Phillip Jenkins, historian and author of The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, comments: For many Americans and Europeans, not only are the societies in the Bible—in both testaments—distant in terms of time and place, but their everyday assumptions are all but incomprehensible. Yet exactly the issues that make the Bible a distant historical record for many Americans and Europeans keep it a living text in the churches of the global South. . . . And this identification extends to the Old Testament no less than the New.
