The compilation of texts — assembled over roughly a thousand years of composition, canonized through centuries of religious politics, translated into every major language, and used to justify slavery, liberation, empire, resistance, persecution, and redemption — that remains the most widely distributed and most contested book in human history
The Bible is not one book. It is a library — 66 books in the Protestant canon, 73 in the Catholic, with further variations in Eastern Orthodox and Ethiopian traditions — assembled over roughly a thousand years, translated into over 700 languages, and read by billions of people who do not agree on what it says, what it means, who has authority to interpret it, or what it requires. No other text has been more productive of both liberation and oppression. No other text has been more thoroughly studied and more frequently misread.