The Book of Books (35 page)

The determination of these Bible societies was to spread the Word of God and one sure method, they believed, was by printing and distributing as many Bibles as possible. Bible societies began in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain and America. The most ambitious of the British societies was the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), established in London in 1804. This benefited from the energy, wealth and connections of Wilberforce and by 1811 there were offices in Cairo and the beginnings of a network across Europe. In the middle of the nineteenth century the society undertook to provide translations of the King James Bible in all the languages of the British Empire. A hundred years later, the BFBS had over 7,500 auxiliaries. In 1901, the law that the Bible could only be printed in the King James
Version was lifted but it was the King James Version which was still dominant well into the twentieth century. New English versions have been criticised as adulterations, shadows, even betrayals of the original.

The American Bible Society was formed in 1816 and at their first meeting in New York, the representatives of thirty-five Bible societies agreed to work for the distribution of ‘the Holy Scripture without note or comment'. In the twentieth century, more than 125 new Bible societies emerged – in Australia, but also in Cambodia, Hong Kong, Austria and Chile. By 1904, the American Bible Society had supplied nearly 181 million copies of the Scriptures and spent about £14 million on translations and their distribution. During the Second World War, the society circulated an estimated 45 million copies of Scripture. No book in history has matched the general distribution achieved by the King James Bible. The command to the Apostles to broadcast the Gospels was accomplished around the globe. In 1946, the United Bible Societies were founded, an alliance of 135 national Bible societies working in more than 200 countries. The King James Version now spoke to the world in many tongues, including an English which would have been foreign to King James.

 

These missionaries, mostly from the nonconformist Churches, preponderantly Methodists and Baptists, provide heroic stories in the history of faith. Henry Nott, for example, a bricklayer, joined the mission ship
Duff
which, as I have mentioned, sailed to Tahiti in 1797. It left the thirty missionaries on the island and went back to England for new supplies which were not to arrive for five years. During that time several of Nott's fellow missionaries deserted, died, were murdered or went insane.

Nott was the only survivor and spent the five years' wait learning the Tahitian language. He would eventually translate the
King James Bible into Tahitian. He attempted to befriend the fearsome King Pomare II but in those five years while waiting for the
Duff
to return from England he made not a single convert. He returned to England only twice in forty-seven years. This island and others like it were far from the sun-kissed innocence romantically relayed from the inaccurately reported experiences of Fletcher Christian (so desperately romantic in fact that it lured him into murder and mutiny). One group of Tahitians killed their children as soon as they were born: King Pomare's chief wife belonged to that sect. There were constant wars after which the houses of the defeated were burned, prisoners butchered, their bodies pounded to pulp with large stones, then dried out, holed in the middle and worn like a poncho. Children were sacrificed to idols: Nott estimated that in his thirty-year reign, Pomare sacrificed 2,000 victims to his idols.

Henry Nott's line of defence and attack was to quote from the Bible, especially and, he records, repeatedly from the Gospel according to St John, chapter 3 verse 16: ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.' It had been the favourite line of Martin Luther, who is said to have repeated it three times in his death throes.

Nott's house was destroyed; his possessions stolen; his printing type melted down for bullets. By 1810, alone and beggared, Nott described himself as ‘troubled . . . persecuted . . . cast down . . . but not in despair'. He held to his faith that one day Christ would triumph in those islands.

It is not so easy to dismiss such resolution and such faith. Perhaps it was all a delusion. Perhaps Nott and the many other missionaries like him were in a trance of fanaticism, mesmerised by a promise which devoured their reason. Or perhaps through their religion they dug more deeply into their inner resources
than most do and found there a source of conviction which carried its own knowledge. Perhaps they believed because they knew something hidden from most of us.

After eighteen years, Nott's persistence was rewarded: or he might say his call to faith was answered. Pomare had a chapel built; 31 natives agreed to renounce idolatry and the number sped up to 800. King Pomare won a great battle and after his victory he destroyed all the heathen idols and altars he could find. Schools were established and a huge church was built at Papara – 712 feet long, 54 feet wide, containing three pulpits, 260 feet apart, so that three sermons could be preached simultaneously. In 1819, King Pomare was baptised, watched by more than 5,000 of his subjects. Henry Nott, the bricklayer from Bromsgrove, had, as he would see it by the grace of God, helped Tahiti to see the true light and become an active Christian community and put aside its murderous heathen ways.

William Carey, a cobbler, went to India as a Baptist missionary at the age of thirty-three and stayed there for forty-one years. He never returned to England. He was part of what was admitted to be an unsuccessful mission but it was not for want of trying on his part. He had schools built, and travelled thousands of miles across the subcontinent preaching the Word. By the time of his death in 1834, Carey had helped to set up more than thirty different missionary stations in different parts of India. His greatest achievement was to translate the Scriptures into Bengali, which set off a spate of translations into fifteen other languages – Sanskrit, Hindustani, Person, Maratha, Guajarati, Oriya . . . The small but tenacious congregations of Christians in India today still honour him.

There is Alexander Mackay, a Scot, an engineer missionary who arrived in Zanzibar in 1876. It took him two years to achieve his first goal and get into Uganda. He spent fourteen years there
without once returning to Scotland. Mackay built 230 miles of road, and translated Matthew's Gospel. He died of a virulent tropical disease having seen his bishop murdered, his pupils burned and his converts and friends strangled or clubbed to death. ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord' was the injunction that inspired him and so he did.

