What do you know about the Bible itself: about its influence, its composition, and those things the
Bible doesn't say (but which most people think it does)? Cutting through many conceptions of popular
culture about one of the most-influential books in the world, here’s the untold truth of the Bible.
Back in the 1960s, some famous figures were predicting the Bible was on the way out. In 1966,
a 25-year-old John Lennon said, as reported in Rolling Stone:
"Christianity will go. […] I needn't argue about that; I know I'm right,
and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I
don't know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity."
The controversial comment provoked an enormous backlash in the US, where Beatles records
and memorabilia were burned by outraged Christians. Lennon was forced to apologize.
“I’ve clarified it about eight-hundred times, you know. I could’ve said ‘TV’
or something else, you know, my answer’s as clear as it can be.”
But the Beatles member was wrong. Fifty years after his famous gaffe,
the influence of religion has waned very little — as the continued popularity of the Bible
demonstrates. In the US alone, it is estimated that at least 168,000 copies of the Bible are
sold or distributed each day, more than ever before, according to Congressional records.
So while the Beatles may be the best-selling musicians of all time,
the units they shifted pale in comparison to those of the Bible, which Guinness World Records
says has sold a huge 5 billion copies. That makes it the most-popular book in the world.
The holy text has had a profound influence on writing in English
ever since it was translated into the language,
and especially after the ready availability in England of the King James Bible in 1611.
As The Washington Times argues, while the Bible is undoubtedly a religious text,
it's a literary one, too. It’s an anthology of various literary forms:
letters, poems, dialogues, narratives, and more. Together, they’ve inspired generations
of English-language writers looking for forms their ideas can inhabit.
Not only have the stories themselves inspired allegorical writing by the likes of C.S. Lewis
in the Chronicles of Narnia series, they’ve also given solid blueprints for plot and structure.
In Paris was our Mistress, a memoir of his days as part of the European literary circles of
the 1920s, Samuel Putnam states that Ernest Hemingway claimed to have learned to write,
quote, "by reading the Bible." Hemingway once remarked in a letter to F. Scott
Fitzgerald that the good book is a great source of titles for literary works,
such as that for his novel The Sun Also Rises, which was taken from the book of Ecclesiastes.
While it’s a common belief that all Christian teaching is handed down to us from the Bible,
many ideas on Christian morality have come from elsewhere, including theologians.
One of these is the idea that there exist "seven deadly sins":
pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. They’ve worked their way into
popular culture as a pillar of Christian thought, including in the 1995 movie Seven.
However, according to Britannica, this categorization of, quote, "mortal" sins
into seven groups doesn't occur in the Bible at all. It was actually developed in the 4th century
AD by John Cassian, an ascetic, theologian, and abbot . Cassian arrived at his concept of the
seven deadly sins through interpretation of various passages he analyzed throughout the
Bible and worked into a teachable doctrine. That doctrine became highly influential, especially
in the Catholic faith, with the Catholic Church declaring Cassian a saint as a result of his work.
Though Open Bible lists several passages that come close to echoing what we consider the
seven deadly sins today, nowhere does the holy text list them as it does the Ten Commandments.
As Britannica describes, Catholicism teaches that purgatory is a place — or
process — different from hell, which purifies the souls of repentant sinners and eventually
allows them to enter heaven. According to The Catechism of the Catholic Church,
published in 1992 with the approval of Pope John Paul II,
"[Purgatory is the fate of those] who die in God's grace and friendship,
but [are] still imperfectly purified, [who through purgatory undergo] purification,
so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven."
But purgatory is not overtly mentioned in the Bible. In fact, the concept of purgatory as a
place only arose in the Middle Ages through interpreting certain passages of the Bible
that describe death's, quote, "purifying fire." The conclusion was, according to Britannica,
that a place for such purification of impure souls must exist, in light of God’s mercy.
Though its fiery image is emblazoned in the imaginations of most westerners,
hell in the Judeo-Christian tradition has transformed hugely since the writing of the
Hebrew Bible or Old Testament more than two millennia ago.
As Bart Ehrman, religious scholar and author of Heaven and Hell:
A History of the Afterlife told NPR, the assumption that the Old Testament contains
multiple references to hell is based on a mistranslation. Ehrman claims the Hebrew word
Sheol is closer to the literal word "grave" than the underworld of the dead. Writing for TIME,
Ehrman explains that the Hebrew Bible, quote, "assumes that the dead are simply dead."
It’s the New Testament that promises an eternal afterlife, though as Ehrman explains,
the image of hell as a fiery pit is mentioned just briefly in Revelation.
The image has been expanded upon by non-Biblical writers and artists such
as Dante, whose epic poem Inferno gives the reader a guided tour of hell. In that work,
each of the nine circles of hell is more horrible than the previous,
in which sinners are found being tortured in increasing agony. Where Dante wrote about hell,
artist Hieronymus Bosch brought to life the unbearable tortures of hell in terrifying detail.
Though the King James Bible of 1611 is thought of as the definitive English version,
it did, in fact, have one important precursor. That was the Great Bible,
commissioned by one of England's most famous — or, perhaps, notorious — kings: Henry VIII.
According to the British Library – which holds what many experts believe may have
been Henry VIII's own personal copy of the Great Bible — for centuries English
editions of the Bible were illegal. They existed in England only in Latin,
the official language of the Catholic Church — that is, until 1536, when Henry saw the political
advantage to be gained in spreading the holy scriptures in the native tongue of his subjects.
