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The Enduring Influence of the Bible: A Journey Through History and Culture with Professor Bruce Gordon

• Michele McAloon • Season 3 • Episode 90

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How has the Bible managed to influence cultures across the globe for over two millennia? Join me, Michelle McAloon, as I sit down with Professor Bruce Gordon, the distinguished Titus Street professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale Divinity School, to uncover the Bible's remarkable journey. Together, we promise to unearth how this sacred text has continued to evolve, both through its divine inspiration and as a cultural artifact. Professor Gordon offers a wealth of knowledge from his acclaimed work, "The Bible: A Global History," as we explore the intricate historical and linguistic transformations that have allowed the Bible to resonate with diverse communities throughout history.

Our journey through time delves into the formation of the New Testament, where we discuss the challenges faced by certain books like Revelation and Hebrews in securing their place in the canon. We also navigate the diverse landscape of Christian Bibles, including the Ethiopian Bible, showcasing how translation into vernacular languages played a pivotal role in spreading the Bible's message across cultures. From the advent of the Gutenberg Press to modern digital platforms such as the Hallow app, we examine how technological advancements have consistently shaped and been shaped by the Bible, reinforcing its adaptability and enduring significance.

Beyond its textual influence, the Bible has also served as a profound symbol within various cultural expressions. Our discussion touches on its evolution from a collection of texts to a revered object of worship, permeating medieval art, drama, and rituals. As we look forward, we reflect on how contemporary technology continues to enhance biblical engagement, defying the outdated narrative of conflict between science and religion. By weaving through history, philosophy, and theology, we present an enriching narrative that underscores the Bible's timeless impact and its role in shaping human experience.

Speaker 1:

Hi, this is Michelle McAloon, the host of this podcast, crossword, and I want to thank all my listeners this year who read the books, who listened to the podcast, who interacted with me, who sent in questions. I want to thank all the authors for their time and their beautiful works that they wrote. I look forward to a great reading year next year and hopefully y'all will join me. I can be found as Michelle McElhune1 on X, on True Social and I'm even trying Blue Sky now. My webpage is bookcluescom. So keep reading, keep talking and I'll see you in the new year.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word, and I am your host. Cultural clues lead to the truth of the word and I am your host, michelle McAloon, and we have a great book today, especially for the Advent season. This happens to be probably my last book of the year and it's actually very, very appropriate for the weeks leading up before Christmas. It is the Bible A Global History, by Professor Bruce Gordon. Professor Gordon is a Titus Street professor of ecclesiastical history at Yale Divinity School and has an appointment in Yale's Department of History. He's the author of the biographies Calvin and Zinguili, god's Armed Prophet and a number of other books on the history of Christianity, and he currently lives in Vermont. Professor Gordon, welcome to Crossword.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much, Michelle, for inviting me, and it is indeed very snowy Vermont today.

Speaker 1:

Ah, very good. Okay, now I have to tell you you take a look at the Bible in some different aspects of the different historical, linguistic of its history, as it basically has reflected, in many ways, human history. What prompted you to look at the Bible as both a book, divine inspiration, a cultural artifact, a historical artifact? What was your thinking behind all of that?

Speaker 2:

Yes, exactly, michelle. It's all of those things, and one of the great joys and discoveries and challenges of all of this was thinking about how the Bible is so much greater than what I imagined it to be. I grew up with the Bible in a Presbyterian background, but the Bible has been very much also the center of my academic work. I've been teaching courses on the Bible for many years. I've had various projects working on Bibles, mostly in the medieval and Reformation periods, but I've also been active in lay education and so in many ways, what the book addresses are not only my questions, but the questions students and people have had that they've shared with me over a long period of time, that they've shared with me over a long period of time. And I just reached a point where I thought I really want to pursue some of these questions, because I'm very aware, with the global church today, that my tradition reflects a particular view of the Bible, but it's a particular view within a vast expanse of experiences of the Bible. But it's a particular view within a vast expanse of experiences of the Bible, of reading and hearing the Bible as looking at the Bible as a physical object, as you say, I realized there was a much, much bigger story and that the Bible has been many different things in many different cultures through 2,000 years.