Uganda's Christian community had grown out of the example of Mackay who, it was reported, when surrounded by mayhem and threats of death, ‘met it with calm blue eyes that never winked'. Another missionary wrote of him: ‘it is worth going a long journey to see one man of this kind, working day after day without a syllable of complaint or a moan and to hear him lead his little flock in singing and prayer to show forth God's kindness in the morning and his faithfulness every night.' Perhaps his example eventually led to the consecration of John Sentamu as Archbishop of York in 2005.

There were many like him: Samuel Marsden in Australia; Mary Slessor, a Scot, in Africa; another Scot, James Chalmers, in the Cook Islands for ten years and New Guinea for twenty-four, until he was murdered by cannibal tribesmen; and yet another Scot, James Gilmour, who went to Mongolia and died there at the age of forty-seven after twenty-one years of service. J. Hudson Taylor, an English missionary to China, founded the China Inland Mission, which at his death included 205 mission stations, 800 missionaries and 125,000 Chinese Christians.

In 1885, there were the ‘Cambridge Seven' – seven young graduates from Cambridge. They had a wide influence in inspiring student volunteer movements and their remarkable successes in China were published in
The Evangelisation of the World
, which was distributed to every YMCA and YWCA throughout Britain and the United States.

The records of these people, mostly working alone in initially
alien and hostile cultures with languages hard for Europeans to grasp, must inspire respect at the very least, even from the most case-hardened agnostics and atheists. Unless they are thought to be utterly misguided, their undoubted energies misdirected, their intrusions into foreign cultures undesirable. In which case what they did is to be written off and even damned.

Yet the emphasis on education can be seen as a benefit. It is relevant to quote from a speech by King M'Tesa of Uganda:

There must have been some authoritarian, brutal missionaries. Accounts of various missions are scarce. There will always be the divide between those who see the missionaries as prejudiced and interventionist, out to destroy an existing culture, and those who see them as bringers of light, who prepared the way for their inevitable takeover by the rampaging West.

What happened, in my view, is that the idea of empire and especially the British Empire, because it was the biggest and the most recent, got such a bad name that its reputation stained that of the missions. All empires have always behaved badly which does not mean that everything within them is bad. Moreover in the UK Christianity waned rapidly in the second half of the
twentieth century, after the British Empire was finally dissolved, and there grew in strength a sense of disillusionment, almost of being cheated, which contaminated everything to do with Christianity. And the voice of the non-believers grew louder in the land and became more acceptable and energising for the media. The novelty of their zest recalls the early evangelicals.

None of this, I think, should take away from the efforts of valiant and often good people to bring to quarters of the world they considered in peril the opportunities to embrace a religion, in the New Testament, of high morality and kindness. That it failed on many occasions is not especially surprising, given its entanglement with the lusts of empire-building and the complications of civilisations which they encountered and of which they knew very little at the outset. That it succeeded could be regarded as a loss or a gain depending on your point of departure. That it, the Word of God in the King James Bible, sent out across the world cohorts of outstandingly brave and virtuous people and that some good came of it can hardly be denied.

But to Christians, these missions were all admirable and their results a testament to the glory of God. That there have been setbacks is disappointing but they should not be a cause of despair. The missions go on. The Bible they believe dwells in eternal life. The world still has to be saved and by repeated efforts Christians believe that it will be saved. Such is the prayer and the faith of the dedicated today who find inspiration in these early attempts to spread the Word.

THE BIBLE AND SEX

W
hen men began to look for ways to control society, language, firepower and sex followed fear as the best available methods. The Bible is packed with examples of both fear and sex. God exemplified the authority to crush and terrify: the characters in the Bible provide a gallery of sexual activities which could be examined for many a different version of heaven or hell.

There was polygamy among the most respected patriarchs; there was incest and the prostitution of daughters by their fathers. There were mass rapes. There were banning orders on a range of sexual activities which were successfully broken, often to positive and much applauded effect. Adultery was practised and denied. Seduction was an art which could either further or thwart the will of divine destiny. The erotic was celebrated in sexually abandoned verse so lightly disguised that a fig leaf would have seemed like an overcoat. There was the repudiation of all eroticism. There was the introduction of sin to sex and guilt to sin. Then, for the brave, a sensual and dark engagement with the brew of guilt, sin and sex, more dangerous eroticism spurred on by such dramatic constraints. The Bible has provoked a multitude of variations, often to spite it, sometimes in the strict obedience to it.

There were heroines of sexual liberation and hordes of women condemned to sexual servitude. Sexual meekness was a bond and a virtue but it also became an object to desire in itself, heightened further by protestations of chastity. There is prostitution and celibacy, orgies and the love between men which is accepted and sex between men that is abominated. There is onanistic sex for which the Lord slaughters you. There is a fuse of mystical sex with the divine Creator of all things visible and invisible. There are detailed lists of prohibitions which imply much licentiousness and rampage. There is sexual assault and tenderness, cruelty, the wreckage of jealousy and the severe duty to breed, protect and build up family. We read of Eve begetting the human race in original sin according to St Augustine; Mary conceived of Christ in immaculation to redeem and to save the human race, according to the Gospels; and Salome the slut.

Interpretations of what these and other women represent fill volumes, from phallocentric essays to the relatively recent scholarly counter-attacks by feminist authors. There is in the Bible almost all that sex can offer: and the King James Version's ubiquitous availability over the four centuries has broadcast it far and wide.