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For nearly three decades, Nicholas Leone lived and breathed Wall Street, reading the Wall Street Journal before sunrise, scanning Bloomberg terminals through the day and parsing trends that could make or break fortunes.
Yet, somewhere between the chaos of the markets and early morning devotionals, Leone, a businessman and father of four, found himself asking a question that few of his peers dared to entertain: What does the Bible actually say about business?
That inquiry would consume years of his life, leading to what he now calls The Business Bible, a 2,000-page NASB translation annotated with articles, briefs and case studies designed to unearth what he believes has been “hiding in plain sight” all along: that Scripture itself contains a coherent, divine blueprint for economics and work.
“I’ve been a lifelong learner,” Leone told The Christian Post. “I love sports, I love business, and I love the Bible. I didn’t realize until recently that those three things, discipline, diligence and devotion, were all preparation for what I was actually created to do.”
Leone’s career trajectory has been anything but predictable. He was a competitive hockey player turned Wall Street broker, trader, hedge fund manager, and eventually theologian who attended Tim Keller’s Bible studies at Redeemer Church in New York City. He studied exercise physiology, business and later theology at Fuller Seminary, supplementing his education with financial analysis and private equity coursework at Harvard Business School.
Leone was also on the front lines of three major market meltdowns: the dot-com crash, the Y2K decline and the 2008 financial crisis, experiences that, at the time, left him spiritually uneasy.
“I had a front-row seat to Merrill and Lehman collapsing,” he recalled. “Markets were down more than 50%, housing had crashed, people were losing everything. And yet, Wall Street wasn’t providing guidance. Neither was the Church. The greatest financial crisis in 100 years and the Church was silent.”
That silence, Leone said, stirred something in him. “I’d been to business school, I’d been to seminary, and I still didn’t understand what was happening. I wasn’t equipped. I started searching Scripture not devotionally, but for principles that could help me navigate this.”
What he found changed his life.
The breakthrough came in the Parable of the Talents, one of Jesus’ most cited but, Leone contends, least understood teachings.
“Everybody on Wall Street loves the Parable of the Talents,” he said. “It’s about stewardship, about multiplying what you’re given. But a talent isn’t what most people think it is; it’s not ‘skills’ or ‘abilities.’ The word in Greek, talanton, literally means 75 pounds of gold.”
He did the math: “At the time, gold was about $2,000 an ounce. That’s $2.5 million per talent. And Jesus was talking about eight of them. Suddenly, the Son of God and $20 million just collided in front of me.”
The realization that Jesus was teaching in the language of capital allocation jolted Leone. “He diversified, he weighted, he allocated according to ability, and then he waited for the money to multiply,” he said. “That’s literally the investment process.”
From there, he began reading the Bible as a financial analyst might, searching for structure and models. In Leviticus 25, he found an echo of modern economics: “Work for six years and rest for one.”
“When I looked up historical data, I discovered that the average U.S. economic expansion lasts six years, followed by about one year of recession,” he said. “The economy reflects design. Just like the body reflects design. Just like creation reflects design. And that realization gave me hope, that God is sovereign, even in the market.”
In the same passage, he found what he believes to be the oldest recorded valuation method — a form of present-value accounting used by Moses to determine the worth of land.
“At that point,” Leone said, “I had discovered, in the Bible, the same three pillars every hedge fund manager uses: how to value assets, how to understand cycles, and how to invest. And when I applied those principles, my next fund doubled market performance with half the risk.”
The discoveries drew mixed reactions among his peers.
“When I first pitched a fund-of-funds manager, he said, ‘Nicholas, you have a great track record but the Bible has nothing to do with business.’” Leone laughs at the memory. “I told him the story about the talents, diversification, risk management. He said, ‘That’s the first time religion ever made sense to me.’”
It was a revelation for Leone as well. “If we want to reach the marketplace, we have to learn to speak its language,” he said. “When missionaries go to Brazil, they learn Portuguese. When we go to Wall Street, we need to speak in the language of business and economics.”
For years, Leone began sharing what he was finding in boardrooms and casual conversations, with believers and skeptics alike.
“Everybody wanted to know, ‘What does the Bible say about business?’” he said. “Even atheists were curious. They’d joke, ‘So how did Jesus double the money?’”
That curiosity became conviction in January 2020, when Leone spent a month praying and fasting. The result was a call to write a “Business Bible” that would synthesize theology and finance into a single, cohesive resource.
