It was 1952 and as a seven year old who had a Sunday School perfect attendance record for a year, I was presented with my very own King James Bible. I still have it and still refer to it.
I wasn’t able to make my way through it at seven, but after a few years I decided it was time to read every word and digest as much of it as possible. Millions of others like me had done the same since the first versions of what we know today as the “Holy Bible” were put together by disciples of Jesus Christ and those who knew him some years after his death.
Those early authors were, it is believed by Christians and Jews alike, recording the word of God for the benefit of mankind. The written Bible was needed as Christianity spread and as those who had known Jesus themselves died off. For centuries, biblical texts were laboriously copied by hand by monks to preserve and spread the word until the mid-15th century when moveable type was invented and the Gutenburg Bible appeared in 1454. Since then some six billion Bibles have been printed, distributed and devoured by Christians the world over.
Tyrants, ancient and modern, have tried over centuries to burn them, deny the Bible’s content and suppress those who believed with Thomas Aquinas that “The author of Holy Scripture is God.” Christians were sentenced to Stalin’s Gulag for distributing Bibles, killed by Mao’s troops for spreading its words and are today beheaded, tortured and burned alive in parts of the world for doing the same. But the words of the Bible have never been stamped out or its influence diminished. It is not only the most widely published and read book in the history of the world, but the most influential.
Intellectuals, historians and philosophers can argue about whether it was God’s words that its more than forty authors transcribed or which version and/or translation of those words is accurate. But believing Christians and Jews believe to day as they have for centuries that God either virtually dictated the book to its authors. Orthodox Jews believe for instance that the first five books of the Old Testament, known to them as the Torah, came into existence or were inspired to their authors to accurately reflect God’s words .
In this country secularists have tried to drive religion and the Bible from the public square. But try as they might, even today young people seem to have an unquenchable thirst for this book written so long ago. Today something like 10 percent of the student body at Princeton attends voluntary bible study classes at least once a week, and students at dozens of other colleges and universities are doing the same.
Regardless of one’s beliefs, no one can deny the influence of this one book on human history nor dismiss its value either as literature or as a guide to a better world.
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