One of our finest church historians has now given us an invaluable history of the church’s great blessing—the Bible.

In this highly interesting volume, Gordon traces how the “Bible” became a book that “remains the most influential book in the world” (2). He fully recognizes the Bible as a “sacred text with multiple voices, open to widely divergent interpretations” (2). Gordon’s rich narrative, bolstered by the widest array of scholarly sources, not only surveys the Bible historically, but also globally with full attention given to non-western contexts, including chapters on China, Africa, and Global Pentecostalism. There is so much interest in this book that if one reads it with an eye toward underlining important sentences, the pages will be fully filled with the marks of one’s own writing instrument!

Throughout, Gordon pays full attention to the history of how Bibles were assembled, translated, produced, and distributed. This provides a marvelous panorama of the Bible, on many levels, which illuminates the multi-faceted phenomenon of the desire to hear and understand and spread this, “the most global of all books” (6). As Gordon notes, “each physical manifestation reflected a moment in time that aspired to eternity” since “the story of the Bible is not merely the story of a book. It is a story of the divine conversation that was never limited to bound pages” (6–7). Gordon argues that “the story of the Bible is thus a story of a life force, experienced positively and negatively by all the human senses” (7). In short, while he recognizes his work can “only tell a partial story of the world’s most influential book,” Gordon hopes through it “to tell something of ongoing human effort to hear God” (7).

The very real “physicality” of the Bible was there from the beginning as we recognize with Gordon’s recounting of the Bible’s “becoming a book.” Yet, “for two thousand years Christians have been making choices about the forms of their Bible, and there has never been a single one for the whole of the faith” (11).

The story of the circulation of early documents – which became biblical “books” as both the Old and New Testaments and their subsequent recognition and formation into a “canon” of Holy Scripture – is complicated. Sacred writings grew “organically” into a canon, “fostered by the worship, reading, and devotional practices across Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, and Africa. Canon formation was a social act by which communities granted certain texts a status of authority for a wide range of reasons, although most prominently out of the belief that these works came from the earliest writers of the faith and carried the true teachings of Christ” (18).

Through the first millennium of the Christian church, the church’s biblical “canon” took shape, and “what began as a set of stories, prophecies, letters, and wisdom retold without fixed form emerged as a sacred book” (95). Gordon recounts key elements of this history. As the medieval period progressed – with its important theologians – there was, says Gordon, “an abiding devotion to the coherence of the sacred text and its story of creation and salvation” (96). Yet, “the Bible played a central role in this conflict” called the Crusades: A “theology of holy war based on selected texts” (103).

“The medieval Bible” – the Latin Vulgate – was primary. Yet in the 15th century there was a “spectacular growth of vernacular translations” (119). These included, in England, the Wycliffite Bible in the 1370s, fueled by John Wycliffe’s conviction that “the Bible should be in the language of the people” (120). The invention of the printing press led to the mass production of Bible. “Movable type” spread, leading to “the appearance of almost a hundred Latin Bibles by the end of the century” (127).

Gordon’s chapters on the Renaissance and Reformation richly convey the important scholarly labors of Erasmus and Luther (three million copies of the Luther Bible were in circulation by 1800; [157]) to biblical translation while the age of exploration flourished into lands beyond Europe. So the Bible “became global on a new scale” (131). The Bible was brought to cultures, such as India and Japan “which had their own traditions of sacred writings” while – notes Gordon, “the Bible was tearing apart the Europe that these conquistadors and missionaries had left behind” (131).

In “Science and Religion,” Gordon argues that even in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the “seeds of secularism,” which germinated in the 19th century, “the Bible retained center stage and, in most cases was reconciled with what was being learned about science and history” (208).

The continuing vibrancy of discussions of the Geneva Bible, the King James Bible, and the Bible in America, provide combinations of historical, theological, and cultural insights that substantiate Gordon’s view that in America, “the Bible formed the vision for a new society, a new world” and that “the Bible should be the book of all peoples” (302). In his chapter on “Missions Worldwide,” (ch. 10), Gordon explores the “missionary impulse” to carry out Christ’s Great Commission and the deep convictions to spread the Gospel” (304). The challenges and limitations – including racism and sexism, as well as colonialism – are all part of this story.

Unknown to many will be the stories of the Bible, in its translations and cultural and religious uses in non-western countries. In amazing detail, the work of dedicated biblical translators and organizations is conveyed, giving us a panoramic overview of faithful women and men who have devoted their efforts and their entire lives to conveying the Bible and its message to others. Their resourcefulness is amazing – including the Luganda Bible, known as Biscuit-Tin Bible because “it was the right size to be stored in tin boxes, along with other valuables” (385).

Gordon acknowledges that “writing a story that stretches over two thousand years is a gargantuan task” (439). So it is! But no one could have done this very important work better, than Bruce Gordon!