Speaker 2:

And when Basic Books approached me and the editor, brian Distelberg, said to me, well, what would you like to do? And I said this may sound crazy, but I have a really big story that I'd like to explore, because it's become so evident to me that the Bible has both shaped many, many different communities but also been shaped by them, that it's a living book that has always dwelt amongst the people, but many, many different peoples through time, and that there isn't one story, there isn't one linear tract on which this Bible has been. It's a book of many, many experiences. It's had many different lives and, of course, my book can only in some ways touch on some of those things. But it was a wonderful journey for me of learning, exploring and finding out so many things I had no idea about. Finding out so many things I had no idea about.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so let's start at the very beginning the Christian Bible. I think a lot of readers would assume Christ dies, his apostles go out and start writing this book. Maybe they understand the Jewish heritage of the Bible, maybe they don't. What is the Bible? When did it come into being? And this is actually, you know, I'm talking about our earliest understanding of the Bible because I, like you, agree that the Bible has always been in continuous formation and we are watching it now with Father Mike Schmidt and his app.

Speaker 2:

Yes, with the Halo app.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we are watching the Bible still transform with our technology, our media, in our culture, in our languages today. But let's go to the very beginning. What started this? What happened?

Speaker 2:

Yes, well, perhaps we could go back to the New Testament. The scriptures, of course, for Jesus and his followers were naturally the Hebrew scriptures. When Christ is in the synagogue and opens up the text of Isaiah the prophet and says, to great shock, to the people present that in this day Isaiah's words have been fulfilled, and says basically that they have been fulfilled in him, and when he engages with all manner of people through his ministry, he's quoting the Hebrew Scriptures, people through his ministry, he's quoting the Hebrew Scriptures. So for the earliest group, of course they were Jews and they had the Scriptures, and so the expectation for them was that these Hebrew Scriptures would be fulfilled by the coming of a Messiah. And, as we know, jesus both declares himself to be the Messiah and his group believes that he is the Messiah. But you notice again and again through Scripture that when the characters quote the holy text, they're quoting the Jewish texts, what Christians often call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. That was the only Bible. But, as you say, christ's commission when he leaves is to go unto the world, and so at that point Christianity becomes a faith that's constantly in motion. But of course, a faith that's constantly in motion, but of course the center of it is Jesus' teachings. So the earliest apostles and then their followers seek to write down what he said, they seek to transmit what Jesus said and of course the center of this new faith are the teachings of Christ, but also the understanding of who Jesus was as the Son of God. So people who are biblical scholars of this earlier period know much more.

Speaker 2:

But they would say to you it's a very complicated process by which there were many different versions that were circulating amongst the earliest Christian communities of texts. There was no Bible in the way that we would think of it. Mostly we need to think about it in terms of individual texts, individual Gospels, circulating in isolation, being carried by those who were preaching, being used in communities for reading and learning for worship. But it's not until much later you're thinking in the second and third centuries, so some time after the first generation is long gone that we see the first efforts to try and bring these texts together. But you have to remember there are many different texts and one of the difficulties for the earliest Christians was discerning which are the true texts or which are the most authentic texts of Christ's words, and that becomes in many places a very heated conversation and debate and to some extent dispute. So in the first few centuries there's no sense of a complete Bible and of course there's the relationship of what these writings have to the Jewish scriptures which Christians will then eventually call the Old Testament. But of course for Jews it is the Bible, and so it's a slow process over the first three or four centuries.

