No book has influenced American history and culture more than the Bible. For legions of American Protestants, who inherited the Reformation's slogan of "Scripture alone," the English Bible functioned not only as a working text but as the icon of a word-centered piety that supposedly transcended superstition and built religion on solid empirical foundations. To the extent that Protestants once dominated American religious culture, this veneration of vernacular Scripture influenced other groups, including Roman Catholics and Jews, who published their own biblical translations partly as a statement of their American identity. Indeed, for Americans of many denominations, the Bible was long the wellspring of national mythology, although the prevailing biblical stories and imagery changed with time and circumstance.
Colonial America
The Puritan colonies of seventeenth-century New England were arguably the most biblically saturated culture America has ever known. America in Puritan eyes was the New Israel, although this Old Testament image always coexisted with the New Testament image of the primitive, gathered church, uncorrupted by the accretions of "invented" human traditions. Puritan emphasis on Scripture as the antidote to Catholic "superstition" led to much higher rates of literacy in the New England colonies than in any other part of British America or most of England. Probate records reveal that Puritan families who could afford only a few books invariably owned a copy of the Scriptures, either the Geneva Bible (a copiously annotated version begun during the reign of Mary Tudor and published in 1560, or the King James, or Authorized, Bible (a new translation published in 1611 that preserved the verse-numbering system introduced by the Geneva version but eliminated the heavily Calvinist doctrinal glosses).
Even outside of New England, the Bible's influence in the American colonies was considerable. Biblical passages against adultery, blasphemy, sodomy, witchcraft, and other practices influenced legal codes across the American colonies. European settlers also tended to draw on the Bible in the encounter with the Native Americans, whom they variously interpreted as existing in a state of Edenic innocence or as resembling the Canaanites who had to be driven out of the Promised Land.
New Nation
The first complete Bible printed in America originated in the English encounter with Native Americans. John Eliot's Indian Bible (1663), a translation into the Massachusett language, was one of a number of non-English Bibles published during the colonial period, including several editions of Luther's German translation, printed in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the 1740s. The English Bible was not printed in America until 1777, when the war with England, which curtailed international trade and halted importation of British Bibles, prompted Robert Aitken of Philadelphia to print an American edition of the King James New Testament.
The Bible market in the early republic would soon include other English versions as well. After Aitken published the entire King James Bible in 1782, the Irish Catholic printer Mathew Carey printed the Catholic Douay Bible in Philadelphia in 1790. Most Protestant Bibles lacked the Apocrypha, or Deuterocanonical books, which Catholics regarded as authoritative, and Carey's edition filled this void. The Protestant King James Version, however, continued to be required reading in many public schools, leading to periodic conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, especially during the 1840s when large numbers of Catholic immigrants arrived in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and other cities. Riots in Philadelphia in 1844 over which Bible to use in the public schools left thirteen people dead and whole blocks of Irish homes in ruins.
Yet the presence of Catholics, and Catholic Bibles, did not deter antebellum American Protestants, who entertained sweeping visions of a Protestant America founded on the rock of Holy Writ. The American Bible Society, founded in 1816 by the consolidation of over one hundred local societies, distributed millions of Bibles in successive campaigns to put a copy of the King James Bible in every American home. Scores of other antebellum reform societies invoked the Scriptures to combat perceived ills such as intemperance and Sabbath breaking. Meanwhile, the Bible was a touchstone for a variety of antebellum religious prophets, from Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith, who penned The Book of Mormon (1830) in the familiar idiom of the King James Version, to the lay preacher William Miller, who calculated from biblical evidence that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in 1843.
The Civil War
Perhaps nowhere did the Bible loom larger in the nineteenth century than in the debate over slavery, which revealed as never before the difficulties of forging a universally acceptable civil religion based on Scripture. As President Abraham Lincoln said of North and South in his second inaugural address, "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other." For its opponents, slavery called into question the old Puritan identification of America as the New Israel. America instead appeared as Egypt, the land of bondage, which could only be escaped by crossing the "Red Sea of war," as the prominent Brooklyn preacher,
Henry Ward Beecher, put it in a famous 1861 sermon. African American Christians used the biblical Exodus motif extensively in preaching, political oratory, and spirituals, even as Southern white supporters of slavery appealed to the "curse of Ham" (Genesis 9:25) as a divine warrant for keeping dark-skinned peoples in perpetual servitude. The New Testament also admitted of conflicting interpretations on the slavery question. Slavery's opponents frequently invoked Paul's declaration that "there is neither bond nor free … for ye are all one in Jesus Christ" (Galatians 3:28), while slavery's supporters cited Paul's admonition to servants to "obey in all things your masters" (Colossians 3:22).
