Starred review from July 22, 2024
Yale Divinity School history professor Gordon (Calvin) delivers an ambitious study of how a collection of prophecies, poems, and letters became a sacred text that has shaped cultures. Styling the Bible as a migrant, he describes how diverse writings—the rabbinic Bible, the four Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles—coalesced into canon through “worship, reading, and devotional practices,” then were spread by “merchants and colonizers” to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. There, local communities adapted the “alien” book through a mix of cultural blending, reinterpretation, and even rebellion. For example, theologians in 20th-century China drew comparisons between Confucianism and biblical texts, Native Americans centered themselves in biblical stories (a group of 18th-century Mohican converts renamed themselves Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, declaring themselves “patriarchs of a new nation of believers”), and a charismatic 20th-century Baptist catchetist in the Democratic Republic of Congo formed the “Kimbanguist” movement, which rejected “the God of the missionaries” but revered Christ. Smoothly capturing a sprawling and complex history, Gordon frames the Bible as a cultural artifact and a dynamic site where identity is negotiated; a force that binds communities; and an arena where foreign influences are contested. The result is a fascinating look at how the “most influential book in the world” came to be.
August 15, 2024
A global history of the Bible. Church historian Gordon describes for the reader a sacred book that seems to take on a life of its own. Through two full millennia, the Christian Bible has survived, thrived, and acted as both a holy object and a cultural force. Gordon notes that early Christians "would participate in a communications revolution," a revolution that continues to this day. Adopting the codex as their chosen medium, Christians would, over the course of several generations, craft a canon of scripture that would survive centuries of cultural fragility in Europe. From the fifth century on, Gordon writes, "the Bible itself became an object of veneration. [It was] the ultimate symbol of the sacred...Christ's physical presence in the world." With new technology and the Protestant Reformation, the Bible would move beyond the church and monastery and into the home. No version of the book reflected this cultural sea change more than the King James Bible, which came to dominate the English-speaking world and influence missionary activity outside of it. Spreading into Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, the Bible would be influenced by new, global voices. Gordon describes the story of the Bible as "the story of a life force" and mystically concludes that "the Bible dictates its own history, which is without end." He has written an approachable history suitable for lay readers, but it adds nothing significantly new to the sizable corpus of works on the same subject. To mention just two examples, Karen Armstrong'sThe Bible (2007) provides a more academic viewpoint; John Barton'sA History of the Bible (2019) offers a more critical reading of the Bible's background. Serviceable but not particularly original.
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August 1, 2024
The Bible evokes so many disparate beliefs the world over that describing its history and influence in a single volume is a near-impossible task. Gordon (Zwingli, 2021) takes up such a challenge, resulting in this magnificent survey of how the Bible was dispersed from its Middle Eastern origins to become the planet's most reproduced and republished book. The Bible's contents took centuries to gel into a canon that met general approval and had to be repeatedly transcribed and translated. In the fifth century, Jerome established an authoritative Latin text that reigned until the printing press and Protestant Reformation made Bibles accessible to people beyond clerics. In Tudor and Stuart England, the Douay-Rheims Bible contended with the King James Bible. Nineteenth-century missionaries and Bible societies spread copies all over the world in just about every written language. Translating the Bible proved more difficult than imagined and required creative linguistic talents--even the word "God" has no fixed meaning in some languages. A valuable resource for both serious and curious readers interested in the Bible's central role in history.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.