the fact that it stimulated the foundation of other great Bible
societies. There were some small beginnings in Germany and Switzerland.
They suddenly became strong and influential in consequence of the report
made concerning the British and Foreign Bible Society by its secretary,
Doctor Steinkopf, and Basel and Stuttgart made a new start in 1804 and
1812. After the Napoleonic War in 1814, Mr. Pinkerton travelled through
Germany with the result that Bible societies were started at Berlin,
Dresden, Elberfeld, and Copenhagen, and in Holland, Norway, and even
Russia. In 1808 Philadelphia joined the movement. The American Bible
Society has twice canvassed the entire United States, finding that five
hundred thousand families were without any Bible, and selling sixty
million Bibles. It is remarkable that in the beginning Roman Catholics
joined the Bible societies enthusiastically. A Bible society was founded
at Regensburg in 1805, supported almost exclusively by the Roman
Catholic clergy. But as early as 1817, soon after the restoration of the
Jesuits by Pope Pius VII, these Bible societies were dissolved; the
Roman Catholics were forbidden to be members of the other Bible
societies, and in the syllabus of Pius IX, in 1864, the Bible societies
are reckoned among the dangers of our time, together with Masonry and
other secret societies.
By the help of the Bible societies it has become possible that Bibles
should really spread among the people. In Germany each boy and girl who
goes to school has his own Bible. Bibles and New Testaments are
distributed among the soldiers. Most churches make a present of a Bible
to each couple who are to be married. There is rather a superabundance
of Bibles, which contrasts sharply with the estimation in which the
Bible is held. As Spurgeon, in his drastic way, said in one of his
stimulating sermons: "The Bible is in every house, but in many the dust
on it is so thick that you might write on it: _Damnation_." It was a
veteran Bible agent who, after thirty years' experience, said: "It is
easy to give away dozens of Bibles, but only the one which you sell will
be valued."
The circulation has been greatly enlarged by numbers of translations. We
remember that the first translations of the Bible were connected with
Christian missions; they were epoch-making for the languages, creating a
written alphabet and a national literature. The translations of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were of a different character; they
were the result of a religious reformation; they represented for the
nation the culmination point in language and a remarkable stage in
literature. Now again Christian missions revived, and started on a
wonderful career all over the world, and they needed to have the Bible
translated. The Bible societies did their best to provide as many
translations as possible. From the eight languages of 600 A. D. and some
twenty-four in the sixteenth century the number of languages into which
the Bible has been translated has grown up to four hundred, and if we
count the dialects separately we have over six hundred. The whole Bible
has not been translated into all these languages and dialects, but in
every case parts of it, sometimes the New Testament, sometimes only one
Gospel, have been translated, and other parts will follow. It is
interesting to hear the translators speak of the difficulties they have
to overcome. One sees what influence the Bible has on civilisation.
Often a language lacks some word which is indispensable for the
translator; he has to adapt one or coin a new one. There is no idea
more frequent in the Bible than the idea of God. The Chinese had no word
which exactly corresponded, the usual words indicating either spirits or
the sun or something of that sort. The Amshara lacks the idea of
righteousness, the Bantu the idea of holiness. If the translator uses as
an equivalent the word for separateness, his reader will get rather the
notion of something split. Sometimes the translator will prefer to keep
the Greek word, as in the case of _baptise_, but he must be careful, for
_batisa_ in Bantu means "treat some one badly." So the language has to
be remodelled in order to become suitable for the purpose of translating
the Bible. The Bible once again exercises a civilising influence on the
languages of many peoples. With very few exceptions, such as a Malayan
Bible of 1621 and a translation by John Eliot into the Massachusetts
Indian dialect published in 1666, most of these translations originated
in the nineteenth century and are due to the present missionary energy
of Christianity. Here again it is mortifying to see how the Bible is
spread among peoples who never had had civilisation before, while among
the Christian nations, who, to a large extent, owe their civilisation to
this very Bible, it is disregarded.
Besides the circulation we may also mention the enormous amount of
mental energy spent on Bible studies by the scholars of this last
century. Not only students of theology but also classical and Oriental
scholars have joined to study the Bible, to comment upon it, and make
everything in it understood. Specialisation in its inevitable course has
caused a separation of Old Testament and New Testament studies. In order
to understand and explain thoroughly the Old Testament one has to know
several Oriental languages and follow up the daily increasing evidence
for Oriental history, culture, and religion, whereas the New Testament
scholar is bound to study the development of the Greek language and the
whole civilisation of the Hellenistic period. Nay, even the Old and the
New Testament departments are each specialising into the textual and the
higher criticism, the theology or the religious history both of the
Jewish people and of primitive Christianity. One scholar studies the
life of Christ, another makes the apostolic age the topic of his special
research; one is commenting upon the Gospels, another upon the letters
of Saint Paul. The literature in these different departments has grown
so rapidly that it is almost impossible to follow it and to survey the
whole field. Nevertheless, we need a comprehensive view, and a large
number of scientific journals, in German, English, French, some few
also in other languages, are devoted to the summing up of results which
have been attained by special research. There are dozens of dictionaries
and encyclopedias dealing with Biblical matters either separately or in
connection with other material. It is, indeed, wonderful what progress
has been and is being made. One is astonished to find that every day
brings new problems and new attempts at solution, and one cannot help
admiring the energy and sagacity which are put into these studies.
