Christianity is a religion of the book, and in particular of one book, the Bible. More precisely, it is a religion of a library of plural books (biblia) that eventually became one single book. It is possible to view the history of all Christian traditions, and not Protestantism alone, as a history of the canonical formation, liturgical and devotional use, cultural influence, contested theological interpretation and geographical diffusion of the Bible. In view of the magnitude of the subject, it is not surprising that very few historians have set out to encapsulate this grand narrative in a single volume. Bruce Gordon, the distinguished historian of early modern European Protestantism, has now made the attempt, and it is a valiant effort of stupendous chronological and geographical range, extending across the entire span of Christian history and covering all continents, though Australasia receives only a paragraph, oddly devoted to the New Hebrides. Not quite so rare are historians who have set out to chart the impact of one translation of the Bible on a single nation or family of nations – notably the role of the King James Bible of 1611 (the Authorised Version) in shaping the language and religious culture of English-speaking peoples, including those in the New World of North America.Footnote ¹

Donald Akenson’s book, which is much narrower in scope than Bruce Gordon’s, yet almost equal in bulk, attempts something different again. The ‘America’s own Bible’ of the subtitle is not the King James version itself, but the Scofield Reference Bible, an extensively annotated version of the King James text. In contrast, Gordon’s chapter ix is similarly entitled ‘America’s Bible’, yet makes no mention of Scofield’s Reference Bible. Cyrus I. Scofield was an American Congregational minister, serving pastorates in Dallas and Northfield, Massachusetts, who imbibed the principles of Brethren dispensationalist hermeneutics through a number of intermediaries. These included James Hall Brookes, a Presbyterian minister from St Louis and organiser of the influential Niagara Conferences on the Bible and prophecy. In July 1888 Scofield gave a paper at Niagara on ‘Rightly dividing the Word of truth’. This became one of the foundations for his Reference Bible, first published in 1909 by the New York branch of Oxford University Press with the strong support of Henry Frowde, Publisher to the University of Oxford, and a member of the Exclusive Brethren. The first edition had a limited circulation, but the second edition, published in 1917, sold some two million copies worldwide by 1945. Akenson does not tell us how many of those were sold in the United States, though it must have been a high proportion. He takes largely as a given the formative role of Scofield’s Bible in shaping fundamentalist Protestantism in North America, perhaps because this topic has already received a good deal of scholarly attention.Footnote ² Only towards the end of the nineteenth and last chapter of his book does Akenson sketch the impact of Scofield’s Bible on American Christianity. His interest lies more in tracing the theological ancestry of Cyrus Scofield’s intricate system of notes, paragraph headings and chain references, which set the King James text in an explicitly dispensationalist hermeneutical framework.

Akenson’s fine book skilfully blends the genres of intellectual genealogy and transnational history. It is the third in a sequence of volumes that trace the family tree of dispensationalism from its roots in the responses of the Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy and Evangelical clergy in the 1830s to Catholic emancipation and the ensuing crisis of Church and State, which formed the seedbed of the ‘Plymouth’ (or ‘Christian’) Brethren movement. He then traces the patterns of migration of the Brethren to England, Francophone Europe and supremely to Ontario, from where they carried their distinctive biblical hermeneutic across the porous Canadian-American frontier of the Great Lakes basin to the northern United States, eventually, through Scofield’s Bible in particular, reaching a popular Evangelical audience that extended far beyond the confines of the Brethren movement.Footnote ³

Although these two volumes have markedly different objectives and therefore quite disparate content, they share some noteworthy themes in common. This review article will identify three of these, and draw out their wider significance.

The first theme may be characterised as the often paradoxical relationship between the materiality of Bibles as objects intended to be read, in public or in private, and the fact that, for most of Christian history, the majority of Christians have accessed the biblical message primarily through their ears rather than their eyes. Gordon points out that in early Christian worship, Scripture ‘reading’ was an oral and social exercise. However, as the late New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado argued cogently in one of his last books, Destroyer of the gods, the predominantly oral culture of the primitive Church did not imply that scriptural texts held little value; on the contrary, early Christianity was exceptional among the religions of the Mediterranean world in being an emphatically ‘bookish religion’.Footnote ⁴

