How to 'Let Your Light Shine' to Illumine the Path to God
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Recent statistics from the publishing industry show that the bible has continued its dominance as the world’s top-selling book. In the U. S. alone, sales totaled 19 million copies in 2025, according to the company that monitors sales for book publishers, Circana BookScan. The runner-up—The Let Them Theory (nonfiction)—sold just under 3 million copies.
Worldwide, 5 to 7 billion bibles are in circulation. By comparison, existing copies of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, number between 500 million and about 2 billion, according to numerous estimates searched by Google AI. The King Fahd printing complex in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest publisher of Islamic books, prints an average of 10 million Qurans a year.1
Sales of the bible were particularly strong in the last two decades, reflecting the thirst for Christian wisdom to carry people through the difficult times of war, terrorism, political turmoil, economic upheaval, and covid 19, with its resulting rise in mental illness.
Since the first printed copies of the bible appeared in 1455, it has been at the center of the spread of Christianity and the development of western civilization.
A German Catholic, Johannes Gutenberg, published the first copies after he invented movable metal type and a printing press unrivaled by other methods of converting handwritten documents into legible printed documents. The type was easy to melt down and reuse. His ingenious technology marked the beginning of more than five centuries in which the bible became the perennial favorite of book buyers. Highly praised for the excellence of the typography in its 1,300 pages, Gutenberg’s bible spurred the spread of information about God, Christianity, and all other subjects affecting humankind.
Gutenberg was born to a patrician merchant and his commoner wife in Mainz, Germany, between 1393 and 1406. His birth name was Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg. The phrases “zur Laden” and “zum Gutenberg” referred to the houses his family occupied. Later, he became known simply as Johannes Gutenberg. It is believed that he was baptized at St. Christoph’s Church in Mainz. He remained a faithful Catholic throughout his life.
Before his invention, monks and professional scribes had to use quills dipped in ink to copy existing written texts—including religious books, diaries, memoirs, essays, epic poems, plays, treaties, and so on—onto animal skins (vellum or parchment) in a tedious process that could last months or even a year to finish a single copy. Because the documents they produced were so rare and so expensive, they were unavailable to the European poor. Their lack of exposure to the written word rendered most of them illiterate. One can only wonder how many of them could have risen to prominence locally, nationally, or internationally if they had had books to teach them. After Gutenberg invented his press, everyone had access to printed tomes from presses that based on Gutenberg's, including educational texts that taught people to read and write. Although they were still expensive, they cost less than the previous handwritten manuscripts. No doubt, lower classes borrowed copies in their native language from friends or read them in libraries.
The bible version Gutenberg printed was the Latin Vulgate, completed in 405 by St. Jerome after he spent more than two decades translating the Old Testament from Hebrew and the New Testament from Greek. Pope Damasus I had commissioned the work in 382 to replace Latin translations of inferior quality.
Gutenberg’s technology made the best literary works available to all of Europe and eventually the rest of the world in numerous languages. It enabled great thinkers of the Renaissance—poets, philosophers, theologians, historians, scientists, statesmen—to access knowledge that inspired them. They, in turn, used the knowledge to document and spread their own ideas. Printers used models of the Gutenberg press to publish Martin Luther’s German bible at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. So did printers who published the plays and poems of Catholic-born William Shakespeare, whose greatest plays have never been equaled for the sheer brilliance of their writing.
Gutenberg’s metal type and printing apparatus were far superior to those of the Chinese, who had also developed a press with movable type. But his type was more durable, his oil-based ink yielded sharper reproductions, and his mechanical process could print up to 3,600 pages a day compared to Chinese output of only 40 pages a day.2
After the Vulgate was translated into English and other languages, it became the standard Catholic bible for five centuries.
Printers of magazines, books, and newspapers continued to use Gutenberg’s metal type until computer technology replaced it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. When I joined the staff of a national newspaper, Grit, in 1968, it was one of the publications still printing its pages with metal type. However, the machines produced the type in full lines rather than single letters. Nevertheless, the process intrigued me and hinted at what it was like when Gutenberg reproduced St. Jerome’s Vulgate to spark cultural development and spread Christianity worldwide. Following are examples of Vatican-approved Catholic bibles.
Douay-Rheims Bible (Translation of the Latin Vulgate)
English Standard Version, Catholic Edition
New American Bible, Revised Edition
New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition
New Jerusalem Bible and the Revised New Jerusalem Bible
The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible
Sources
1. “King Fahd Complex.” Wikipedia. 24 May 2025 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Fahd_Complex_for_the_Printing_of_the_Holy_Quran>.
2. Vlahos, Jackie. “How the Gutenberg Press Revolutionized Printing.” Printivity Insights, 30 July 2025 <https://www.printivity.com/insights/gutenberg-press>.
Before retiring, Michael J. Cummings was a public-school English teacher, a journalist for 17 years, an adjunct instructor of English for 19 years at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, a freelance writer, and the author of more than thirty e-books and five print books. He was born in 1941 in Williamsport, Pa.
