Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T03:50:15.106Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

America's Bibles: Canon, Commentary, and Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Stephen J. Stein
Stephen J. Stein
Affiliation:
Chancellors' Professor of Religious Studies and department chair at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In America the category ‘bible’ enjoys a privileged cultural position. That fact was brought home to me anecdotally several years ago when I received a telephone call forwarded through a departmental secretary. The woman on the other end of the line expressed frustration because she did not know what to do with a worn-out Bible. She asked if there was a proper way to handle the situation: should she bury it, or burn it? She was genuinely perplexed. Of one thing alone was she certain: she could not throw the Bible into a garbage can. As it turned out, I was of little help. I knew no liturgy for disposing of old Bibles, nor any special protocol for handling them. But I also do not remember ever throwing one away. I am accustomed to seeing old Bibles in attics or on shelves of used-book stores. The telephone call underscored in a practical way the special aura that surrounds the ‘bible’ in America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 169 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Frerichs, Ernest S., ed., The Bible and Bibles in America (Atlanta, Ga., 1988), p. ix.Google Scholar

2. Hatch, Nathan O. and Noll, Mark A., eds., The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History (New York, 1982), pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

3. Denny, Frederick M. and Taylor, Rodney L., eds,, The Holy Book in Comparative Perspective (Columbia, S.C., 1985).Google Scholar

4. Graham, William A., Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge, U.K., 1987), pp. x–xii.Google Scholar

5. Levering, Miriam, ed., Rethinking Scripture: Essays from a Comparative Perspective (Albany, N.Y., 1989), pp. 5, 11.Google Scholar

6. Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (Minneapolis, Minn., 1993), pp. ix, 17.Google Scholar

7. See Allen, James B. and Leonard, Glen M., The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, Ut., 1976), pp. 23–57.Google Scholar

8. Smith, Joseph, The Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, Ut., 1987), p. 110.Google Scholar

9. Bushman, Richard L., Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana, Ill., 1984), pp. 115–142.Google Scholar

10. Stendahl, , “The Sermon on the Mount and Third Nephi,” in Reflections on Mormonism: Judaeo-Christian Parallels, ed. Madsen, Truman G. (Provo, Ut., 1978), pp. 139–154.Google Scholar

11. Smith, , Book of Mormon, title page.Google Scholar

12. See Book of Mormon, 2 Nephi 3:6–16.

13. The Pearl of Great Price: A Selection from the Revelations, Translations, and Narrations of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City, Ut., 1967), p. 59.Google Scholar

14. Stewart, Philemon, A Holy, Sacred and Divine Roll and Book; from the Lord God of Heaven, to the Inhabitants of Earth: Revealed in the United Society at New Lebanon, County of Columbia, State of New-York, United States of America (Canterbury, N.H., 1843).Google Scholar

15. For background on Shakerism during this period, see Stein, Stephen J., The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven, Conn., 1992), pp. 165–200.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 370.

17. Stewart, , Sacred Roll, p. 216.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 39.

19. “One of Philemon Manifestos to the Ministry,” 1863, Shaker Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, VII B 124, p. 88.

20. Peel, Robert, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery (New York, 1966), p. 272.Google Scholar

21. Eddy, Mary Baker, Manual of the Mother Church, First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston, Massachusetts (Boston, Mass., 1936), p. 15.Google Scholar

22. Gottschalk, Stephen, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), p. 35.Google Scholar

23. Eddy, Mary Baker, The First Church of Christ Scientist and Miscellany (Boston, Mass., 1915), p. 115.Google Scholar

24. Eddy, Mary Baker, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston, Mass., 1991), pp. viii–ix.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 200.

