Editorial October 12, 1992 Issue

The Bible: discovering what it's worth to you

Mary Metzner Trammell

Let's be truthful about it. Very few of us, if we were figuring up our net worth, would think of our family Bible as a key financial asset. Recent polls show that although most of us own a Bible, not many of us have yet discovered much about what's between its covers. We may know who Noah and Moses and Jesus are. But ask us about Melchizedek and Samuel and Amos—and we get a little fuzzy. In fact, the pollsters say, some of us haven't opened up our Bibles in years.

Yet it hasn't always been that way. There was a time—before Bible reading was legalized in England and Europe—when ordinary people were willing to pay exorbitant prices for just a few smuggled chapters from the New Testament. And they paid over a thousand dollars (in today's currency) for a complete Bible. Then they'd hide it in their mattresses—and read it by candlelight around the kitchen table, listening with all their hearts as a family member labored through the holy text word by word.

These simple people loved what they heard; and they lived by it. Kings and parliaments, though, felt that giving the Bible to people in ordinary spoken languages somehow desecrated God's Word. So they banned Bible reading. And they imprisoned or put to death those who refused to comply.

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