Speaker 2:

But what's essential and what's distinctively Christian in this period is that these texts are gathered together and produced in what we might recognize as book form and what's called a codex. It's the pages essentially bound together, looking like what we would recognize as a book form. This is something very new. The Christians don't invent it. It's in the Roman and Greek world. But they really make it their own. And if you think that Jewish scriptures are traditionally in scrolls not individual pieces of text, not individual pieces of text so now Christianity has a very different sort of sacred text. It has one in book form. Now these codices, these codexes that they have, are pretty rudimentary, but they're meant for one thing to be easier to travel with. They can be stuck in a pocket, they can be put in a bag, because the nature of Christianity as Christ charges at the end of the gospel that it needs to be taken unto the world. It needs to be portable, it needs to be usable, it needs to be able to be taken across the sea, across deserts. So it's a travel book and so it requires a new form, as I say, the codex, the book form, so that it can be taken with this.

Speaker 2:

But there's still the debate over which of the texts are the most authentic, and that takes really into the third and the fourth century when, slowly, there is a kind of consensus emerging as to the Gospels and also the Epistles and Acts, which constitute the true body of the New Testament. But that idea is not accepted by everybody. You have in Egypt what are called the Gnostic Gospels. You have many books that are being used by Christian communities, such as the Epistles of Clement, which ultimately do not get included in this.

Speaker 2:

From a secular point of view, people would view this as a historical development in which there are questions of power who decides what's in and who decides what's out? For Christians, this is understood. This is what's called the who decides what's out? For Christians, this is understood. This is what's called the formation of the canon, the body of the New Testament. Christians view it as guided by the Holy Spirit towards a sense of which are the authentic texts of the New Testament. So there are various different ways. You can read many books that will talk about it purely in historical terms and they're very interesting, very helpful.

Speaker 2:

But the Christian view is that the Holy Spirit is at work in this slow formation of the New Testament in the first three or four centuries. But, for instance, certain books like the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, is quite late in being included in this. Many churches didn't believe that it was apostolic. Other questions arose. So the letter to the Hebrews is very late in being included because there were many groups who thought it was not apostolic. So it's a very slow process.

Speaker 2:

And even today there are variations in Bibles between biblical texts.

Speaker 2:

The Protestant Bible, the Catholic Bible, have a different order of things, what are called the apocryphal books, the books that were written in Hebrew before, the books like Daniel. Well, daniel is also in the Hebrew Bible, but books like Tobit and others. Some Christians accept those into the Bible, others do not. But today, just to give an example, the Ethiopian Bible, the Bible of the Ethiopian church, the traditional Christian Bible, has 66 books. The Ethiopian Bible has more than 80 to today, so it's never been one single form. But this period over the first four centuries is really when it begins to acquire its character. But I'll just finish with this. There's also the debate as to what's the relationship of these new writings to the Hebrew scriptures, and there are many figures, including the famous early church figure of Marcion, who said the Hebrew Bible has nothing to do with the New Testament and that they are two quite separate things. They don't belong together. But the majority Christian view is they see what become known as the New Testament writings as the continuation and even fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible.

Speaker 1:

One of the things you really bring out in your book which I had. I think I've never I've thought of it. I mean I understand it and I understand when in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the understanding of the Trinity actually came out of language formation. But language in the Bible? What language? And you said Jesus was a polyglot. Yeah, Of course he was. I mean I never thought of that. Here's a man that probably can speak Latin, probably Hebrew, probably some Greek, because of the people that he is interacting with. So he's got Latin, you know, he's got a Indo-European and Semitic languages. So where, what? I mean we go all the way up to Jerome the Vulgate, where he does the Latin. But what? How does language play in this? And this is a real important part of your story Absolutely crucial.

Speaker 2:

I would say that Jesus probably. There's no evidence that he knew Latin, but his own language was probably Aramaic. But where he lived they would also be Greek and of course the earliest writings are in Greek, although they may have existed in Aramaic beforehand. But Jesus certainly spoke Aramaic. He certainly knew Hebrew, because we know that he read in the synagogues. He certainly knew Greek and he may have known other languages. When he meets Pontius Pilate, who of course, is the Roman official, I asked a friend of mine did they speak Latin? The Roman, no, pilate most likely spoke Greek, which was the language of the elites in Judea. So those scenes in the Gospel of John, for example, when Pilate and Jesus are together, they probably spoke Greek with one another, because I always wondered what language did they speak?

