50 SHADES OF LUTHERAN:

Yet the Bible, printed in a new Norwegian language version, has outpaced Fifty Shades of Grey to become Norway's most popular book, catching the entire country by surprise.

The sudden burst of interest in God's word has also spread to the stage, with a six-hour play called "Bibelen," Norwegian for "the Bible," drawing 16,000 people in a three-month run that recently ended at one of Oslo's most prominent theaters.

Officials of the Lutheran Church of Norway have stopped short of calling it a spiritual awakening, but they see the newfound interest in the Bible as proof that it still resonates in a country where only one percent of the five million residents regularly attends church.

"Thoughts and images from the Bible still have an impact on how we experience reality," said Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of several famous Norwegian authors enlisted to help with the translation.

Scholars explained the runaway success of the Bible by saying that that faith is a deeply personal - and therefore private - matter for Norwegians. As such, "church attendance is a poor measure of the Norwegian state of faith," said post-doctoral fellow Thorgeir Kolshus at the University of Oslo.

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