As the single work at the heart of Christianity, the world's
largest organized religion, the Bible is the spiritual guide for
one out of every three people in the world. The Bible is also the
world's most widely distributed book. Translated into over two
thousand languages, it is estimated that more than six billion
copies have been sold in the last two hundred years. It remains the
best-selling book in the United States, year after year, with at
least twenty-five million copies sold in 2005 alone. But the Bible
is a complex work with a complicated and obscure history. Made up
of sixty-six books written by various authors and divided into two
testaments, its contents have changed over the centuries. The Bible
has been transformed by translation and, through interpretation,
has developed manifold meanings to various religions,
denominations, and sects. In this seminal account, acclaimed
historian Karen Armstrong discusses the conception, gestation,
life, and afterlife of history's most powerful book. Armstrong
analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history
turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was
collected into one work, and how it became accepted as
Christianity's sacred text. She explores how as the pragmatic
scientific ethos of modernity took hold, scripture was read for the
information that it imparted and how, in the nineteenth century,
historical criticism of the Bible caused greater fear than
Darwinism. As she writes, 'If Jonah did not spend days in a whale,
' asked a Lutheran pastor, 'did Jesus really rise from the tomb?'
Karen Armstrong's history of the Bible is a brilliant, captivating
book, crucial in an age of declining faithand rising
fundamentalism.
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