Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger (28 page)

The Puritan “Persecution”

Even after the
Thirty-nine Articles
, after years of
steady Protestantization under Cranmer and his successors, there were still
some within the Church of England who believed the break with the old Faith had
not gone far enough. For them, the English Church needed to be “purified”—by
which they meant completely remade on a radically Calvinistic basis, removing
all lingering “popish” teaching and practices. It was these Puritans who first
began to pressure Church leadership to remove the Deuterocanon from all English
bibles, beginning what Sir Frederic Kenyon once called, the Puritan persecution
of the Apocrypha.
[704]

Modern authors sometime assert that the move to exclude the
Deuterocanon from Protestant bibles was readily accepted without much
discussion; this claim is far from true. The first attempts to do so met with
stiff opposition, most notably from the Anglican Archbishop John Whitgift. For
Whitgift, the thought of Protestant bibles being printed without the
Deuterocanon seemed unthinkable, almost revolutionary. Here is how the
Archbishop responded to a challenge by Puritan John Pentry to remove them:

The Scripture here called Apocrypha, abusively and
improperly, are Holy Writings, void of error, Part of the Bible, and so
accounted of in the purest time of the Church and by the best Writers; ever
read in the Church of Christ, and shall never be forbidden by me, or by my
consent.
[705]

Who ever separated the Apocrypha from the rest of the
Bible from the beginning of Christianity to that day? …And shall we suffer this
singularity in the Church of England, to the advantage of the adversary,
offense of the godly, and contrary to all the world besides?…And therefore that
such giddy heads as thought to deface them were to be bridled, and that it was
a foul shame, and not to be suffered, that such speeches should be uttered
against those books, as by some had been: enough to cause ignorant people to
discredit the whole Bible.
[706]

Pressure continued and the Puritans eventually won a
victory, with the exclusion of the Deuterocanon from the 1599 edition of the
Geneva
Bible
. The books were gone but, curiously enough, not their pages, which
were left blank and unnumbered between the Old and New Testaments.

Why did the Puritans feel the need to exclude these books
from the Scripture? After all, Luther’s new format prevented them from being
used to contradict Protestant theology. The Protestant scholar Goodspeed
believes that their objection to the Deuteros had less to do with scholarship
and more to do with the grim or sensational character (as they perceived it) of
certain passages within those books.
[707]
For whatever reason, the Deuterocanon did not suit their
tastes.

Eventually, the Puritans and other dissenters within the
Church of England slowly began to emerge as a political and religious force. So
much so, that King James I called the
Hampton Court Conferences
(1604)
to attempt, somewhat disingenuously, to appease these dissenting parties.
Little was won for the dissenters, except to secure the king’s permission to
produce a new translation of Scripture. This version would be completed in 1611
and known as the
King James Version
or the
Authorized Version.
[708]

The King James Version (1611)

Most people do not know that the original 1611 edition of
the
King James Version,
and a few subsequent editions, included the
Deuterocanon in an appendix marked Apocrypha. As with previous versions, this appendix
was sandwiched between the Old and New Testaments (though there was no
preface). In later editions, this appendix was removed, but the
cross-references that linked the text to the Deuterocanon remained for some
time. Scholar Bruce M. Metzger believes that these cross-references were
removed because the margins were too crowded.
[709]
However, the Protestant theologian Daubney
explains that there was much more going on than cleaning up crowded margins:

Plainly, the references to the Apocrypha told an
inconvenient tale of the use which the Church intended should be made of it;
so, either from dissenting influence without, or from prejudice within the
Church, these references disappeared from the margin.
[710]

All cross-references were removed, including the reference
to the Maccabean martyrs in Hebrews 11:35-37 who were inexplicably expunged or,
as Daubney puts it, “illicitly suppressed!”
[711]
  Given the exalted position this
translation came to occupy within the English speaking word, this action
certainly did contribute to the ignorance of subsequent Protestant generations,
with regard to the Deuterocanon and place it once held even in non-Catholic
bibles.