Two years prior, as recounted by Rochester Cathedral, he had separated England from
the See of Rome — transferring jurisdiction over the country’s churches from the Pope to himself,
as king. The British Library reveals that by 1541, more than 9,000 English Bibles — based on formerly
illegal translations by the Protestant sympathizer William Tyndale, executed in
1534 — were distributed among England's churches. Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s shady agent, ordered
pastors to purchase the works. The title page of the Great Bible included images of both Henry
and Cromwell interacting with Biblical figures, with Jesus Christ saying in reference to the King,
"A man after my heart who will do all my will."
Though today the Bible is considered to be a fixed text containing a certain number of books,
its history is far more fluid. For centuries before the time of Jesus,
various holy texts and religious documents circulated among ancient scholars and holy men,
usually in scroll form. According to John Barton, a former professor of holy scriptures
at the University of Oxford, sometime in the first century BC, 39 of these texts
were collected to form the Hebrew Bible, which Christians now refer to as the Old Testament.
When it comes to the compilation of the New Testament in the years following the crucifixion
of Jesus Christ, the British Academy explains there is a common misconception. Popularized
by Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code, a widely held belief is that in early Christian history,
various writings deemed heretical were removed by councils looking to form the new Biblical canon
along orthodox lines. However, the British Academy argues that, apart from the Gospel of Thomas,
most of the books claimed to have been excluded were in fact written much later, while those
included had been held as Christian doctrine long before the written texts were officially compiled.
In later centuries, books were sometimes excluded from the Bible at times of great change, such as
in the case of the Lutheran Bible and even that of the King James Bible, which originally excluded
14 books. Nowadays, most of these works are included in modern Bibles as, quote, "Apocrypha".
For many, the Bible speaks in two distinct voices: that of the Old Testament — which has often been
described as "fire and brimstone," and which warns, chides, and chastises — and that of
the New Testament — which, broadly speaking, delivers its message in softer tones. Both
parts of the Bible are generally thought to be direct and sincere. But despite this,
there are numerous moments in its 1,189 chapters where snark and sarcasm give the
reader a moment of comic relief, proving that our love of a salty putdown is deep-rooted.
In 1 Kings 18:27, for example, the prophet Elijah confronts a group of worshippers of the god Baal,
who are in the middle of offering a sacrifice. When the worshippers
receive no response from their god, Elijah hits them with this sarcastic rebuke:
“Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself,
or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened."
Who knew trolling was more than 2,500 years old?
More modern versions of the Bible, such as the Good News Bible published in 1966, foreground the
humor inherent in many verses. Take, for example, this stand-up style line from Proverbs 26:13:
"Why don't lazy people ever get out of the house? What are they afraid of? Lions?"
A Bible that encourages affairs? Whether you're a believer or not, you're
likely to be familiar with the Ten Commandments. They’re the basic rules of good behavior handed
down from God to Moses in the book of Exodus, which Moses brought to his followers on stone
tablets and then laid in a beautiful gold chest known as the Ark of the Covenant.
Though the Ark and its contents are now lost,
the Ten Commandments have remained central to the Jewish and Christian
faiths. But not all Bibles have carried the same exact version of the Ten Commandments.
According to The Guardian, ​​in 1631, two decades after the appearance of the King James Bible,
King Charles I commissioned a pair of London printers, Robert Barker — who produced the
original KJB — and Martin Lucas, to produce 1,000 new copies of the Bible. It was a heavy task,
even after the dawn of printing. And an error made its way into the printed version: the commandment
on adultery lost the word “not,” instead reading, quote, "Thou shalt commit adultery."
Ten copies of the so-called Sinners' Bible or Wicked Bible are known to
exist, one of which was sold at Sotheby's for $56,250 in 2018 .
The traditional story of Adam and Eve relates that it was first Eve
who was tempted to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden,
despite being told that eating the fruit of the tree was deadly. A serpent supposedly told her:
"You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened,
and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
Most modern Christians now consider the serpent to be a manifestation of Satan himself. But this
idea does not appear in Genesis, or even the Old Testament. Instead, it's only confirmed in
the final book of the New Testament, Revelation, written some 1,500 years after the first book of
the Bible. As The Biblical Archaeology Society has noted, even the idea of the Devil isn't believed
to have been developed until 900 years after the story of the Garden of Eden was first devised.
Though Revelation does indeed provide a late Biblical reference for the serpent's
Satanic identity, the most influential conflation of the serpent and the Devil
arguably occurs in a non-Biblical text: John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost.
The 1611 King James Bible is held among most academics as the most-seismic version
of the text in English in terms of its influence as a literary work.
The literary critic and journalist Robert McCrum, via The Guardian,
goes as far as to say that the KJB, quote, "shaped the English language."
McCrum points out the huge array of phrases found in the text that are still used in our
everyday language even now. To, quote, "fight the good fight?" That's from 1 Timothy 6:12,
while Prince fans may be interested to note that the,
quote, "sign of the times" was a phrase first found in the KJB's Matthew 16:3.
In fact, so successful was the King James version that some scholars have suggested
William Shakespeare himself — who was alive and working at the start of the 17th century — may
have had a hand in its composition. However, as Britannica notes, it’s likely a myth. A committee
of 47 translators and writers are known to have had a hand in the creation of the KJB,
though who is responsible for each part of the finished text is still a mystery.
Despite the Ten Commandments having reminded mankind that theft is wrong
for more than 3,000 years, stealing is still one of mankind's habitual vices.
Somewhat unexpectedly though, it appears that the kleptomaniacs of the world might
be looking to the Good Book for some advice on how to change their ways.
CNN Money had reported that the Bible — the planet's all-time bestseller — was also the
most-stolen book in the world as recently as 2013. However, they also noted that Bibles are often
distributed free of charge in churches, which may give the impression that they’re up for grabs
more generally. With the number of Bibles found in hotel rooms, no wonder so many go missing.
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