View PDFThe content displayed below is for educational and archival purposes only.
Unless stated otherwise, content is © Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania
You may be able to find the original on wol.jw.org
Do You Value the Bible?
JUST over 200 years ago, Mary Jones was born in Llanfihangel, a remote Welsh village not far from the Atlantic coastline. Her parents were poor weavers—too poor to own a Bible. But they instilled in their daughter a love for God by telling her Bible stories and repeating texts they remembered. Mary often read a neighbor’s Welsh Bible and started to save what little money she could, determined to buy one of her own.
In the year 1800, when Mary was 16, she heard that a few Welsh Bibles were for sale 25 miles [40 km] away in the small town of Bala. Undaunted, she resolved to walk there. This she did, barefoot across the hills. By the time she arrived, however, all copies had been sold. Mary also learned that the sum of money she had saved was far too small.
The local pastor was deeply moved by Mary’s knowledge and love of the Bible. Seeing her tears of disappointment after all the effort she had made, he kindly gave her his own personal copy, saying: “Read it carefully, study it diligently, treasure up the sacred words in your memory, and act up to its teachings.”
This story was later related at a meeting of the Committee of the Religious Tract Society of London. There the decision was made to supply Bible translations not just to the people of Wales but to the whole world. From this simple beginning sprang the first of the many Bible societies of the 19th century. Thereafter, foreign-language copies of the Bible began to appear with increasing frequency.
Today, the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, incorporated in 1884, prints Bibles and Bible study aids in over 200 languages. Worldwide, it has distributed 72 million copies of the modern-language New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. Translated from the original Hebrew and Greek, the New World Translation is now available in whole or in part in 18 languages and is presently being translated into 12 additional tongues.
With the Bible now accessible to nearly everyone, how do you view it? Do you value the Bible? Do you have a copy that you treasure and read?
[Picture Credit Line on page 3]
From the book The Story of Mary Jones and Her Bible
