By clicking “Accept,” you agree to the use of cookies and similar technologies on your device as set forth in our Cookie Policy and our Privacy Policy. Please note that certain cookies are essential for this website to function properly and do not require user consent to be deployed.

The Bible

A Global History

Contributors

By Bruce Gordon

Formats and Prices

Price

$35.00

Price

$45.00 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 17, 2024. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

“A marvelous work of scholarship and storytelling” (Wall Street Journal​), offering a global history of the world’s best-known and most influential book

For Christians, the Bible is a book inspired by God. Its eternal words are transmitted across the world by fallible human hands. Following Jesus’s departing instruction to go out into the world, the Bible has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, and every community it has encountered has read, heard, and seen the Bible through its own language and culture.  
 
In The Bible, Bruce Gordon tells the astounding story of the Bible’s journey around the globe and across more than two thousand years, showing how it has shaped and been shaped by changing beliefs and believers’ radically different needs. The Bible has been a tool for violence and oppression, and it has expressed hopes for liberation. God speaks with one voice, but the people who receive it are scattered and divided—found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages. 
 
Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible tells the story of this sacred book through the stories of its many and diverse human encounters, revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.

  • “A marvelous work of scholarship and storytelling…Mr. Gordon has written the life of the Book of Books, and the sense in his narrative that this book is alive, as if somehow it has agency and finds ways to make itself known and felt, is inescapable.”
    Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal
  • “Gordon’s compelling, sensitive, accessible, and balanced work is a Christian people’s history of the Bible through time and space…A remarkable work of original synthesis, weaving many strands of scholarship into a coherent and lively narrative.” 
    Christianity Today
  • “Fascinating…The Bible: A Global History tells the riveting tale of how the writings of a marginal sect in the ancient Near East came to be considered (together with the Jewish scriptures) the sacred texts of a new religion, before becoming—via medieval scribes, the early modern printing press and 20th-century mass production lines—the most reproduced and translated book ever.”
    UnHerd

On Sale
Sep 17, 2024
Page Count
528 pages
Publisher
Basic Books
ISBN-13
9781541619739

Bruce Gordon

About the Author

Bruce Gordon is Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Yale Divinity School and has an appointment in Yale’s department of history. He is the author of the biographies Calvin and Zwingli: God’s Armed Prophet, and of a number of other books on the history of Christianity. Raised in Canada, he lives in Vermont.

Learn more about this author