A bookish religion required neither popular literacy nor the possession of anything like a modern book, yet it eventually led to the veneration of material Bibles as iconic objects once they came into existence from the fifth century onwards. Gordon’s stunning colour illustrations reveal the extent of the devotion which first Byzantine and then Latin Christianity lavished on the illustration and ornamental embellishment of scriptural codices. The Garima Gospels, produced in the ancient Ethiopian kingdom of Aksum, contained lavishly illustrated canonical tables presenting parallels between the four Gospels, a genre first devised by Eusebius of Caesarea. Although the ‘vast majority’ of medieval Christians never even saw anything that could be described as a Bible (p. 87), such visual aids were important in deepening knowledge and inspiring devotion. Biblical manuscripts were often housed in ornate boxes, latter-day arks of the covenant no less sacred than the reliquaries containing bones of the saints. Scribes and illustrators took great pains to ensure that those who did gain sight of the Scriptures knew that they were in the presence of the holy. Texts from the Gospels, when read aloud, began to be used as talismans for purposes of exorcism or divination. ‘In societies primarily oral in nature’, Gordon observes, ‘words were power’ (p. 113). The modern history of reception of Christianity by oral peoples has exhibited similar features. It became common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among East African peoples such as the Baganda and Gikuyu to describe Christian enquirers and converts as ‘readers’, those who were learning the mysterious source of the white man’s power.Footnote ⁵ In the present century, in both Pentecostal and some non-Pentecostal varieties of non-European Evangelicalism, the vernacular Bible as material object can sometimes be treated as a Protestant fetish that can be relied upon to provide deliverance or protection from evil forces even if it is opened merely at random, or never opened at all.Footnote ⁶

At first sight, Akenson’s detailed examination of the genealogy of the Scofield Bible reveals a very different social and educational milieu for reception of the Bible. The Brethren, despite their repudiation of the ordained ministry, have from their origins exalted expository scriptural preaching alongside the weekly ‘breaking of bread’. The leading figures in Akenson’s account of the diffusion of late nineteenth-century Brethren teaching in the Great Lakes Basin were literate and often wealthy laymen. Those who gathered to hear such teaching also read their open Bibles as they heard (and made their own contributions to) what was expounded, always by men – women, though present, had to remain silent. Yet there was, and remains, a iconography of Bibles in this Evangelical tradition. The Scofield Reference Bible was a handsome and weighty item, with a column of chain references running down the centre of each page. It was designed for diligent visual study, an indispensable material accompaniment to participation in scripturally-focussed worship. The visual element was important, not least because the typology and scheme of dispensations taught by late nineteenth-century Brethren were complex and elaborate. They could not easily be absorbed by hearing alone. The entire Bible, in Akenson’s words, had become ‘a prophetic code’ which gave believers ‘the most seductive and consequential of cryptographic challenges’ (p. 137). They needed the visual aid of charts and diagrams to grasp the sequence of the dispensations, just as the medieval Church compiled canonical tables of the Gospels to assist the faithful. Moreover, the Old Testament text itself contained the most intriguing visual aid of all, the tabernacle, whose architecture and furnishings, as described at length in the book of Exodus, were interpreted as an elaborate typological guide to the atoning work of Christ. The tabernacle, the priesthood, and the offerings (1866), written by Henry Soltau, a London lawyer and member of the Open (non-Darbyite) strand of Brethren, was distributed in North America by James Inglis, a Scots emigrant to Hamilton, Ontario, whose spiritual pilgrimage had taken him from the Secession Church via the Baptists to the Brethren. Soltau’s work on the tabernacle was a key influence on Scofield’s biblical annotations. To this day, model kits of the Mosaic tabernacle as ‘God’s visual aid to explain what Jesus would do on the cross’ are available from a range of American or Canadian websites.Footnote ⁷ Although digital Bibles viewed on mobile phones and modern projection screens are gradually eroding the place of personal Bibles, at least in public worship, visual materiality remains an inescapable dimension through which Christians ‘hear’ the word of God.