But in spite of this circulation never attained before, and in spite of
this active work of research, the fact remains indisputable that the
Bible has lost its former position. There was a time, in the Middle
Ages, when the Bible was at least one foundation of Christian
civilisation, not to say the one foundation (as the men of that period
would have said). Then there was a time, during recent centuries, when
the Bible ruled daily life almost completely. Whether we regret the fact
or approve of it, it remains a fact, and we have to face it, that those
times are gone.
The Bible nowadays is one book among a thousand others. It is still
revered by the majority of the people, but it is not so much read as it
was in the time when it was the one book the people possessed. The
enormous statistics for Bible circulation lose in effect if we compare
the figures of the book-trade in general, the number of books published
every year, and the numbers of editions and copies which some of the
notable successes have attained.
The old problem, the Bible or the classics or a combination of both, is
revived in a new form. There is a neopaganism in literature, and often
it seems incompatible to read both the Bible and modern literature, and
most people decide in favour of the latter. Once again the Bible has its
rivals very numerous and strong.
The Bible in former times was held to be the divinely inspired text-book
for all human knowledge. It was in the Bible that one had to look for
information not only about God and God's will and everything connected
with God, but also about philosophy, natural science, history, and so
on. Now a secularisation of science has taken place by which all these
departments of human knowledge are withdrawn from the ecclesiastical,
theological, and Biblical authority.
The mediaeval view of the world as taken from the Bible, or at least
believed to be taken from it, had been utterly shattered by the great
discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. When Columbus
found the way to America and Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape to
India, and later others crossed the Pacific Ocean, the earth could no
longer be considered as a round plane, it was proved to be a globe.
Copernicus deciphered the mystery of heaven, the movement of the earth
around the sun; Galileo Galilei followed in the same studies, and Kepler
reached the climax of probability for the new theory. The church did not
follow at once. It is remarkable that Copernicus did not win the assent
of Luther. The great reformer, critical as he was, felt bound in this
question to the authority of the Bible, and called the contradicting
Copernicus a fool. It is well known how the Roman church by its
inquisition treated Galileo until he withdrew his theory--formally,
still holding it in his heart (_e pur si muove_, "and yet the earth does
move"). Johannes Kepler, himself a Protestant and brought up with the
fullest reverence for the Bible, found his own way out of the difficulty
by distinguishing between the religious and the scientific aspect of the
Bible, an anticipation of the modern solution. And if one is willing to
maintain the modern scientific view of the universe as it has been
established by the three men just named, and strengthened by their
followers, he must renounce the Bible as authority in matters of
science. It is a notable fact that even the Roman church, in 1817,
withdrew the verdict against Galileo's theory and similar theses,
thereby admitting that a Christian may safely deny the Biblical
assumption that the sun moves round the earth.
The Bible in its first chapter tells us that the world was created in
six days; geology now speaks of twenty million years and more. The Bible
says that man was created on the sixth day by a special act of God;
Darwin's theory is that the human race is the result of an evolution
which eliminated numbers of former beings and developed ever higher
species. The Bible tells of many miracles which can have no other
meaning than that in certain cases the law of gravitation and other laws
of nature are suspended; the scientist tells us that a law loses all
meaning if it admits of exceptions. Of course, there are miracles and
miracles: the healings of Jesus we may accept as historical without any
hesitation, but the standing still of the sun in Josh. 10 : 12 is
nothing but a poetical form of speech, and the floating axe-head is as
legendary in the story of Elisha (II Kings 6 : 6) as it would be in any
other legend.
In former times scholars wrote large volumes on the animals mentioned in
the Bible and the flowers and the stones and so on; this they called
sacred zooelogy and sacred botany and sacred mineralogy. It was not for
their amusement: it was a serious study. The Bible was thought to be a
text-book for every science, and it seemed to be much more valuable to
get information of all kinds from the Bible than to collect real
animals, flowers, or stones. Likewise the human body was dealt with in
the same scholastic way; it is a comparatively modern thing for
physicians to be allowed to study the body and find out its real
structure by dissection. Nowadays it is universally agreed that science
and medicine are autonomous and are not dependent on the Bible.
