The Influence Of The English Bible

from The Christian Reader:

The Influence of the English Bible


by Eric Rauch



One of the easy things to forget in our modern, information-saturated era of history is just how unique it is to have instant access to a Bible in our own language. Forget for a minute that we don’t just have one Bible available, but literally hundreds of Bibles available in the English language alone. There is a study Bible for nearly every demographic imaginable, including some that aren’t (imaginable that is). We have teen Bibles and senior Bibles, we have white-collar Bibles and blue-collar Bibles, we have boy Bibles and girl Bibles, and we even have a Bible that has no gender. Even though we have far more Bibles lying around than any other time in history—to the point that every American home has at least three copies—it is also paradoxically true that we are the most ignorant of what the Bible actually says. Further, very few modern readers have much of an idea about the history of how we came to have a Bible in English in the first place.





Get "A Visual History of the English Bible" from the bookstore

It is these two difficulties—little knowledge of the Bible’s content and history—that makes Donald Brake’s new book, A Visual History of the English Bible, such a necessary reference work for every Christian home. Filled with illustrations, graphs, charts, photographs, and fascinating information, A Visual History is difficult to put down. Added to the fact that the book is a beautiful presentation of the information, the publisher is offering the book at a steal of a price. A hardcover, full-color, glossy-page, smyth-sewn book for under $20 is nearly unheard of, but Baker Books has made this possible, so don’t waste time asking why.



Dr. Donald Brake is as much a Bible collector as he is a Bible scholar. Brake founded Multnomah Biblical Seminary in Portland, Oregon in 1993 and continues to serve on the Seminary’s administrative staff. His passion for the Word of God shows through clearly in his writing, but it his sense as a collector that differentiates A Visual History from other similar books. Brake pays attention to details that most scholars would miss about the physical books themselves. Understanding the printing industry is an important part of understanding the history and development of the English Bible. Knowing how manuscripts moved from hand-copied texts to machine-printed translations is fascinating and is as integral to the complete picture of how we got our English Bible as are the stories of the translators’ bravery and courage. Even though I found myself disagreeing with Brake’s theology at times, his history is relatively sound. A Christian who is unfamiliar with the sacrifice and danger that countless men and women have endured to give us a Bible in our own language, is a Christian that needs to be educated. A Visual History is the tool to make that education possible, and painless.



A necessary discussion of any English Bible translation is the “King James only” controversy. Dr. Brake does a good job in demystifying this subject and shedding much needed light on this often heated topic. Although he makes it quite clear that he has no love for its Calvinistic tradition, Brake rightly shows how the Geneva Bible—translated into English 50 years before the King James—was actually a great influence on the King James translation. The whole reason for commissioning the King James Bible was because the King disagreed with the marginal notes of the Geneva, he did not have a problem with the translation itself. Some scholars estimate that the KJV is nearly 90% identical to the Geneva translation. The fact of the matter is that both the Geneva and the KJV are both fairly accurate translations of the limited number of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts that were available to scholars 400 years ago. Fighting over which translation is the better one is more a matter of opinion than it is of fact.



American social order, culture, and government owes a huge debt of gratitude to the English Bible and the Christians who first brought it here. Up until 50 years ago, the Bible was a book that nearly everyone in this country was at least familiar with, and most had read it at least once. Today, Bible knowledge and familiarity is staggeringly low, and most people who reject the Bible outright have never bothered cracking open one of the three in their home. If Dr. Brake’s book does anything, I pray it renews a study of the influence and connectedness of the Bible and America. Perhaps if more people understood the deep impact that the Bible held—and still holds—over the underlying infrastructure of America, more people would consider reading the Book itself. The Reformation took place in Europe, and had the lasting effects that it did, because common men and women were able to read the Bible in their own language and in their own homes. We take this divine blessing for granted in this country to our own detriment. America’s reformation is as close—or as far—as the Bibles that sit unread on the bookshelves of our homes. “As author Marion Simms states, ‘No nation in all of history was ever founded by people so dominated by the Bible as America’” (p. 249). May this be true of us once again.