Article July 2, 2012 Issue

Famous but nameless

In search of some of the anonymous characters in the Bible.

Kim Shippey, Senior Editor

Mark Hendrickson, economist, teacher, and prolific commentator on economic and political issues (“Nothing controversial,” he deadpans) worked overtime in 2010 and 2011 to write a book he’d been thinking about for over a decade—Famous But Nameless: Lessons and Inspiration from the Bible’s Anonymous Characters (iUniverse, Bloomington, Indiana, 2011).

As Hendrickson explains in his preface, his approach was to retell “biblical incidents from the unconventional perspective of the anonymous characters who briefly flit across the stage of biblical history rather than from the customary perspective of the Bible’s headliners and stars.”

Recently, I asked Hendrickson how and why he set about learning more about those he describes as “the most famous anonymous people who ever lived.” 

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