Which god are being referenced, of the 50,000 gods worshipped by humans and other members of the genus Homo? And if the Christrian gods, where is Gordon’s proof that such beings exist or ever have existed? Which word, in a collection of texts that contradict each other innumerable times? What ‘humanity,’ when Gordon’s own book demonstrates both that the ‘word’ spent its first 1000 years being heard on only a minuscule speck of the Earth’s surface and that it has yet to be ‘heard’ by even 80% of the human population? 

The claim, made so matter-of-factly right at the beginning of The Bible: A Global History, is in other words completely unsupported by anything remotely resembling historical evidence, which ought to bode poorly for the reliability of the rest of the book. If Gordon’s opening contention is essentially “In order to enjoy my book, you should first be a believing Christian,” he gains in clarity what he then instantly loses in credibility, since history isn’t a faith-based pursuit. 

The book is beautifully illustrated with pictures of Bibles throughout history, Bible promulgators throughout history, and warehouse palettes stacked high with Bibles ready to be shipped to bookstores. And Gordon writes in clear, light-footed prose (no academic bloat anywhere in these pages) about many of the details of Bible dissemination over the centuries, including such legendary organizations as the American Bible Society, founded in 1813 and by 1860 printing over a million Bibles a year. “Similar to Bible societies in Britain and across Europe,” Gordon writes when he’s firmly in Triumph of the Living Word mode, “the society was not interested in theological interpretation or confessional differences but in making the book widely available, often in inexpensive formats.” Not interested in theological interpretation? By flooding the non-Christian world with the Christian holy text? Again, it only makes sense as a claim if you’re a priori categorizing the Bible as “true” in a way that has nothing to do with empirical facts. 

Gordon briefly chronicles the spread of Christianity into far-flung lands, mostly at the hands of Jesuits like Michele Ruggieri, Matteo Ricci, or Life of Jesus author Giulio Aleni, but although The Bible: A Global History is interested in matters of perseverance, printing presses, and other practical matters, The Bible: The Triumph of the Living Word has not only little time but visibly little patience for such quotidian things, concerned instead with all such things only as parts of an ongoing supernatural process at work in the world. Again, The Bible: The Triumph of the Living Word expects you to be a believing Christian – and as with all such books, this expectation inevitably trends in the direction of reductive science-denying anti-intellectual quasi-fundamentalist Christian triumphalism.

Eventually, in other words, the Enlightenment becomes the enemy. 

Gordon writes:

It is tempting to think that, with the arrival of the age of science and reason, the story of the Bible has reached its zenith – that what remains is a tale of decline. Not so. The rise of natural philosophy and the Enlightenment brought to the fore the relationship between the Bible and reason. Though older and sometimes still-relevant accounts of the eighteenth century cast it as a time of reason prevailing over religion, the vast majority of writers and their readers during this period believed that the two sat together in the same boat. 

But the two do not sit together in the same boat. For two thousand years, the Bible has been trying to throw reason overboard, since the world was created by magic and thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test. There is nothing scientific, rational, or reliable in the Bible, obviously, since it’s a collection of millennia-old folklore and theology, one of hundreds of such collections. When Gordon writes that “leading lights” such as Galileo, Bacon, and Newton “transformed our understanding of heaven and earth and did so with the Bible in hand,” he’s just incorrect, but when he adds that “the question with which these thinkers grappled was not really whether the Bible was still relevant in a world in upheaval but how it was so,” he’s proselytizing, since the Bible could only be “relevant” if it were in some sense “true.” No one would use the word “relevant” in a printing history of Pride and Prejudice. 

Naturally, the story moves to Africa, where Bible production and spread is more fervent than anywhere else in the world. Gordon writes about Nigerian Baptist minister Israel Olofinjana, for example. “In his view, Africa can lead the way in reviving Christianity,” Gordon writes about him.  “It is no surprise, he argues, that African churches are the fastest growing, for ‘they have not been tempted by the rationalistic worldview that reduces our world to the natural. They still believe in the supernatural.’” When it comes to the future history of the Bible, Gordon writes, “there is every reason to believe that African voices will be central to the story.” 

But this doesn’t actually refer to the history of the Bible, or its future as a book. It’s not part of The Bible: A Global History. The Bible is an incredibly important collection of ancient texts – as long as humans study history and literature, its future is assured. No, that’s part of The Bible: The Triumph of the Living Word. Gordon here isn’t saying those African voices will be doing ground-breaking scholarship. He’s saying they’ll be raised in worship, shouting against the rational, and he approves. 

The reader is getting both books here, but those books can’t abide each other, since the one thinks the other is fundamentally anti-historical and the other thinks the one is a stake-warranting spawn of the Enlightenment. Bruce Gordon from the history department does a very skillful job of outlining the spread and influence of this ancient text into a hundred nations and languages. And Bruce Gordon from the divinity school shares stories of all the brave prophets and disciples who’ve spread The Word through countless trials and oppressions. Readers will need to pick their pleasure.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News