The Bible was also the text-book for history, as we have seen. The
history of mankind, according to this view, was limited to six thousand
years. A great amount of mental energy was spent upon the question of
Biblical chronology, which, however, proved to be hopelessly confused by
the fact that various systems were used by the Biblical authors
themselves. History was the history of the Jewish people, enriched by
some glimpses of contemporaneous pagan history. Now, the discoveries in
Egypt and Babylon and the deciphering of the Oriental inscriptions have
illustrated the fact that the Jewish people was only one among others
and one of the weakest of all these Oriental nations. Assyrian kingdoms
were established as early as 6000 B. C. The famous code of Hammurabi is
much older than the Mosaic law. If we compare them, we find that the
former represents a high level of civilisation, while the latter
establishes rules for nomadic life, a relation similar to that which
exists between the Roman law and the national laws of the German tribes:
though codified later, they represent, nevertheless, an earlier stage.
The occupation of Canaan has come to be viewed in a new light through
the exploration of Palestine. The history of the kings of Judah and
Israel is now seen much more clearly than before to have been determined
by politics; they are for ever steering between the influence of Egypt
and that of Babylon. The accounts given in the Babylonian archives and
the Egyptian inscriptions are to be compared with the Biblical account,
and some may feel that the comparison is not always in favour of the
latter. Even the social and religious position of the prophets is
nowadays compared with contemporaneous facts in Greece, Persia, and
India. The life of Jesus and the Acts of the Apostles have changed their
aspect with the possibility of literary comparison. It is not so much
the literary criticism of the Gospels and the Acts by themselves as it
is this facility of comparison which contributes to shake the authority
of the Bible. We find the same miracles told of Jesus and of the emperor
Vespasian; some sayings of Jesus can be compared with utterances of
Caesar and Pompey. Many of his words have parallels in the Jewish
literature as well as in the writings of the Stoa. I feel sure that the
originality of Jesus will but gain by such comparison, but it is obvious
that originality must be taken in a higher sense than is often the case;
it is not the wording but the meaning attached to it which is new and
original.
In this way everything which loomed so large when viewed standing by
itself in the Bible has been reduced to its natural size; the earth has
lost its central position; man is only one in a long line of similar
beings; the history of Israel enters the large field of universal
history; and even the personality of Jesus is subject to comparison and
analogy.
This reduction is the necessary complement of the independence and
autonomy attained for human science as the result of a long development.
Already in the sixteenth century the humanists claimed for science the
right to follow its own rules without being led and limited by the
church's authoritative doctrine. They aimed at a civilisation free from
ecclesiastical tutelage; going back to the classicism of pre-Christian
times, they did not want the guardianship of the Christian church and
its clergy. But the time was not yet ripe for this view. Even the
reformers, Luther as well as Calvin, while they broke with the authority
of mediaeval scholasticism and of the Roman church, were not prepared to
acknowledge the autonomy of science; they established the primacy of the
Bible in an even stricter sense than it had borne in the Middle Ages.
The Bible was to rule everything, and it was the Bible in its plain and
simple meaning, without the mitigations which tradition and allegory had
allowed in former times. To be sure, Luther occasionally granted some
independence to secular science. He was furious when Aristotle was
quoted as an authority in matters of religion, but would himself
introduce him as an authority for civil government or for logic. He had
a curious proof for this from the Bible itself. It was on the advice of
his father-in-law, Jethro, a pagan, that Moses appointed the seventy
elders to help him judge the people. Therefore for secular organisation
one may take the counsel of the heathen, of the philosophers. But Luther
was not consistent; as we have already seen, against Copernicus he
insisted upon the authority of the Bible. He did not see that it was a
question of astronomy without any relation to religion. In the
seventeenth century the philosophers began to claim independence for
the human reason, and soon they established reason as the highest
authority, even in religious matters. It is very interesting to see the
effect of this claim at the beginning. Even the most advanced liberals
were so convinced of the infallible authority of the Bible that they
tried by all means at their disposal to reconcile with the contents of
the Bible the principles which the rational philosophy of Descartes or
Spinoza had established. They started a new method of interpretation in
order to make the Bible agree with reason. A long time had to pass
before it became obvious to all competent minds that the Bible and
reason were not to be reconciled by means of a makeshift harmony. It was
only in the nineteenth century that the view forced itself upon all
scholars that the Bible has to be understood in an historical way; that
it does not give inspired information upon natural science and history,
its revelation dealing with God and religion only.