The second, and closely related, common theme permeating these two very different works of historical scholarship is that of biblical interpretation. As the world of the biblical texts receded into the distance from the world inhabited by those who heard or read them, commentaries and glosses became necessary (Gordon, The Bible, 96). This is a theme replete with ambiguity. Were the scriptural texts designed to be plainly accessible to ordinary unlettered people, to be received with humility, as Jerome’s prefaces to the Vulgate urged? In fifteenth-century Germany and some other parts of Europe vernacular translations multiplied, but initially they were available mostly to the wealthy laity or within the confines of religious houses. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type printing made it possible for Bibles to be produced for a wider public, and hence opened the gates more widely to interpretative disagreement, which swelled to a flood during the Reformation. Gordon observes (p. 135) that ‘there was no straightforward answer’ to the recurrent question: Was the Bible ‘the book of the people or the book of the church?’ Luther insisted that Scripture was self-interpreting, yet dissented forcibly from the scriptural interpretations advanced by Zwingli on the Lord’s Supper or by the Radicals on baptism. The translators of the Geneva Bible aimed at accessible English, but felt the need, as its title page explained, to add ‘moste profitable annotations vpon all the hard places, and other things of great importance’.Footnote ⁸ These annotations were, inevitably, not free of partisan judgments. Gordon cites (p. 165) the example of the explanatory note on Revelation ix.3, where the locusts that swarm upon the earth in the last days are identified as ‘false teachers, heretikes, and worldlie subtil Prelates, with Monkes, Freres, Cardinals, Patriarkes, Archebishops, Bishops, Doctors, Bachelers & masters which forsake Christ to mainteine false doctrine’.Footnote ⁹ The Geneva Bible also divided the text into verses, for ease of reference.

The danger that extensive marginal notes might become, in Akenson’s words, a ‘visual frame’ that ‘took precedence over the text’ persuaded the translators of the King James Bible to take an opposite course, reducing the marginal notes to the bare minimum. That in itself was not without danger, since in a self-interpreting Bible, anything goes. The Puritans followed Calvin in teaching that Word and Spirit properly belonged together, but estimations of which of a range of possible interpretations accurately represented the mind of the Spirit varied widely. The weakening of interpretative consensus became highly visible during the English Interregnum, and has since been apparent in myriad global settings as readers and hearers of the biblical text from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds have added their own insights into what the biblical text in their own language meant. Gordon notes that the founders of the interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society (1804) reaffirmed Luther’s touching confidence that ‘the Bible would explain itself’ (p. 308). It is a pity that he does not make explicit the Society’s consequent refusal to add any note or comment to its Bible translations, other than minimal references to translators’ notes or alternative readings.Footnote ¹⁰ That stratagem, which the American Bible Society (1816) duly followed, was necessary in an interdenominational body, if it was not to be torn asunder by disputes between defenders of varying denominational traditions. In fact, occasional fractures did occur, such as with Baptists over whether the Greek word baptizo should be translated in the Bengali New Testament with a word meaning ‘immersion’, leading to the formation by English Baptists in 1840 of their own Bible Translation Society.Footnote ¹¹

Scofield’s Reference Bible, similarly, was conducted on the Reformation principle that the Bible was self-interpreting; to understand one biblical book or difficult passage, the reader simply needed to consult another relevant biblical book or passage. Scofield’s chain references, which identified the first and last occurrence of a particular topic, and then traced the connections between the two, were intended simply to make visible the verbal and theological inter-connections believed to be inherent in the text itself.Footnote ¹² Akenson’s contention, however, is that Scofield took the King James text, and encircled it with ‘interlocking bands of information, gnomic definitions, apodictic doctrines, and free-range typologies … presenting these in a physical form that gave priority to the interpretations over the material that that was being interpreted. Hence, the visual frame “took precedence over the text”’ (p. 411). The framework of notes was so prominent and extensive that Scofield achieved ‘a successful rewriting of the scriptures – so thorough and so visually unique that it was a new Bible’ (p. 427).

This is a powerful argument, but, set alongside Gordon’s book, it raises the question of whether the same could be said of the Geneva Bible. When compared, for example, with its immediate predecessors, Miles Coverdale’s Bible of 1534 or the seven folio editions of the Great Bible of 1539 to 1541, did the Geneva Bible’s pointedly Reforming annotations not strike more conservative Elizabethan bishops as constituting a dangerously ‘new Bible’? With its novel addition of a verse structure, it certainly looked rather different. Whereas the Geneva Bible divided the Scriptures into verses, Scofield divided them according to the hermeneutics of J. N. Darby, pointing out which portions of the text applied only to God’s purposes for Israel, which to the Church. ‘Rightly dividing the Word of truth’, the title of his 1888 Niagara paper, was a foundational principle for Scofield. In typically common-sense fashion he assumed that the exhortation in 2 Timothy ii.15 to rightly ‘divide’ the Scriptures must mean separate into distinct theological categories, not ‘divining’ or ‘ascertaining’, as was the case for the translators of the King James version (p. 340).