The exegetical impasse over slavery contributed indirectly to future ideological divisions among American Protestants. On the one hand, it hastened the advent of modern Protestant liberalism, which tended to relativize biblical texts that were not amenable to a progressive ethic. This liberal theology, in turn, provoked a reaction within Protestant denominations from conservative parties determined to uphold the authority of Scripture as a timeless moral and doctrinal standard.
The Bible and Modern Scholarship
The greatest challenge to traditional biblical authority, however, would come from American colleges and theological seminaries, where a generation of antebellum scholars had pioneered critical biblical studies in America. These antebellum scholars included the Unitarians Andrews Norton and George Rapall Noyes and the Congregationalists Edward Robinson and Moses Stuart. After the Civil War, as American scholars looked to the German model of the research university, American biblical studies developed rapidly on two fronts, known popularly as higher and lower criticism.
Higher or historical critics tended to question the accuracy of biblical history as well as traditional assumptions about biblical authorship (for example, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch). Among the most celebrated higher critics was Charles Augustus Briggs, who was suspended from the Presbyterian Church in 1893 but retained on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which severed its Presbyterian ties because of the affair. Historical criticism also influenced the female authors of The Woman's Bible (1895–1898), an early feminist Bible commentary whose chief contributor, the woman suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, argued that the Scriptures "bear the impress of fallible man." Meanwhile, opponents of higher criticism, including the Princeton Seminary professors Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, were constructing elaborate defenses of biblical infallibility and inerrancy, arguing that apparent historical, geographic, or scientific errors in Scripture stemmed from incomplete knowledge or misunderstandings on the part of interpreters.
Lower or textual critics were concerned with the most accurate reconstruction of the biblical text from the immense array of surviving manuscript variants. Their work assisted Bible translators, who drew on new manuscript discoveries to improve the English text of Scripture. The Revised Version (1881–1885), a British American translation and the first major new English Bible since 1611, was a transatlantic publishing sensation that provoked criticism from Americans still committed to the cherished language of the King James Bible. Opposition to modern translations reached a climax with the Revised Standard Version (1952), which many fundamentalist Protestants vilified as a symbol of the liberal church establishment. By the latter half of the twentieth century, however, the American publishing market was awash in Bibles of every denominational and ideological stripe, even as polls showed relatively low levels of biblical literacy among Americans. The Catholic New American Bible (1970), the evangelical Protestant New International Version (1978), and the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh (1985) were among dozens of translations and annotated editions in print.
The Bible's continuing influence in twentieth-century American culture was particularly evident in American politics. In crafting his philosophy of nonviolent resistance during the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. drew on themes of social justice in the Hebrew prophets as well as Jesus' radical demands for love in the Sermon on the Mount. Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 outlawed Bible reading in the opening exercises of public schools. This was one of a series of legal cases that helped galvanize political conservatives, who accused liberals of seeking to dethrone Scripture as the standard of American morality. By the 1980s, a powerful new religious right, led by Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell, Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, and other advocates of biblical norms in public and private morality, helped Ronald Reagan win two terms as president. The Bible remained a presence in politics at the turn of the twenty-first century, particularly in battles over gay and lesbian rights, with conservatives citing Leviticus 20:13 and Romans 1:24-32 to condemn homosexuality, and liberals echoing biblical refrains about justice and the equality of all persons in Christ.
Bibliography
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Barlow, Philip L. Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Brown, Jerry Wayne. The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870: The New England Scholars. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969.
Fogarty, Gerald P. American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.
Gaustad, Edwin S., and Walter Harrelson, eds. The Bible in American Culture. 6 vols. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982–1985.
Gutjahr, Paul C. An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Hatch, Nathan O., and Mark A. Noll, eds. The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Noll, Mark A. Between Faith and Criticism: Evangelicals, Scholar-ship, and the Bible in America. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986.
———. "The Bible and Slavery." In Religion and the American Civil War. Edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout, and Charles Reagan Wilson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Thuesen, Peter J. In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Wimbush, Vincent L., ed. African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures. New York: Continuum, 2000.
Wosh, Peter J. Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994.
—Peter J. Thuesen
