The Bible

Gordon, Bruce

£30.00

For Christians, the Bible is a book authored by God for humanity. 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.

In stock

Publish Date: 26/09/2024

Description

‘Wonderful’ JOHN BARTON

‘A stupendous intellectual achievement’ ANDREW PETTEGREE

‘A stunning love song to the Bible . . . this will be a classic’ CHINE MCDONALD

The remarkable story of the most influential book in human history.

The Bible is the world’s best-known text. Yet, it is a book that never was – its original form does not exist and probably never did. What we have is the inheritance of generation after generation of Christians who have sought to hear God speak. Available in over three thousand languages and taking innumerable forms, each version is a revelation, evolving as a reflection of its own culture and moment.

Bruce Gordon traces the Bible’s astounding journey from its emergence as a codex in the second century, to the Reformation, to the spectacular growth of Christianity in the Global South today. For centuries a source of inspiration, it has also been a tool for violence and oppression, weaponised in the name of colonialism, and it has expressed hopes for freedom in the struggle for liberation. Found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages, it has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, a product of more than two thousand years of wandering, restlessness and change.

Breathtakingly global in scope, The Bible is a sweeping history of this sacred book told through the stories of its diverse human encounters in search of the divine – revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.

Additional information

Weight 800 g
Dimensions 238 × 160 × 46 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Hardback

Pages

512

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

220.09 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K