Roger Steer

Good News For The World

2004

200 years of making the Bible heard
The Story of the Bible Society
Roger Steer

In 1800 a 15-year-old Welsh girl, Mary Jones, walked 28 miles, barefoot, across the side of a mountain to buy a Welsh Bible, for which she had saved six years, from a Methodist minister, Thomas Charles. Impressed, Charles persuaded friends to set up a society to provide affordable Welsh Bibles. The group quickly realised that Bibles in the language of the people must be made available not just in Wales, but around the world. They agreed to distribute the unadorned Bible, without note or comment, to transcend sectarian divides.

The subsequent achievements of Bible Society are astonishing: so much so that the elderly Mary Jones, aged 71, would donate a half-sovereign to the Society’s appeal to print and circulate a million Chinese New Testaments. The Society whose formation she unwittingly triggered quickly attracted within its orbit kings, queens, a Russian tsar, an Ethiopian emperor, prime ministers – the list goes on.

This is the story of men and women of immense ability and courage. But above all it is the story of a book – the Book – and of the way it has broken through barriers of culture and language to set hearts on fire right around the world.

Author

Roger Steer is author of 12 books, including George Muller: Delighted in God, which has been continuously in print for nearly 30 years. He has been a trustee of Bible Society for many years. He lives in Devon, UK.

Selling points

Published to mark the Society’s bicentenary

Full of vivid cameos and fascinating detail

Major advertising support

Market

Wide: a dramatic and very readable story which should capture public imagination afresh.

Category: Bible

ISBN 1 85424 663 1

Large format p/b, 448pp,