By recent discoveries it is proved that the creation story in Gen. 1 is
by no means a unique and original one; there is something similar in the
Babylonian mythology; it may have been taken from there. The same holds
true regarding the story of the deluge and others. So there is no reason
for claiming for these stories the authority of revealed science; the
Biblical author simply shares the ideas of his time. We are not bound to
the scientific notions of a period two thousand years before Christ and
four thousand years before our own time. And yet there is something
unique in this creation story, as told in Gen. 1, for which one looks in
vain in all the alleged parallels in Babylonian and other religions; it
is the idea of the one God Almighty, who by his supreme will creates
heaven and earth. That is the revelation conveyed to mankind by this
chapter. We must not trouble about the specific description of creation;
that belongs to the historical form. We cling with all our heart to the
wonderful idea of the one creating God, and we realise that here
revelation is given to us.
It is only by comparison that the real importance of a thing comes out.
On a map of America, made on a small scale, the distances may seem
short; comparing a map of Europe on the same scale one realises how long
they are in fact. We are always in danger of taking some accidental
feature for the main point. The frame does not make the worth of the
painting.
As the Bible has lost its exclusive authority in the domain of science,
so in the fine arts it has ceased to be the single source of
inspiration. Since the Renaissance motifs taken from ancient mythology
and poetry have come into competition with the Biblical scenes; the
Dutch school cultivated the illustration of the life of the people and
presented even the sacred story in this fashion--the mystery of
sacredness has gone; it is purely human, not to say profane. The French
liked landscapes and used Biblical subjects only as accessories.
Pictures of battles, triumphs, apotheoses filled the galleries. Art
to-day is anything but Biblical; modern painters have, most of them, no
sense for sacred art. I venture to think they do better to keep away
from it. For if a modern painter, when trying to illustrate the parable
of the prodigal son in a triptychon, puts in the large middle field the
man feeding the swine, giving only the left-hand corner to the return to
the father, he has proved himself incapable of a religious understanding
of the story, however finished a work of art his painting may be.
By all this process of secularisation the Bible has been drawn back from
general civilisation and restricted to its own proper domain, religion.
We must not insist on the fact that even here the Bible seems to have
lost somewhat of its infallible authority. It is in the domain of
theology as distinct from religion that this holds true. Strange as it
may seem, it is a fact that the Bible is no more the text-book of
theology. Theology, of course, can never do without the Bible, but here
also the Bible is the source of historical information, not the
authoritative proof for doctrine. Already in the period when the
orthodox Protestants vied with one another in asserting the inspiration
of the Bible in the boldest terms and relied on the Bible for answers to
every question, Samuel Werenfels (d. 1740), a professor at Basel, wrote
the distich:
"Hic liber est in quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua."
"This is the book where each man seeketh his own ideas,
In it accordingly each findeth his own beliefs."
It was the support given by the Bible to every doctrine and every theory
which made critical people doubt the propriety of proving truth by
adducing proof-texts; and this not only for dogmatical questions but
also for moral ones. It is well known how both parties in the
controversy over slavery appealed to the authority of the Bible, and it
would be difficult to say which party found the stronger support in the
letter of the text. The same holds true regarding other questions of
modern life; one can argue from the Bible pro and con regarding the use
of wine. The Bible has been adduced in the question of polygamy. It can
be quoted on both sides with reference to woman suffrage. It is
indicative of the present attitude toward the Bible that this is so
seldom done. The use of the Bible for the settling of modern social
problems has brought upon many Christian minds a pitiful confusion. It
has proved impossible to deduce from the Bible, even from the teaching
of Jesus, rules for modern life. Times have changed and the conditions
of life have altered.
All this prepared the way for the historical view of the Bible. Then the
period of higher criticism began. It was to many a hard lesson; but we
had to learn it. It was started--curious to say--by Roman Catholic
scholars in France. Having the authority of the church behind them, they
felt more free as regards the Bible than the Protestants did. Richard
Simon made it evident that the transmission of the Bible excludes a
mechanical view of inspiration. Astruc, a doctor, the physician of Louis
XIV, discovered that in the Pentateuch two different sources were used.
During the eighteenth century the theories of literary criticism were
applied to all the books of the Old and the New Testament, and the
scholarship of the nineteenth century has taken up the task, perfected
the method, and reached in some questions a general agreement. To-day
the principles of literary criticism in their application to the Bible
are generally acknowledged. The books of the Bible are like other books;
they are not to be treated as divine Scriptures but as human writings.
One has to inquire in each instance about the author, his methods of
writing, the sources of his information, his tendencies, and so on.
Criticism did not stop here; it overstepped the boundaries of purely
literary criticism; it became historical criticism, too. The historicity
of the facts reported in the Bible was called in question; recently the
historicity of Jesus has been denied; and where his existence was
admitted, still his teaching was criticised. Some people found it too
ascetic, to others it was purely eschatological; in either case it could
not be adapted to our own time. So even in its central points the Bible
seemed to be attacked and its authority shaken. Instead of being
restricted to the domain of religion, the Bible seemed to be denied even
to the uses of devotion. But the present situation is not so desperate
for the pious Bible reader as it looks.