Speaker 2:

But to your broader point, language is crucial. Christian scriptures from, for instance, later emerging in the 8th century, the Quran, which is, of course, as we know, dictated and is supposed to be in Arabic Even to this day. If you have a translation of the Quran, you have a lesser version if you don't read it in Arabic. Of the Quran, you have a lesser version if you don't read it in Arabic. Christianity has no official language and right from the beginning, as I say, jesus was himself polyglot. Right from the beginning it's being translated. The texts Now remember the Word Scriptures are in Hebrew, but Christianity again takes a very different view. Although we have texts in Hebrew and Greek, those are never the official languages.

Speaker 2:

The official languages, in a way, are the vernacular languages where right from the early states it goes east and is translated into Syriac, another Semitic language.

Speaker 2:

Very early on it arrives in Africa and is probably Greek, but eventually is translated into Coptic, which is an old language of Pharaonic Egypt. It is from an early start circulating in the Mediterranean world in Latin, because the whole idea of the Scriptures is in the Christian sense, is it's meant to be the language of the people. So that means it constantly needs to be translated and of course translations are complicated things because it's not easy to go from one language to another and capture exactly what the original—anybody who works with translation knows how difficult it is to capture exactly one language in another. But the character of the Christian scriptures right from the beginning. Very quickly they will go north into the Caucasus, into what's today Georgia and Armenia. Those languages were often not written languages but the arrival of the Bible actually facilitated the writing, the written form of these languages. So it has an intimate relationship with the languages of the people, because its intention was always to be a book in the vernacular.

Speaker 1:

So I mean so from the very earliest part of the Bible you see two things and your book really brings it out. You see language development with the Bible and you see technical development with the Bible and that has been pretty much the trajectory of the Bible through the ages. Is this story of a Bible that is adapting to the culture around it versus the culture adapting to the Bible? Now, that does happen, but it is the Bible that actually adapts to the culture, absorbs the culture and then the culture absorbs the Bible. So you've got kind of this kinetic experience, cultural, social, divine experience with the Bible and I have to think and after reading your book, that that is a lot of. That's the genius of this actually, that is, there's something otherworldly about the survival of the Bible and the development of it.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, but it's also something very worldly, because it comes into the languages of the people, even today.

Speaker 2:

I recently was at a presentation by some people who have worked in churches in Ecuador up in the mountains, and the people had no written scriptures. This is within the last 18 years or so. The people living in the mountains because they didn't speak Spanish, although they were in South America. They spoke a very ancient vernacular language of their own and one of the things these people engaged with working with the locals was a translation of the New Testament into this language. So it's continuously happening in our own day. The Bible is now in hundreds of languages and always translations are being redone because people are trying to get better translations.

Speaker 2:

My view of the Bible, at least one aspect of it, is that it is a conversation between God and humanity and it is in that sense, reciprocal because God speaks and of course, that's absolute. But the Bible is written by humans, it's translated by humans and that's what gives. In a sense, the Bible is a somewhat fragile book because it's dependent our versions as we read it is dependent on translators and translators getting it right, as you might say. But translators differ, they disagree with each other. So that's always been the character of the Bible. Translations have been contested. As I said earlier, the very shape of it is contested in the first centuries. To this day, there are different types of Bibles. You just have to go on Amazon and you can see that there are many different types of Bibles. That's the way it always was. It never existed in one absolute form. It did for certain communities, but never for the whole of Christianity, and it always has existed, from the beginning, in many different languages.

Speaker 2:

And there is, I think, a fundamental aspect of the Christian Bible that we need to remember. Unlike the Quran, which is dictated and therefore every word is sacred in that sense, god speaks and it is recorded. That's not the tradition of the Christian Bible. The Christian Bible is in many ways based on memory. Those who heard Jesus transmitted it to others.