Akenson may, however, over-state the case that Scofield’s notes imparted explicit divine authority to the dispensationalist scheme. In support of that case he cites Scofield’s introductory heading to Matthew’s Gospel: ‘It is peculiarly the Gospel for Israel; and, as flowing from the death of Christ, a Gospel for the whole world’ (p. 412).Footnote ¹³ Akenson adds the comment that these instructions ‘carry the crucial Brethren tenet that Matthew was intended mostly for Jews … This quietly furthers the Brethren division (adopted by strict Dispensationalists) of the scriptures into two compartments, those for Israel and those for the Church’. However, Scofield’s description of Matthew’s Gospel as being ‘peculiarly the Gospel for Israel; and, as flowing from the death of Christ, a Gospel for the whole world’ would not strike contemporary New Testament scholarship as eccentric. Akenson does not comment on Scofield’s crucial paragraph heading over Matthew xxviii.16–20: ‘Jesus in Galilee: the great commission’.Footnote ¹⁴ Whilst a modern biblical scholar might readily accept that Matthew thought that Jesus was commissioning believing Jews to undertake the global mission of calling the Gentile nations to faith and baptism into the Jesus movement, Scofield’s heading implied clearly that the commission was addressed also to the churches that would be called out from the Gentiles. In 1890 he established one of the new non-denominational ‘faith missions’, the Central American Mission, which, along with other faith missions, gave great emphasis to ‘The Great Commission’ of Christ to take the Gospel to all peoples. The almost universal tendency of modern Evangelicals to refer to that phrase as deriving from Matthew xxviii.16–20 and as being uniquely constitutive of the mission of the Church owes much to Scofield’s appending of that heading to the end of Matthew’s Gospel. He attached no such heading to the parallel text in Mark xvi.15,Footnote ¹⁵ which earlier Protestant missionary advocates, such as William Carey in 1792 and even A. T. Pierson, a consulting editor of the Scofield Reference Bible, had hitherto cited as of equal importance in defining the mission given to the disciples and their successors.Footnote ¹⁶ Whilst Scofield had noticed that Matthew’s Gospel was ‘peculiarly the Gospel for Israel’, he left his readers in no doubt that the commission with which it ends applied both to Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, a conclusion that is hard to reconcile with strict dispensationalist exegesis. It is significant that Pierson, as editor-in-chief of the popular periodical, The Missionary Review of the World, explicitly commended the Scofield Bible as a handbook for missionaries who lacked ready access to biblical commentaries.Footnote ¹⁷

A third theme shared by these two books is migration of people, ideas and the Bible itself across the borders of land and sea. Gordon makes the perceptive comment that the Christian commitment to translating the biblical message into indigenous languages guaranteed that the Bible itself would become a migrant, finding multiple residences far from its Palestinian homeland: ‘Like any migrant, the Bible continued to speak with its original accent, but it was quick to gain fluency in the languages of the known world’ (pp. 43–4). He also rightly notes that a novel feature of the biblical translations produced in the sixteenth century was that they were ‘producing Bibles on the run’. Men such as William Tyndale or the Genevan exiles were able to identify the biblical narratives of persecution, exile and return with their own enforced nomadic experience. The Bible ‘as a book permanently in exile came to be the symbol of a world torn apart by religion’ (p. 176).

Migration is even more prominent in the thematic structure of The Americanization of the apocalypse. John Nelson Darby (1800-82), the primary focus of the second volume in Akenson’s trilogy,Footnote ¹⁸ made seven transatlantic tours between 1862 and 1877, originally to set up ‘a core organization of Exclusive Brethren on the north side of the St. Lawrence/Great Lakes watershed’ (p. 82), but increasingly extending into the northern United States as well. One of the most original aspects of Akenson’s narrative is his recognition that the missionary strategy of Darby and his disciples mirrored geographical and economic reality. Darby understood that the Great Lakes basin constituted a single zone of communication, economic activity and cross-border migration, and this basin became the geographical location of his forays into the United States (pp. 120–1). As so often in North American history, missionary travels to frontier regions were as much pastoral as evangelistic in intent. The Exclusive Brethren in Canada had in many cases preceded Darby himself, impelled by enthusiasm to bring the Gospel to a ‘foreign’ land (pp. 132–4). Canada in the last quarter of the nineteenth century exported nearly two million of its population, over half a million more than it received in immigration (p. 129). Almost all of the emigrants went to the United States, and most were second- or third-generation Canadians driven by the search for land and higher wages. The diffusion of apocalyptic Evangelicalism rode this wave of human emigration. It was a wave of migration that coursed from north to south within the North American continent.