At first, publishers warned him it couldn’t be done. “They told me, ‘You’re not a pastor. You’ll never publish a Business Bible,’” Leone recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not a publisher, I’m an entrepreneur.’”
Fueled by “the Holy Spirit and 10 espressos a day,” Leone set out to read, exegete and write through all 31,000 verses of Scripture. “I worked 20 hours a day for 100 days,” he said. “It was a labor of love.”
The final manuscript, nearly 100,000 words of original commentary, was vetted by pastors, scholars, theologians and linguists. “Every principle in The Business Bible is grounded in a law, commandment, or statute recorded in the Torah,” Leone explained. “And for every principle, there’s a case study in both the Old and New Testaments. So it’s not just what I think the Bible says, it’s what the Bible says about itself.”
“The commandment, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ establishes the principle of private property,” he added. “You see it illustrated in Naboth’s vineyard in Kings, and again in Jesus’ parable of the landowner: ‘Can I not do what I want with my own property?’ These patterns repeat across Scripture and mirror modern business ethics.”
According to Leone, that internal consistency gives The Business Bible its authority. “These aren’t cultural values, they’re design principles,” he said. “They’re true for everyone, everywhere, whether you believe or not.”
Reflecting on why such teachings are rarely heard from the pulpit, Leone first pointed to a truncated gospel.
“I just met with two of the nation’s largest pastors,” he said. “They told me, ‘You talk about money all the time on Wall Street. Why can’t we talk about it in church?’ The problem is theological and practical.”
“For 50 years, the American Evangelical church has been preaching sin, salvation and the end of the world,” he added. “But that’s not the good news. The good news is forgiveness, peace, prosperity, God making everything new. Without that hope, the Church looks at business negatively, like it’s part of the world’s decline.”
The second issue, he says, is a misunderstanding of biblical law. “Because salvation is by grace, the Church has thrown out the law, the very statutes that teach us how to live and work,” Leone said. “Those commandments aren’t about earning salvation; they’re about flourishing. When we rediscover God’s design, we rediscover hope.”
And then finally, there’s the simplest explanation: “Pastors don’t understand business,” he said. “That’s not their fault. They shepherd the Church beautifully. But it’s time for businesspeople to take their rightful place to uncover what the Bible says about stewardship and money.”
“People love to quote ‘Money is the root of all evil,’” he added. “That’s a misquote. Scripture actually says, ‘The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.’ There’s a difference.”
“‘Money is the answer for everything,’ Solomon says. That doesn’t mean money solves everything; it means it solves what it’s designed to solve. We just need wisdom to discern the difference.”
That principle of design extends to saving and giving, Leone said, pointing to a rarely noticed detail in the story of Joseph. “When Joseph stored grain in Egypt, the Hebrew word for ‘save’ means ‘one-fifth,’ just like ‘tithe’ means ‘one-tenth,’” he said. “If we saved 20%, gave 10%, and took a day of rest each week, three principles of design, we’d experience peace, generosity, and joy. The Bible’s financial plan still works.”
The Business Bible is published by Simon & Schuster and endorsed by leaders across both business and ministry worlds. The World Evangelical Alliance, representing more than 600 million Christians globally, recently commissioned a custom edition. Leone’s team is collaborating with pastors, seminaries and marketplace ministries to distribute it worldwide.
“This is the first Bible of its kind,” he said. “We’re discovering business the way God designed it.”
He credited the project’s credibility to its dual foundation in theology and finance, adding: “If I’m talking to hedge-fund managers about allocation or to pastors about stewardship, I need scholarship that can withstand scrutiny,” Leone said. “That’s what sets this apart. It’s not motivational, it’s methodological.”
“Work has become a four-letter word,” he said. “But in Hebrew, the word for work means work, worship, and service. In the New Testament, it means ‘an inner desire to use your abilities for a higher purpose.’ When people rediscover that, they find meaning again not just in their careers, but in their calling.”
The verse that guides his decisions, Leone said, is Colossians 3:23: “‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.”
“We are created to work and to discover the work we were created to do,” he said. That calling, he added, has come full circle: the discipline of a hockey player, the diligence of a trader and the devotion of a theologian.
The Business Bibleis available now through Simon & Schuster. A digital platform companion is expected to follow later this month.
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
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