Speaker 2:

It's the work, as I say, of human hands and therefore that's why, in many ways, it's a problematic text. It's often difficult to understand, it sometimes appears very contradictory, because we have to remember that, although God's words are there, the Bible has always been this partnership by which humans were responsible for the writing of it, and therefore that of course, raises all sorts of issues of how to read this problematic text. And that's for 2,000 years. People have been very aware of this, that the Bible is a challenging book. It's not a manual like Ikea where instructions on how to do this. It's a very complicated book and that's why people have wrestled with it ever since it appeared, because it's not straightforward. So in that sense, christianity has quite a challenging sacred text.

Speaker 1:

When did? At what point? I tell you when I go to Mass I see the priest kiss the Bible.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

To hold the Bible up. Yes, and you talk about how the Bible becomes the manifestation of the Savior. Yeah, so it becomes. It's not just a book, it's also a center of our religion. It is a religious object in its entirety. Yeah, how did that come about and how did that develop? Because that wasn't from what you're telling me, that isn't how it began. It developed, but then it crystallized into something that is actually. You cannot talk about Christianity without talking about the Bible.

Speaker 2:

Sure, this is again a fascinating aspect of it. It begins, as I said before, as in a sense, this fairly rude collection of not just the words but the actual material nature of the book becomes not just a vessel of these words. See, this is the development of extraordinarily beautiful art in the Bible. We see the development of the Bible in artistic terms and cultural terms, objects of extraordinary beauty. Now, most of these, of course, would have circulated amongst the elites. But the important part is that most people from earliest times encountered the Bible not through reading it, because literacy rates were extremely low and also most people could never have afforded it, but, just as you did, they see it in worship and because it acquires this sacred nature, it becomes a liturgical object. But it's more than that. It's itself an embodiment of what it is the Word of God. It's almost, in that sense, a sacramental aspect of the manifestation of God that you can see in worship, that is processed around, that is incensed and, as you say, kissed or touched. People believe it was like touching a relic. It's a sacred object and from the fifth century we have evidence of a council of the church in Constantinople where the physical presence of a Bible in the room of this council signifies the presence of the Holy Spirit in the room. So the whole development of these beautiful cultural and artistic creations of Bible are not just mere aesthetics or trying to make it something valuable. Although there's the element of that, it's because they regard the very object of the Bible as itself sacred and to be treated sacredly and used in liturgy.

Speaker 2:

And that, of course, continues today, as you say, amongst many traditions, but even amongst traditions that we might not think of in this way. I grew up in a Presbyterian Reformed background and on the communion table, which is not an altar, on the communion table, the Bible sits open in front of the congregation. The physical presence of the Bible in that location indicates, of course, the centrality of the Word of God. Or today, often in Pentecostal churches, the Bible itself as an object is laid on people for healing, for driving out evil spirits. So the physicality of the Bible as a material object begins early on and today now has many different manifestations. In the Orthodox traditions right through to Pentecostal. Its physicality has become an expression of what it is, which is the Word of God.

Speaker 1:

It's interesting. I'm going to kind of fast forward to really I mean, just because I live next to the Gutenberg Press and we're going to go let's talk about the medieval period and really, when that Bible started hitting the streets.

Speaker 2:

And it started hitting and it was actually, I think, a symbol of rising literacy, rising prosperity in society and that the issuing of the Bible really turned humanity in a lot of ways, that the Protestantism, with its focus on the Bible, had restored Christianity to its proper authority, which is the Word of God. And part of that is a kind of polemic against the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, saying they had ignored the Bible. All sorts of things get said. This is absolutely not true, and I can say that as a Protestant that the Bible was widely available in the medieval world. Those who engaged in the study of theology primarily engaged in the study of Scripture, though the Bible itself, just as I spoke about, was visible to the masses in liturgical worship when they went to Mass. But the Bible also inhabited the world in which these people lived. They had access to biblical stories being told in drama. Even the most rudimentary parish churches would have scenes from the Bible on the walls. People were constantly engaging visually with all the senses you think of touching and kissing that we talked about earlier With the Bible. The Reformation will bring a different understanding of what the Bible is, but it doesn't recover the Bible from nothing. The medieval world was full of Bible in the sense that it was a biblical world the people lived in. Yes, there were other aspects to it, but visually and you see this if you live today in Catholic or Orthodox traditions there was everything in the landscape to remind you of biblical stories. So, although literacy was extremely low, people had access to the Bible in many different ways, including also preaching, during the Middle Ages.

