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Gutenberg Bible, Lenox Copy, New York Public Library, 2009

The Bible refers to the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. The Hebrew Bible, known by Christians as the Old Testament, contains two-thirds (39 books) of the Christian Bible. The other third (27 books) is known as the New Testament.

In most Harry Turtledove timelines, the Bible exists as it does in OTL. Various characters are depicted reading from the Bible, or quoting the Bible. The following timelines have a Bible that is different from our own, or are stories where the Bible was particularly relevant to the plot.

Bible in "Before the Beginning"[]

The time-viewer disproved some assertions made by the Bible. The first such discovery was that Moses and Jesus were not everything the Bible made them out to be. Other, larger revelations soon followed.

Bible in Crosstime Traffic[]

Bible in Gunpowder Empire[]

Crosstime travelers who visited Agrippan Rome and studied its culture became interested in the differences between the Bible carried by its Christians, and the Bible of the home timeline. For example, in the Bible of Agrippan Rome there were only three Gospels, as the Book of John had never been written (and John the Apostle himself possibly never having been born); the Acts of the Apostles had the same name, but recorded quite different acts; and the Epistles of Paul included several addressed to churches in locations to which Paul the Apostle never wrote in the home timeline. St. Jerome was never born in this alternate, and so others had translated the Bible into Latin. Such differences provided scholars in the home timeline with material to embark on the new field of Comparative Crosstime Bible Studies.[1]

Bible in In High Places[]

After the Great Black Deaths had killed 80% of the population of Europe, the Bible had an additional Final Testament which described the life and acts of Henri, a 14th-century Frenchman who proclaimed himself the Second Son of God and was the center of New Revelation. Henri was stated by the Final Testament to be more important than his elder brother Jesus.

Crosstime Traffic found no other alternate where Henri's Revelation occurred.

Bible in "Ils ne passeront pas"[]

The final book of the Christian Bible, known as the Book of Revelation, came to pass during World War I's Battle of Verdun in March 1916. However, the weary French and German soldiers fighting in the battle were too numb to the horror of warfare to truly understand what was happening. They each assumed that the bizarre animals and demons sent by God, were simply new martial inventions of each other's technology, and blasted them away without a second thought.

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