26. Eddy, , Manual, pp. 120–121.Google Scholar

27. Folkert, Kendall W., “The ‘Canons’ of ‘Scripture’: Text, Ritual, and Symbol,” in Scripture and Community: Collected Essays on the Jains by Kendall W. Folkert, ed. Cort, John E. (Atlanta, Ga., 1993), pp. 53–83.Google Scholar

28. Eddy, , Science and Health, p. 456.Google Scholar

29. Peel, Robert, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” in Bible and Bibles in America, ed. Frerichs, Ernest S., p. 212, n. 4.Google Scholar

30. Numbers, Ronald L., A Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (New York, 1976), p. 197.Google Scholar

31. Seventh-day Adventists Believe…: A Biblical Exposition of 27 Fundamental Doctrines (Washington, D.C., 1988), p. 216.Google Scholar

32. Van Noord, Roger, King of Beaver Island: The Life and Assassination of James Jesse Strang (Urbana, Ill., 1988), p. 97.Google Scholar

33. Braude, Ann, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston, Mass., 1989), pp. 34–35.Google Scholar

34. Moon, Sun Myung, Divine Principle (New York, 1973).Google Scholar See Outline of The Principle Level 4 (New York, 1980), pp. 1–7.Google Scholar

35. See Foster, Lawrence, Women, Family, and Utopia: Communal Experiments of the Shakers, the Oneida Community, and the Mormons (Syracuse, N.Y., 1991), pp. 103–120.Google Scholar

36. Nordhoff, Charles, The Communistic Societies of the United States (New York, 1965), originally published 1875, p. 58.Google Scholar

37. See insert in The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Numbers, Ronald L. and Butler, Jonathan M. (Bloomington, Ind., 1987).Google Scholar

38. Ham, F. Gerald, “The Prophet and the Mummyjums: Isaac Bullard and the Vermont Pilgrims of 1817,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 56 (1973): 290–299.Google Scholar

39. Smith, Jonathan Z., “Sacred Persistence: Toward a Redescription of Canon,” in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago (1988), p. 48.Google Scholar

40. Henderson, John B., Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis (Princeton, N.J., 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41. Ibid., pp. 89–138.

42. Ehrman, , The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York, 1993), pp. 185–187.Google Scholar

43. Roche, O. I. A., ed., The Jefferson Bible with the Annotated Commentaries on Religion of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1964), p. 10.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., p. 137.

45. Pelikan, Jaroslav, “Jefferson and His Contemporaries,” in The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, with an Introduction by F. Forrester Church and an Afterword by Jaroslav Pelikan (Boston, Mass., 1989), p. 161.Google Scholar

46. Smith, Theophus H., Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York, 1994), pp. 4–6, 31.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., p. 58.

48. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, The Woman's Bible, Foreword by Maureen Fitzgerald (Boston, Mass., 1993), Part I, pp. 5–7, 10.Google Scholar

49. Ibid., Part I, pp. 14–15, 115, and Part II, pp. 100, 157.

50. Fitzgerald, , “Foreword,” in The Woman's Bible, p. xxviii.Google Scholar

51. The Holy Scriptures (Independence, Mo., 1974), originally published in 1867.

52. Pearl of Great Price, p. 59.

53. Matthews, Robert J., “A Plainer Translation”: Joseph Smith's Translation of the Bible—A History and Commentary (Provo, Ut., 1975), p. 39.Google Scholar See also the very useful study by Barlow, Philip L., Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion (New York, 1991), pp. 43–73.Google Scholar

54. Matthews, , Plainer Translation, pp. 285–286, 302.Google Scholar

55. See Shipps, Jan, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana, Ill., 1985), pp. 30–32.Google Scholar

56. The Scofield Reference Bible. The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments. Authorized version, with a new system of connected topical references to all the greater themes of Scripture, with annotations, revised marginal renderings, summaries, definitions, chronology, and index; to which are added helps at hard places, explanations of seeming discrepancies, and new system of paragraphs (New and improved edition, New York, 1917). See also Boyer, Paul, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 97–98.Google Scholar

57. New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures Rendered from the Original Languages by the New World Bible Translation Committee—Revised 1970 C.E. (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1978).Google Scholar

58. The citations in this paragraph appear in promotional literature distributed by Thomas Nelson Publishers and Oxford University Press.