The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation

by Ernst von Dobschütz

Besides, the circulation of the Bible has received strong support through the foundation of Bible societies. The story is well known how Thomas Charles discovered the great desire for copies of the Bible among his Welsh countrymen, how, when he gathered some friends for the purpose of providing them with Bibles, the Baptist preacher Thomas Hughes put in the question, "And why not for other peoples, too?" and how on his motion the Society was started on March 7, 1804, as the British and Foreign Bible Society. It is wonderful to hear of the work done by this Society in the last hundred years. If one visits the Bible House in Queen Victoria Street in London he gets an impression of the extent and the importance of the work done there. The Society has its presses as well as its translators all over the world; it has its agents scattered through all the nations, and it has begun to do not only a publishers' business proper but scholarly work as well. A vast collection of Bible editions from all times and in all tongues has been gathered, and a valuable catalogue published which is of great importance for bibliography in general.

The greatest merit of the British and Foreign Bible Society, however, is 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 mediæval 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 (è 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.