Speaker 2:

What happens with Gutenberg, of course, is not the invention of printing, because printing was already well known in China. But what Gutenberg does is that he's able to do what's called movable type, and that is to have individual letters and then broken apart and reset as you go from page after another. And that allows you to, of course, now to produce Bibles and other books on a scale that has never been possible before, because previously Bibles were copied by scribes and it could take years for them to do that, so Bibles in that sense were only available to a very small number of people. Gutenberg begins a process, just as you say, where suddenly Bibles—and what printing does, of course, is that it creates a standard version of the Bible, because it's being printed and being produced in hundreds and later thousands of copies distributed across the European world and then eventually transatlantically world and then eventually transatlantically. So here we have a new form of the book.

Speaker 2:

Remember, the book existed really from the second century, but now you have a book that has a range never before possible, and one of the reasons this happens is precisely what you say. There's a growing wealthy what we might call middle class, mercantile class in the late Middle Ages, and these people have a great appetite for having Bibles and other forms of devotional literature. So Gutenberg has a market for this. He can, actually, although he was a terrible businessman, the one very clever thing he did was he sold all his Bibles by subscription before they were printed, so that he would get his money back for doing this. But that really begins a world of the Bible, what we might call a Bible market, which grows hugely during the late Middle Ages, and, of course, is what makes the Reformation possible.

Speaker 1:

Now out of the Reformation comes the King James Bible and I tell you your chapter on the King James Bible. I've just always taken thee and thou for granted and that's always been the book. It isn't the book that the Catholic Church uses, but I know it's out there. But there's some very surprising things that you write about the King James Bible that by the time it was printed in the scene hundreds that thee and thou were actually out. That it does a lot, excuse me, it does a lot to shape our language. You know, at wit's end, I mean, some of those phrases I didn't realize came from the King James Bible. Talk to us a little bit about the importance of that and again, how and we see this time and time in history how the language of the Bible shapes the language and it shapes the culture. And I thought the King James Bible is like the ultimate in doing this.

Speaker 2:

Well, certainly in the English-speaking world, and it remains one of the most popular Bibles world and it remains one of the most popular Bibles. One of the things I learned was that the King James Bible app, the app of today, is amongst the most popular Bible apps in Africa. And so in African churches, the King James at least in the English-speaking African churches, the King James still has a very important role. But here we see another aspect of language which is very interesting. Often the Bible is translated just today, if you think about the King James for many Protestants. They love it because they love the holiness of this older language. It sounds sacred, it sounds really, really good. It's like having a good narrator. It conveys a sense of authority and people love the fact that in some ways it's very antiquated. Well, that story plays out many times in the life of the Bible. One could think of Old Slavonic in the Russian churches, in the Armenian churches, also an older form of the Bible. One could think of Old Slavonic in the Russian churches, in the Armenian churches, also an older form of the language. People still use it Because, as we know, people remain very attached to what they grew up with, what they know, and innovation in Bible translation has not always been successful because people are very wedded to what they have.

Speaker 2:

Jerome, going back to the beginning of the Vulgate in the 5th century. His translation was not a success right from the beginning because people said we already have a translation of the Bible, we don't need your new one. And although Jerome thought it was much better and of course he translated into Latin, which at that point was a vernacular language, because that's the language people spoke we think now of the Latin Bible as being rather remote from us. But it was, for Jerome, a vernacular translation. It was meant to reach the people.

Speaker 2:

But there is this interesting idea about language that older forms of it convey a kind of holiness that perhaps modern, more prosaic translations don't. And so this has always been the story of the King James and, as you mentioned, when it's printed in 1611, they intentionally used somewhat antiquated language Going back to William Tyndale almost 100 years earlier Tyndale's language they retain it in many ways but that oldness, like the thee and thou of the 16th century. They thought that was beauty. It reflected tradition of the English language, it reflected authority. So the King James translators in many cases intentionally made their Bible sound older because it conveyed a certain authority. It's like people building Tudor-style houses today. It conveys a kind of continuity with the past, although it's a new house or a new translation oh, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, latin in the Roman Catholic Church is the same way. That's right.

