The Bible: A Global History, by Bruce Gordon. Basic, 2024, 515 pages, $35.00.

If Reformed Protestants are candid, they have to admit—off the record, of course—that the Bible is an odd way to run a religion. Sure, a book that is the Word of God easily surpasses a church with a universal bishop (Roman Catholicism) or prophets (Islam and Mormonism) who claim new revelations. The Bible’s challenge, however, is that it comes in a seemingly unmanageable form. It has sixty-six separate books, written over roughly 1,700 years. Even more challenging is the mix of genres—narratives, poetry, epistles—which avoid the sort of manual-like or constitutional precision that come with other authoritative texts. Add to the Bible’s variety the historical reality that it emerged in civilizations that lacked the codex or a printing press, publishing technologies that make the consistency of modern versions of the Bible possible. Even the Westminster Confession acknowledges that variety of human fingerprints on the Word of God:

Therefore it pleased the Lord, at sundry times, and in divers manners, to reveal himself, and to declare that his will unto his church; and afterwards, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, . . . to commit the same wholly unto writing: which maketh the Holy Scripture to be most necessary; those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased. (WCF 1.1)

Bruce Gordon’s global history of the Bible is less concerned with the diversity of writings and human authors in Scripture than it is with the Christians devoted to the book and responsible for its publication and distribution. Because the business of publishing and the record-keeping surrounding modern books did not begin until the fifteenth century, Gordon’s history necessarily covers an amazing period before Gutenberg’s moveable type and printing press. The main drivers of this story are, again, a diverse lot of human beings, everyone from monks to monarchs. Gordon himself describes his book as not so much a history of editions, translations, or interpretations of the Bible but one “of ongoing human effort to hear God” (7). By expanding his subject beyond scrolls, codices, bindings, illustrations, translators, and interpreters, Gordon’s book spills into the murky terrains of religious experience.

As kaleidoscopic as this approach to the Bible’s history sometimes renders Gordon’s book, because the subject is the scriptural canon, The Bible can never stray from the physical attributes of Scripture—its words, pages, authors, editors, and interpreters. One major factor in the Bible’s history is the intervention of emperors and kings in its production and acceptance. Although historians debate whether the oldest surviving codices, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, were among the Bibles that Constantine requested for his churches in Constantinople, the emperor’s instructions to Eusebius of Caesarea in 331 did put an imperial stamp on the importance of physical copies of Scripture (at least for church use). Roughly five centuries later, the production of the Bible took another dramatic step with the publication of the Tours Bibles. This was the work of the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin, who presented the Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, with a copy of the Tours version. The emperor himself wanted to recover the glories of Rome and believed a version that relied on Jerome’s Latin translation would assist that cause. James I (of England) was no emperor, but his King James Version (1611) not only displaced the popular use of the Geneva Bible in his realm but also became “best known” for its literary aspects, which in turn “had a profound impact on the English language” (217, 218).

Even as rulers’ interventions had a grand influence on the history of the Bible, the work of ordinary people was equally important. In the medieval world, the labors of scribes and artists turned the pages of Scripture into beautiful spaces that invited readers to peruse the Bible, even while craftsmen adorned covers with gold and jewels that rendered an object to be revered and even coveted. The Book of Kells is a notable example, with a text in black, yellow, red, and purple ink, accompanied by “spectacular illuminations” (89). Its “remarkable” originality stems from the marriage of imagery from the Greek East, the Italian West, and Celtic sources (90). At the other end of the production spectrum was Johannes Gutenberg’s 1453 Bible, the first to use moveable type. The printer’s purpose was to produce the text of Scripture more economically. But that did not stop those who bought his unbound pages from supplying their own illustrations and appropriately designed bindings and covers.

Among the most important efforts beyond emperors and kings in the Bible’s reception were translators. If Scripture were ever to be accessible to people outside the eastern Mediterranean world, it needed scholars who knew both the Bible’s original languages and those of indigenous peoples—from Europe’s barbarian tribes to natives in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Translation is an ever-present aspect of Gordon’s history, but the most arresting period was the rise of Bible missions. Between 1804 and 1817, Europeans and Americans formed organizations to print and distribute Bibles in western languages—Danish, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and English (both British and American)—to augment the new endeavor of Protestant foreign missions (309). Unlike older works of evangelizing native peoples as part of colonial settlements, this phase of foreign missions aimed to reach natives directly. The linguistic work involved, from teaching western language to local people and then translating the Bible into indigenous tongues, has underscored the centrality of linguistic and interpretive work in the spread of Christianity.

When Gordon examines the Bible’s influence beyond church work or missions, his narrative strains. Chapters on “Science and Reason” and “The American Bible” provide an opportunity to remark upon the use of Scripture by important figures in the Scientific Revolution, for instance, Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes. The latter immersed himself in Scripture, disputed most interpretations of it, and believed the book should be firmly under the sovereign magistrate’s control. Hobbes’s rejection of the Bible’s major premise—that God revealed himself through human authors—is one of the few discordant notes in a pleasing melody that features people who believed and spread the Bible's message. His chapter on the “American Bible” also sounds off-key, at least when it comes to discussion of novels such as Moby Dick and Ben-Hur or even the Book of Mormon. These are instances that fall more under “the Bible and . . .” rather than revealing directly religious or devotional endeavors. At the same time, these asides add color and intrigue to a very big book.

Even when the author seems to get sidetracked, the reader will learn about the remarkable variety of hands—and more—that yielded the Bible’s contemporary status as one of the most popular books ever published. Gordon drew an almost impossible assignment in writing a global history of the Bible. Who among us can even conceive of where to start and how to proceed? Even if Gordon sometimes falters, his execution overall is clever, thoughtful, and endlessly fascinating. This is a book that deserves to be used not simply for the delight of reading but also as a reference for tracing how the Bible came from Moses on Mt. Sinai to an app on our cell phones.

Darryl G. Hart is distinguished associate professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, and serves as an elder at Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Hillsdale, Michigan and as a member of the Committee on Christian Education. Ordained Servant Online, May, 2025.