Bible Study Archive

What followed

• The calendar

  Year one

  Every contract, birth certificate and timestamp on earth counts its distance from one Galilean carpenter who held no office, commanded no army, and died a criminal’s death.

• The book

  3,600 tongues

  The most translated and most printed text there has ever been — past six billion copies. The first thing Gutenberg pressed into ink, in 1450, was a Bible.

• The hospital

  AD 369

  Free care for strangers, whatever their rank, was the church’s invention. Basil of Caesarea built the Basiliad for the sick and the travelling. Mercy, Presbyterian, St Jude and the Red Cross still carry the inheritance.

• The university

  106 of 108

  Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne and Bologna were church foundations — as were 106 of the first 108 colleges chartered in America, Harvard and Yale among them.

• Written language

  New alphabets

  Missionaries have written down more alphabets and grammars than any government, empire or university — made so that people could read Scripture in their own tongue.

• The scale

  2.6 billion

  It began with eleven frightened men behind a locked door in occupied Jerusalem. It is now the largest movement there has ever been, on every inhabited continent.

• Human dignity

  Imago Dei

  That every life has worth regardless of use, power or birth had no place in the pagan world, where exposure of infants and the arena were ordinary. Abolition and modern human rights are its fallout.