
A Lamp in the Dark: The Untold History of the Bible
Christian Pinto's film traces the centuries-long fight over who controlled the biblical text, from the early Waldensian communities in the Alps who hand-copied vernacular scripture to the Catholic Church's campaigns to suppress unauthorized translations. Interviews with pastors and researchers walk through the Council of Trent, the rise of the King James Version, and the manuscript debates between the Textus Receptus and the Alexandrian texts later used by scholars like Westcott and Hort. Reenactments show Waldensian believers hiding scripture and facing persecution for reading it in their own language. The film argues that many modern Bible translations quietly rest on manuscripts the makers consider corrupted, and it lays out that case through period art, maps of the spread of vernacular Bibles, and archival engravings of the printing press era. Whether or not the viewer agrees with its conclusions, the film is a detailed brief on how the Bible reached its current English form and who tried to stop it along the way.