A Unique Book
“The Bible is the most widely distributed book in history.”—The World Book Encyclopedia.
OVER 550 years ago, the German inventor Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable type. The first major book to come off his press was a Bible.* Since then, billions upon billions of books on every subject imaginable have been printed. The Bible, however, is by far the most exceptional of them all.
- It is estimated that more than 4.7 billion Bibles (in whole or in part) have been printed. That is more than five times the number of copies of the next most widely distributed publication, Quotations From Chairman Mao.
- More than 50 million copies of the Bible or portions of it were distributed recently in one year alone. “The Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year,” says a report in The New Yorker magazine.
- In whole or in part, the Bible has been translated into more than 2,400 languages. At least some of the Bible is available in the languages spoken by over 90 percent of the human family.
- About half the Bible writers finished their writings before the birth of both Confucius, the renowned Chinese sage, and Siddhārtha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism.
- The Bible has had a profound influence on the arts, including some of the world’s greatest paintings, music, and literature.
- The Bible has endured bans by governments, burnings by religious opposers, and attacks by critics. No other book in history has faced greater opposition—and survived.
The above-mentioned facts are outstanding, are they not? Of course, impressive details and statistics alone do not prove that the Bible is trustworthy. Next, we will examine five reasons why millions of people are convinced that the Bible is worthy of trust.
* Gutenberg’s Bible, also called the 42-line Bible, was a Latin translation and was completed in about 1455.
