After a frantic bidding last Thursday in London, a handwritten letter which Albert Einstein initiated the idea of God as a product of human weakness and the Bible as a ‘pretty childish’ collection was successfully sold for $404,000. The price was more than 25 times the pre-sale estimate.

Bloomsbury Auctions did not identify the oversea buyer said it was a collector with “a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.”

Managing director Rupert Powell also said, “This extraordinary letter seemed to strike a chord, and it gave a deep personal insight one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.”

Einstein wrote the unrecorded letter to fellow philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, a year before he dies. Part of the letter said that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

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