Love it or Leave it, the Bible is the most widely read book in the world, having sold over 3.9 billion copies over the past 50 years. That’s a lot of books. Plenty of hotel rooms still have a Gideons Bible hidden in a drawer. Plenty of televangelists still hold it aloft like it had magical powers. Heck, even Donald Trump tried to pull that trick.
For comparison’s sake, The “Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung” comes in a distant second with 820 million copies sold and the “Harry Potter” series which comes in an even more distant third at 400 million copies. There’s no denying the Bible’s influence over us. But is it still relevant? Fewer of us believe the stories told by the Bible are literal truth; its loyal, believing readership mirrors the diminishing realm of the God of the Gaps. Is it just a matter of time before the Bible becomes nothing more than a quaint museum piece?
SOURCES & REFERENCES
List of Best-Selling Books of all time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
Psalm 78:
http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/PS+78.html
Is the Old Testament story of Moses a fiction?
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html
Who Wrote the Pentateuch/Old Testament? Some current thinking —
Thomas Jefferson’s Bible —
https://www.history.com/news/thomas-jefferson-bible-religious-beliefs
G. K. Chesterton — 29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian and critic — of both literature and art. He has known as the “prince of paradox“.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
Al-Ghazali — (c. 1058 – 19 December 1111) — Persian philosopher, was one of the most prominent and influential Muslim philosophers, theologians, jurists and mystics of Sunni Islam. He claimed that mathematics was the language of the devil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali
Hermaneutics Of Suspicion — coined by Paul Ricoeur in Freud and Philosophy (1965) to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, the three “masters of suspicion“.[2] This school aspires to balance recognition and perception between “explanation” and “understanding” that validates expressions of a representation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics_of_suspicion
The Other Bible — Reference work containing all the non-canonical texts NOT included in the canonical Pentateuch, commentaries and New Testament.
Marcian (c. 392 – 26 January 457) — Roman Emperor of the East from 450 to 457.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcian
Giorgio Agamben — (born 22 April 1942) — Italian philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception, form of life and homo sacer.