I was almost a smuggler, once. When I was a young man, I travelled to Europe, after I graduated from a college, and I travelled with a friend, who also graduated, from the same college. That was common, in those days. We went to Europe, and in Sweden, we met some Christians who were very calm and quiet, when they spoke to us.

It was like a scene out of a spy movie.

My friend was also a Christian, and we took a walk, on a quiet road with another man. I think he was Swedish. He asked us, quietly, to smuggle Bibles into Communist Romania.

I remember, we were told to travel like the tourists that we were, and his friends would give us at least one package of Bibles intended for Romanian Christians. He told us to leave the Bibles on a luggage rack on the train, some distance away from us. 

If the police found the Bibles, we were told to deny ownership, and to get off the train as soon as possible. If we abandoned the Bibles, the local black market would take care of them. If we safely reached our destination, someone would collect the contraband Bibles from us.

That really happened. You are probably wondering what we said, and we both said “no” politely. The assignment was too dangerous, in those days. I did not want to get locked up in a Romanian Communist prison; I was only a young tourist.

The Bible is an interesting book, in history. The words in the book are interesting, but its use in history, is also interesting. It is like a barometer of what is happening, in our world. The Bible describes itself: “Your word is a lamp to walk by, and a light to illumine my path. I have vowed and solemnly sworn to keep your just regulations.“(Psalm 119: 105 and 106)

Bible Distribution

Some Bible statistics were published, recently, by the International Bible Societies. The information is available at:  152 Million Scriptures Distributed Globally by Bible Societies in 2023 – UBS China Partnership 

I also have a summary here. In 2023, the Bible societies reported on which countries received the most Bibles from them. Note: the letter “m” means “million” and “b” is “billion.” I have added information, in brackets.

The number of Bibles delivered to readers, and probably sold in 2023, are in millions, and the population of each country is in millions or billions. Populations in 2024 are the best information that I could easily find.

Bibles in 2023:

• Brazil 3.21m (pop 212m in 2024)
• India 2.61m (pop 1,451 b in 2024)
• China 1.95m (pop 1,409b in 2024)
• Nigeria 1.31m (pop 232.7m in 2024)
• USA 1.04m (pop 340.1m in 2024)

So, what does this mean, to us?

These statistics tell us something about the world that we live in:

1. We can see the largest markets, for Bibles, in the modern world, and we can calculate the number of Bibles, per person, per year.
2. This information is apparently only for the Bible societies, and many other Bibles might be supplied by other organizations.
3. This is a picture of Bibles printed on paper. The number of Bibles, usually free and installed on computers or cell phones, is also a huge number.
4. The trend in the top five countries probably continues in other parts of the world, with smaller populations.

With some limitations, we can see that the Bible is a popular book in the world. We might expect that Christians in Brazil, Nigeria, and in the U.S.A would buy many Bibles, but how do we explain the huge market for Bibles in India and China? The numbers are; more than one in five hundred (India), or seven hundred (China), per year. If that trend continues, a huge part of the world’s population will be reading the Bible, in ten or twenty years. The number of Bible readers might be less than one in every hundred people.

Did you know that Communist China probably has the largest number of Christians, for any country in the world? The Communists tried to control and eliminate the religion of Jesus for many decades, and we can see the results now. Also, India is a mostly Hindu country that was separated from mostly Muslim Pakistan, almost eighty years ago. The Bible does not fit into that history.

I hope you’re not bored with these statistics. They show a trend, in our world, that is almost never mentioned in the news. Governments often tell people what religion they are assigned, at birth, and people are told what they must believe. We can see the reality, that people often choose to believe what they want.

The world around us is not described correctly, by journalists and politicians.

The first Christians had this story; 

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” (Matthew 28: 18 to 20)

Now we have a statistical trend.

You might want to see what this boring statistical trend looks like, on the streets of a large city. It seems that God is alive, and working among us: