Read Your Bible And Stop Worrying About Muslims Buying Publishers!

Just Because People Repeat Something Doesn’t Make It True

I wrote about a rumor that claimed that a “Middle Eastern family” had bought a major Bible publisher here the other day, and it received quite a bit of interest. The rumor has been repeated on several platforms, including Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. What stands out though is that there has been nothing to validate the claim.

Below is a comment left on that post, and it demonstrates the problem I have:
The word is..wealthy muslim family buys a stake/share in the parent company that owns one of the largest bible publishers in the world. Does the name Murdoch mean anything to you? Zondervan?

That’s the word on the street. NDAs were signed which is why neither side is saying anything and no presser. I found that out on FB by search. Not really that hard.

Now the lack of evidence due to the signing of NDAs becomes part of the story, and is taken as evidence that it is true. That just doesn’t make sense. A million people believing a lie doesn’t make it true, it just means that they are wrong.

I don’t have access to the names of investors in Zondervan publishers, but it’s a fair bet that there are Muslim, Hindu and probably outright “non-believers” who have invested funds in the business. That’s what astute investors do, invest in profitable companies.

How do we know when we’ve actually researched something?

Facebook search, YouTube videos and Google results can tell us what people are saying. They don’t necessarily tell us whether what people are saying is true. And that is my problem with the whole story. Now what we have is a real world case study unfolding in real time. Even independent fact-checkers like Snopes are doing precisely the source checking that I said was missing in my original article.

Maybe the world would be a better place if people would actually read the Bible for themselves instead of getting stressed about things that they can’t control, and getting angry at unsubstantiated rumors. We should buy a Bible. We should read the thing as well, and meditate on it. That way when the storms of life come you will have less chance of being moved.

There has been at least one retraction on Facebook regarding the rumor, and hopefully there will be more.
Finding a claim is not the same as finding evidence for that claim. The commenter on my post said: “I found that out on FB by search. Not really that hard.” That’s exactly right, it wasn’t hard to find the rumor, the hard part was finding independent evidence that it was true. Big difference!

So did a Middle Eastern Family buy a major Bible publisher? Probably not, but someone may have bought shares. If you’re worried about the Book being corrupted, buy a copy and read it, and pray about it.