The Bibles that had managed to leak out into the general population were also targeted for disposal. Chinese authorities once dumped a cache of them into a cesspool, believing they were soiled beyond use. Quickly, Chinese Catholics who had witnessed the vandalism hosed them off and sprayed them with perfume. Such was the hunger for these Bibles that even waterlogged and pungent copies were in high demand.

On June 18, 1981, several thousand men and women watched from a coastline near Shantou, China as a tugboat that had been christened Michael towed a massive, 137-foot barge and came to a stop just a few dozen feet from land. The observers began wading into the water, some of them up to their necks, and retrieved the waterproof boxes the boat occupants were releasing into the sea. A handful of small boats pushed out toward the barge and were able to grab several at a time.

Under the cover of night, the barge and the tugboat began receding into the distance. The recipients hid the boxes where they could, including under trees and overgrowth. Others were handed off to co-conspirators, who were waiting nearby in idling vehicles.

All the subterfuge hinted at a drug transaction. While it was true the group was dealing with contraband, it wasn’t of the narcotic variety. Each of the boxes contained 90 Bibles, written in Chinese characters, which were notoriously difficult to come by under the country’s Communist rule. A group of foreign missionaries had spent millions of dollars and risked their lives smuggling the Bibles into China. It was now up to the subversive citizens who had retrieved them from the water to get the books into the hands of the devout before Chinese authorities arrived—and they were coming fast.

Smuggling scripture was something Andrew van der Bijl had plenty of practice in. Born in 1928 in the Netherlands, Bijl, or “Brother Andrew” as he was known to many, heeded a higher calling after being wounded in the Dutch army. Traveling around the Soviet Union and other Communist-ruled areas, Bijl would obscure hundreds of Bibles in a modifiedVolkswagen Beetle and talk his way through border or customs checkpoints.

It was an interesting juxtaposition—a man of faith breaking man’s law to facilitate God’s word—and Brother Andrew achieved a degree of notorietyfor it after authoring his 1967 autobiography, God’s Smuggler. But having a measure of celebrity meant his days of personally delivering Bibles to oppressed areas were over. Instead, he supervised the activities of Open Doors International, a missionary effort that services countries where Christianity is discouraged or persecuted.

In 1979, Open Doors learned that Protestants and Catholics in China were voicing concern over the limited availability of Bibles in the country. Since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, many churches had been forcibly shut down and Bible production had come to a halt. Chinese officials never declared an outright ban on the religion, but they continued making empty promises of allowing more Bible distribution. By most accounts, there were simply not enough Bibles to put into the hands of the eight to 10 million Christians in China.

Read More