As the single work at the heart of Christianity, the world’s largest organized religion, the Bible is the spiritual guide for one out of each three people in the world. It is also the world’s most widely distributed book and its best-selling, with an estimated six billion duplicates sold in the last two hundred years. But the Bible is a complex work with a complicated and fog history. Its contents have changed over the centuries, it has been transformed by translation and, through interpretation, has developed manifold meanings to various religions, denominations, and sects.

In this seminal account, acclaimed historian Karenic Armstrong discusses the conception, gestation, life, and afterlife of history’s most powerful book. Armstrong analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was collected into one work, and how it became accepted as Christianity’s unnameable text, and how its interpretation changed over time. Armstrong’s history of the Bible is a brilliant, captivating book, crucial in an age of declining establishment and rising fundamentalism.