The implication of Akenson’s argument is to reinforce the growing consensus of scholarship that what was once thought to be the unique characteristic of American Evangelicalism – its blend of populism, uncompromising biblicism and fascination with ‘the last days’ – turns out not to be quite so unique after all.Footnote ¹⁹ The genealogy of dispensational and apocalyptic hermeneutics can be traced in the first place to Ontario, and then further back across the Atlantic to the Brethren movement in Britain and its origins in southern Ireland. Akenson’s thesis is tightly argued and convincing. It falters only at the end, when in the space of a few pages he skims over territory not covered in the preceding chapters. Thus Scofield’s introductory notes on Genesis chapter ix include the statement that ‘A prophetic declaration is made that from Ham will descend an inferior and servile posterity.’Footnote ²⁰ Akenson comments that this was ‘a declaration that in the United States in the early twentieth century required no further explication’ (p. 435). The comment takes no account of exegesis of the passage by nineteenth-century American Black writers who correctly pointed out that the Genesis curse is affixed, not to Ham, but to his son Canaan, and advocated an alternative interpretation of the lineage of Ham that served to dignify Black peoples and their providential destiny.Footnote ²¹ The crucial topic of what contribution the Scofield Bible made to American Zionism similarly deserve more extended treatment than it receives in a brief paragraph on p. 435, which observes that, whilst Scofield’s notes said much about the place of the nation of Israel in prophecy, they lacked ‘explicit Zionism’. Doubtless they could have been more explicit, but Scofield’s introductory note to the book of Deuteronomy, for example, was clear enough, stating that whereas the ‘Palestinian Covenant’ made the grant of the Promised Land to Israel conditional upon her continuing obedience to the law of God, the ‘Abrahamic Covenant’ that preceded it ‘unconditionally promises a national restoration of Israel which is yet to be fulfilled’.Footnote ²²

Donald Akenson’s minutely researched study is a highly illuminating piece of scholarship, though one suspects it will not attract a general readership, except possibly among those Brethren and dispensationalists who want to know the rock from which they have been hewn. In contrast, Bruce Gordon’s book is evidently intended for a wider readership, alongside a scholarly audience. Inevitably in a book of such ambitious range, it too falters here and there, ironically at the very points where Akenson is so convincing. Chapter viii on ‘The transatlantic Bible’ properly emphasises the seminal roles played by eighteenth-century Pietists and Moravians in disseminating a Bible-centred missionary spirituality across the globe. However, the sequence of the ensuing chapters may encourage the general reader to draw the conclusion that the role of the United States in initiating the global expansion of Evangelical Protestantism was more exceptional than it actually was. Thus the closing sentences of chapter ix on ‘The American Bible’ assert that ‘The missionary impulses of American biblical culture, which built the country, raised the eyes of missionaries to distant hills and lands beyond the seas. The Bible should be the book of all peoples’ (p. 302). The first page of chapter x, ‘Missions worldwide’, then moves to the formation of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810. The chapter proceeds to tell the story of how ‘in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries millions converted to Christianity’ (p. 305). In the twentieth century, yes, but not in the nineteenth century, and readers might be forgiven for deducing that such mass conversion was the direct product of the efforts of western, and specifically American, missionaries, a conclusion not borne out by recent scholarship. The American Protestant exceptionalism which Akenson has in his sights is not entirely absent from Gordon’s writing. The British and Foreign Bible Society appears only in chapter x, preceded by the (later) American Bible Society in chapter ix. The Baptist Missionary Society (1792) also makes an overdue appearance in chapter x, but is mis-titled, and its chief founder, William Carey, is mis-spelt. Gordon is right to acknowledge in the same chapter that the first overseas missions in Protestant history (outside of seventeenth-century New England) were undertaken neither by Americans nor by Britons, but slips up again when he describes the Tranquebar mission as being undertaken by Danish Lutheran missionaries (p. 309). The Danish Crown indeed supplied the royal patronage, but Halle Pietism supplied the missionaries. A more surprising howler is that Charles Wesley appears on p. 375 as ‘the leader of the Methodist movement’. It is hoped that such blemishes – and there are others – can be corrected in a later edition. Nevertheless, Gordon is to be congratulated on a work that achieves a fine synthesis of scholarship and summative interpretation. It is an engagingly written book which will surely attract a wide readership.