Speaker 2:

Exactly and that's why, for many Protestants, my uncle this amusing story. When he was dying in hospital he asked his children to read the Bible to him and they picked up the Bible that was in the hospital and started and he said no, no, no, no, I want the real Bible. And by which he meant the King James. And this is a strong attachment people have to the Bible. But translation has many different aspects to it. Sometimes you want to make it more authoritative by actually making it sound antiquated, and that's exactly what happened with the King James Now, over the succeeding centuries, as the King James.

Speaker 2:

The King James we have now mostly is not the original one printed in 1611. It's gone through many revisions. Printed in 1611. It's gone through many revisions and at various points people weeded out some of those antiquated words and language to make it more fitting to their own time. But there's always this dialogue in translation between keeping the old and having something new, because when it's new, people feel like it doesn't have any tradition, it doesn't have any lineage, it doesn't have the same importance for us. So, although we live in a society that always seems to value the new and the innovative, that's not always been the story with the Bible.

Speaker 1:

I kind of in this vein, I kind of wondered why I was reading this book, because you know I mean the multitude of Bible apps now, of you know machine language and of you know the podcasts and of how that is going to transform the Bible. I mean, so we're seeing kind of the Bible go through a technical change now because it's on an iPhone, it is downloadable, it's in multiple languages. If this is not another chapter in the history of the Bible, Absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

A couple of years ago I was in a very large church in New York in the center of New York and lots and lots of young people and they came to the scripture reading and they all had their phones out. I thought that's rude. Maybe that's just a sign of our times People can't keep their hands off their phone, and of course I was totally wrong. What they were doing was following the Bible text on their phones, and probably today, for people under the age of 45-40, that's the most common way for them to have access to the Bible is on their phones or on their laptops, and the number of Bible apps are available innumerable. Recently you mentioned Father Mike Schmitz. He did a complete reading of the Bible. You know a year one and I followed that.

Speaker 2:

Another person on the Catholic, the Hello One, which I also listen to, jonathan Rumi, has read through the Gospels, and so I think, particularly for a certain age, you could hazard the guess that they're almost more likely to listen to that or to read it on some form electronic form than perhaps holding open a book in front of them. And that's just as I say towards the end of the book. The Bible has always embraced technology right from the beginning of the codex, the book form in the second century. It's always proved very adept adapting to new forms of technology and I expect long after I'm gone there will be many other forms of technology and the Bible will be there. And because that's being one of its most enduring aspects is that it's very adaptable to different forms of technology, and I know from my own students that most of the time when they're looking at scriptural passages it's on their phone.

Speaker 1:

I tell you, I have seen a steep education, upward education curve amongst lay Catholics in their knowledge of the Bible, and it is because of the Hallow app, it is because of Robert Barron, it is because of Mike Schmidt. So we're dealing now with a much smarter, much more educated Catholic laity in the Bible, as younger people are coming into the church. So I think it, I mean it is transforming the Catholic church as we speak.

Speaker 2:

In some ways it has served to democratize the.

Speaker 1:

Bible? Oh, absolutely In my organization, yes, it has. But I tell you, my favorite chapter in this book is your chapter on science and faith. Is your chapter on science and faith? You really handle this well and the fact that the two inform each other. They're not mutually exclusive or inclusive. Just had an interview with a guy named George Mooser who wrote it was a book about AI, about putting ourselves back into the equation, and you know what he actually had come up with. The same opinion he's a physicist, right, and we don't have to leave theology behind. Theology has never been left behind with science. We have this kind of this legend that you know science and religion were torn apart during the Renaissance, and sometimes it was Voltaire and Hume and all those wonderful people out there Renaissance, and sometimes it was Voltaire and Hume and all those wonderful people out there, but for the most part it's always been. It's two tracks of looking at God's created world, I think.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean this narrative of the great separation of science and religion which we're so familiar with. And if you look everything in textbooks to public history, the narrative is repeated and repeated that the scientific revolution of the 17th century emancipated science from its religious context and therefore the two went separately and were never to be brought back together again. And that is characteristic of the formation of the modern world. You can read this endlessly how the scientific revolution of the 17th century. But let's just take, for example, perhaps the most famous story, which is Galileo. And again, if you go online you read all these things.

