Editor’s note: Heloísa, the author of this article, has been asked by the Christian Science Board of Lectureship to be available this lecture year (July 1, 2018, to June 30, 2019) specifically to give lectures in Spanish and Portuguese, sponsored in the United States and abroad.
Picture yourself in a small village in Brazil sometime in the 1600s or 1700s. Portions of a book that was virtually unknown—the Bible—have been working their way into the hands of villagers in the interior of the country. Throughout the region, the frequent response of people who read the story of Jesus for the first time is that it is such a beautiful story. During colonial times the Bible was a forbidden book, but those who found it were being transformed, regenerated, and becoming better people, just because they were, for the first time, reading the story of Jesus and finding it to be so beautiful.
We’ve come a long way. Today, the book that was forbidden in Brazil during colonial times has become one of the most-read works not only in Brazil, but throughout the world and throughout the centuries.
