The Bible and the People (review)

Ferrell presents an engaging, but impressionistic, study of the how ordinary people received the English Bible since the Reformation. Her frame is the collection in California’s Huntington Library, although she often moves beyond its treasures. What gave impetus to the study was an exhibition at the Huntington for which Farrell served as guest curator. That in turn prompted her to ask more questions and probe more deeply into the interaction between a translated biblical text and the people who purchase, read, and study it. Her contention is that this dynamic reveals much about the lived authority of Christianity’s sacred text, perhaps even more than official pronouncements of church councils and theologians.

Ferrell, a historian of early-modern history and literature, demolishes the popular perception that in the later medieval period—because the Bible was available in a Latin no one really knew, chained to pulpits for security, and officially interpreted only by church leaders—ordinary folk lacked access to it. Rather, she shows that they maintained a lively relation to the text through retelling its stories and seeing them captured in church art and architecture. The Bible was not just a book laboriously copied; it was a living text people made their own and interpreted as they willed.

Ferrell claims further that translating Scripture into the vernacular—whether Martin Luther’s German Bible or the early English renderings of John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, and Myles Coverdale—was both a political and religious act tied to rising nationalism as well as to tensions within the institutional church. So, too, English translations favored by Puritans and even the “Authorized” or King James Version of 1611 were all statements about where both religious and political powers were centered.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new methods of mass production made the purchase of Bibles inexpensive. Publishers then introduced more costly, heavily illustrated editions. Some devoted more space to illustration than to text. Publishers knew that art had a pedagogical and spiritual function. Soon the “family Bible” became a repository of genealogical records, a place to record births and deaths, marriages and baptisms, and other vital statistics. As well, echoing earlier practice when individuals penned personal comments in the margins, printed Bibles began to include commentary and study helps, often thinly disguising a particular theological perspective. The more apparatus a Bible contained, the greater its value (and purchase price). In popular culture, what mattered was not how the text spoke to one’s eternal destiny but how owning a book cemented one’s place in family history. Unwittingly, Ferrell suggests, this apparatus eroded the sacred authority of the text itself, perhaps even more than challenges that were coming from the use of historical-critical method and differing views about what made the Bible inspired.

These trends continued into the twentieth century. Groups like the Gideons sought to place Bibles with guides for particular needs in every hotel room; paraphrased editions were targeted at adolescents, with different texts for girls and boys. As the people’s book, the Bible found its transcendent aura tarnished. But its themes and motifs subtly penetrated every aspect of the culture.

Ferrell writes in a breezy fashion, making the work more accessible to a mass audience than is the Bible itself. Scores of illustrations enliven what she argues concerning how the people made the Bible their own book, not the voice of a distant deity. But more remains to be told. Words used in a translation do make a difference theologically as well as politically, a matter begging for more reflection. Particular editions of the Bible have also sustained entire movements; one wonders whether Protestant fundamentalism could have kept its hold on millions without the century-old best-selling Scofield Reference Bible, whose internal guides echo the premillennial dispensationalism essential to fundamentalism. Nor could Ferrell probe the difference between translation and paraphrase, although the paraphrased The Message (Colorado Springs, CO, 2002) has become wildly popular since its introduction. One...