Speaker 2:

It's Galileo, as this prophet of the modern world, the rejection of the benighted Catholic Church, who got it all wrong by insisting that the heliocentric universe of Copernicus was wrong, completely misread what happened in the 17th century. Galileo, to his final hour, professed himself to be a devout Catholic and a son of the Church. His work was not to disprove religion but to demonstrate how religion and the new forms of science, such as the new understanding of, in a sense, the cosmos of the universe, was entirely reconcilable with religion, not two separate things. That story of the separation is really a story. That is a creation myth of the 19th century in the period of Darwinism and such things.

Speaker 2:

It's not the story of the scientific revolution. And I can name many people Galileo, francis Bacon, who is the great, in a way, exponent of empirical science and experimentation, right through to Newton. Newton wrote more things about theology than he ever did about science. These people, in very different ways, are asking the question of how, not whether, the Bible is important in the world, and Galileo comes up with this idea. Well, it's an older idea, but he embraces it. And that is the idea of the two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture, and they are completely complementary but they are distinct. The book of Scripture tells us about salvation. The book of nature tells us about the world that we are around and science, and therefore it's to be investigated inductively and deductively. The new science should absolutely focus on that. But what that science cannot do is tell us the story of salvation, and Galileo believed that, as many, many others did, and people like Voltaire and Hume that you mentioned are the outriders. They're not, in that sense, the mainstream.

Speaker 2:

We hear about the secularization of religion in the French Revolution. That's a small number of people. The vast majority of people in France at the Revolution regarded themselves as very much Catholic. And the time of the so-called scientific revolution and later of the Enlightenment. We tend to focus on these secularizing figures or these critics of the Bible. But exactly in that period is the period of the great renewal movements within Catholicism, within Protestantism, leading of course in America to the Great Awakening, to pietism, in Germany, where you are, to the Moravians. So people think this is a story of secularization. This is actually a period of enormous religious revival, and so we tend to tell one story because we focus on a few people but in fact we miss the bigger picture.

Speaker 1:

Oh, absolutely. And I tell you, one of the most brilliant essays of the 20th century was John Paul II's Fides et Ratio Faith and Reason. He actually very vigorously defended both the sciences and faith and saw them as not exclusive of one the others. Professor Gordon, I could talk to you for hours. This book is fascinating and, to my listening audience.

Speaker 1:

If you are looking for a Christmas present for a historian, someone who's interested in languages, the development of languages, someone who's interested in geography, someone who might even be interested in the Bible, this is a fabulous book. It's a big read, but it's a you know what it reads really well, because you keep the reader in the story and you actually feel like you are walking through the centuries. So as you walk through the centuries, you learn something about the timeline of history, about the timeline of technology, of philosophy, of theology, of culture. Your book really reflects well what the Bible is and what it has been to so many people for so long, and you actually really capture that in this book. And it's put out by one of my favorite publishers, Basic Books, the Bible A Global History, and it has lots of nice pictures, but I would just say that this book Basic Books is a secular press.

Speaker 1:

The intention of this book is that the reading audience is everyone. It's not intended only for the faithful few. It's, I hope, speaking about the Bible to a wide audience, almost anyone who is a reader of history on your reading list. I think it's going to be a Christmas gift for some of the people in my family, so very good. Well, professor Gordon, I hope to get the chance to speak with you again, because you are such a gifted writer and I love your understanding of history and how you explain it.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a great honor.

Speaker 1:

It was a pleasure, sir.