The British and Foreign Bible Society, the American Bible Society, and the Gideons all came into being at least partly in order to distribute Bibles and tracts that would bring reader everywhere to the faith. It would fly in the face of the historical evidence to suppose that the process has never worked that way. But if we probe the historical evidence, we will often find a human voice hovering somewhere in the vicinity of the written or printed page. When he just happened to read that particular passage from the New Testament, Augustine was responding to the mysterious voice of a child, whether a boy or a girl he did not know, that called out to him: "Pick it up and read it!" And the Bibles and tracts of the Bible societies were often distributed by the hand of a living and speaking human being, not just by mail or in a tract rack. No book of the Tanakh or the New Testament is addressed explicitly to unbelievers, though they are certainly present prominently in both.
Thus for every paragraph in a letter of every chapter in a spiritual autobiography detailing someone's conversion through reading the Book, there are hundreds in which it is the voice of a parent, friend, or stranger - perhaps sometimes even a teacher or preacher - that was the force which did the challenging and summoning and inviting.
+Jaroslav Pelikan, from Whose Bible is It? A Short History of the Scriptures, The God Who Speaks.
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