There is nothing new about the idea that Europeans and Americans in the nineteenth century tended to lose faith in the Bible as a literal or perfect record of historical truth. Generally, we attribute this to the growing evidence of just how old the world was, and also the impact of new ideas of evolution. We also point to the Higher Criticism, which tried to show how different Biblical books were constructed, and generally not by the people whose names they presently bear. All this is well known. But I recently made a surprising discovery about a quite different source of doubt and subversion that is nothing like as well known. You have, of course, heard of Higher Criticism? Well, what about Lower Criticism?
For non-specialists, that term sounds almost like a joke, almost as if it means “low” in the sense of cheap or vulgar. It is nothing of the kind. It is actually a technical (and admittedly dated) term for the other part of the great scholarly enterprise in the nineteenth century Christian West, which meant the painstaking effort to reconstruct the earliest and most accurate versions of the Biblical text. Conservatives hoped that such efforts could offer a solution to the contradictions and errors that scholars were increasingly discovering in Biblical accounts. If the Bible wrongly asserted a particular date or name, then it was possible to claim that this might have been an error that crept in during the process of transmission, and that it did not exist in the most ancient and authentic versions, which might yet be reconstructed. But detailed textual criticism posed its own dangers, in showing just how far removed such archaic texts were from the versions of the Bible that ordinary believers held in their hands.
So how could that be subversive? Here is an example.
One of the really famous Christian leaders in America in the late nineteenth century was Washington Gladden (1836-1918), a warrior in the Social Gospel movement. He had something to say about everything; he wrote at great length, and his Recollections, published in 1909, are well worth reading. He also wrote a useful survey of Higher Criticism in his 1891 bestseller Who Wrote the Bible?, but that is not my topic here.
In 1893, Washington Gladden remarked that Americans aged fifty or older “are feeling that they have in their hands to-day a new Bible,” which was very different from what they had encountered in Sunday School, or in family readings. By implication, that “new Bible,” interpreted much more critically than hitherto, was something to which anyone under fifty was already well accustomed. Tracing the origin of that new Bible, Gladden cited a turning point that occurred in 1869, and which owed nothing to the insights of either Darwin or the Higher Critics, but rather to some thrilling documentary finds of the age. In the mid-century, German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf had found the ancient Bible manuscript known as the Codex Sinaiticus. Using this and other very early manuscripts, Tischendorf presented his extensively revised version of the Greek text of the gospels, and an English translation followed in 1869. This was Nathaniel S. Folsom, The Four Gospels Translated From The Greek Text Of Tischendorf, With The Various Readings Of Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Meyer, Alford, And Others, And With Critical And Expository Notes (Boston: A. Williams, 1869).
The book sold very well, mainly among clergy and seminarians, giving those readers “facts which to many of them were as novel as they were astounding.” They suddenly became aware of the countless variant readings that underlay every word of the Biblical text as it was commonly received:
and in the mind of every man who could put two and two together, the dogma of inerrancy at once went by the board. Those who had this book in their hands knew, then, that what they had been taught concerning the absolute verbal accuracy of the Bible could not be true. A human element there must be; the theory that omniscience had guarded the Book from the possibility of error was simply blown to fragments.
Only gradually did such subversive insights extend beyond educated circles. Recalling his time as a young minister in New England in the 1870s, Gladden reported how painful it had been for his fellow Congregationalist clergy to confront these issues. They sound technical, but they were truly explosive:
Gradually, however, the light that was shining all about us found its way through our shutters. In news-papers and magazines, and in an occasional heretical book, statements of fact appeared which arrested the attention of thoughtful men. There were even Biblical commentaries which ventured to call attention to interpolated verses and doubtful passages. It began to be evident to some that the doctrine of inerrancy had been overworked ; that there was need of the application of critical study to the sacred Scriptures. Yet after this fact began to be plain to students and teachers, there was still great timidity in admitting so much in the hearing of the public.
I remember sitting at table, at the Massasoit House in Springfield, in 1875, with a score of intelligent Congregational clergymen, when the question arose whether it would be judicious to tell the people of our congregations that 1 John v, 7 — a verse not found in the Revised Version — was an interpolation ; and not one of the twenty agreed with me in thinking that the fact could be safely stated. They all admitted that the verse was spurious, but feared the effect of letting the people know a truth so disturbing.
That particular reference is the classic Comma Johanneum. As it appears in the King James version, it reads thus, as a ringing proclamation of Trinitarian doctrine:
For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
The problem is that the explicitly Trinitarian section appears in precisely no early manuscripts, and that fact was very well known in the early sixteenth century, when Erasmus fought hard to exclude it. Hence, the King James translators really had no reason for what they offered.
Edward Gibbon had a high old time explicating the Comma:
Even the Scriptures themselves were profaned by their rash and sacrilegious hands. The memorable text, which asserts the unity of the three who bear witness in heaven, is condemned by the universal silence of the orthodox fathers, ancient versions, and authentic manuscripts. It was first alleged by the Catholic bishops whom Hunneric summoned to the conference of Carthage [484AD]. An allegorical interpretation, in the form, perhaps, of a marginal note, invaded the text of the Latin Bibles, which were renewed and corrected in a dark period of ten centuries.
The NIV is more reliable in its version, which is:
For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.
And that is it. Anyway, back to Washington Gladden in the 1870s:
About the same time I ventured to remark from the pulpit in reading the eighth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, that the thirty-seventh verse was not in the original manuscript, and the next day I received an indignant letter calling my attention to the fate reserved for those who “take away from the words of the book of this prophecy.” Such was the prevailing attitude of English-speaking Protestants upon questions of Biblical criticism, through the first three quarters of the nineteenth century.
Early in the seventies, a copy of the New Testament in English was published, containing the received version, with footnotes indicating the variations from this version of the three oldest and best manuscripts in existence, — the Vatican, the Alexandrian, and the Sinaitic Bibles. It was stated that none of these manuscripts had been known to the men who made the King James translation; and it was held by scholars to be almost axiomatic that where these three oldest manuscripts agreed, their reading must be accepted, and that where they unitedly disagreed with the received version, that version must be erroneous. This edition of the New Testament put within the reach of all intelligent readers the means of judging to what extent our English version needed revision… .
Such a concession, however reluctantly it might be made, involved considerable relaxation of the rigidity of theological dogmatism and opened the way for the examination of many traditional beliefs. There was “the sound of a going in the tops of the trees,” — the spirit of inquiry was abroad.
What I like so much about this example is that it is not about “what Americans thought” in general; it is about a very precise group of people in one region at a particular time. Also, it is fascinating to watch the clerics in conference over how much of the new truth they dare admit to their congregations. And finally, the whole story indicates the often-forgotten prehistory of the full impact of higher criticism that swept the intellectual world in the 1880s and 1890s.
So let’s not forget that Lower Criticism. Low, but not Out.
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