The Rise and Fall of the Bible

Timothy Beal takes us back to early Christianity to ask how a box of handwritten scrolls became the Bible, and forward to see how the multibillion-dollar business that has brought us Biblezines and Manga Bibles is selling down the Bible's sacred capital.

Among his surprising insights: Early Christianity thrived for centuries without any Bible - there was no official canon of scriptures, much less a book big enough to hold them all. There is no "original" Bible behind the thousands of different Bibles on the market today. The farther we go back in the Bible's history, the more versions we find. The idea of the Bible as the literal Word of God is only about a century old. Beal offers a chance to rediscover a Bible, and a faith, that is truer to its own history - not a book of answers but a library of questions.