The Almighty and the Almighty Dollar

Puritan pressure was not the only reason today’s Protestant
bibles today usually omit the Deuterocanon; if it were, then the books would
surely have returned to their accustomed place once Puritan influence subsided.
No, strange as it may seem, the widespread demise of the Deuterocanon can be
attributed to another influence as well—economics. Put simply, smaller bibles
(such as those omitting the Deuterocanon), were cheaper to make. The prospect
of higher profit margins wooed some printers into producing novelty bibles
without the Deuterocanon.
[712]
At first, these smaller bibles were illicit. In 1615, George Abbott, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to employ the power of the law to
censure any publisher who did not produce the Bible in its entirety with the
Deuterocanon as prescribed by the
Thirty-nine Articles
.
[713]
Nevertheless,
economic incentives proved stronger than the threats of the Archbishop, and
editions without the Deuterocanon were sporadically produced.
[714]
In a sense, these
versions were unauthorized Authorized Versions.

Yet despite the growing number of Protestant bibles without
them, bibles which included the Deuterocanon remained the norm. The books were
too well known and too well integrated into European thought to be easily
discarded. As Goodspeed notes:

…[W]hatever may be our personal opinions of the
Apocrypha, it is a historical fact that they formed an integral part of the
King James Version, and any Bible claiming to represent that version should
either include the Apocrypha, or state that it is omitting them. Otherwise a
false impression is created.
[715]

Puritan influence continued long after the restoration under
Charles II, and from then on, the tide began to run decidedly against the
Deuterocanon.
[716]
Anti-apocryphal tracts and pamphlets began to circulate, and in 1740, some
actually proposed that a law should be passed to force printers to remove the
Apocrypha appendix from its place between the two Testaments.
[717]
This proposition
and others like it had little effect other than to weaken the resolve of those
Protestants who wished to include them. It was not until religious motivations
and economic forces united that Protestant bibles uniformly excluded the
Deuterocanon. Oddly enough, one of the chief factors in the demise of
Protestant bibles containing the Deuterocanon came through an agency that was
originally designed to propagate the Bible everywhere…

In the early seventeen hundreds, philanthropic groups
convened to produce inexpensive copies of Scripture so that the Bible would
have the widest possible distribution throughout the world, especially among
the poor. These societies enabled the ordinary man to own his own copy of
Scripture at home or even to carry in it his vest pocket. The first of these
societies was the von Canstein Bible Society, founded in Germany in 1710. It
produced and distributed Protestant bibles that contained the Apocrypha,
following Luther’s example in his original German Translation. The von Canstein
Society also produced stand-alone, pocket editions of individual books of the
Bible—a series that included an edition of the Book of Sirach.
[718]

In London in 1804, a similar society called the British and
Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) was formed.
[719]
Because of its interdenominational,
non-sectarian mission, the BFBS received broad-based support and enjoyed
remarkable growth. Within a decade, the parent organization founded dozens of
auxiliary Bible societies in England and in other European countries and
provided financial and technical aid to other societies working along the same
lines.

However, it was not long before the BFBS found itself
embroiled in controversy. In 1813, several foreign societies began preparing to
print bibles with the Apocrypha, as had been the custom with them since the
time of Luther.
[720]
The inclusion of the Deuterocanon rubbed against the sensibilities of some BFBS
members who advocated that the parent organization cut funding to these foreign
societies until they agree to print their bibles in the same format as the
British Society—that is, without the Deuteros. Cutting the funds would have
destroyed these fledging Societies. Finally, the board of the Society ruled
that the printing of bibles in different formats would be permitted, because
by-laws of the organization had never explicitly prohibited the inclusion of
the so-called Apocrypha. This pragmatic act of tolerance did not sit well with
many Reformed Protestants, especially the Presbyterian preacher Robert Haldane,
who began a speaking crusade against the British and Foreign Bible Society’s
decision.
[721]
As
Gundert recounts:

He [Robert Haldane] taught a doctrine of verbal
inspiration, applied exclusively to the canonical books of the Bible, and
dismissed the Apocrypha as a human word. Like others convinced that God has
given them a mission, he found it hard to understand that other Christians
could have a different view. So he came back in 1819 from an evangelistic
campaign in France to press the Committee to reverse its resolution of 1813.
[722]

The multiplicity of beliefs within Protestantism as to what
constituted
the
Bible gradually became a serious obstacle for the
British Society. The foreign auxiliaries feared that they would be forced to
print bibles in a format likely alienate the very people they were trying to
help. The Scottish Societies, which had sympathetic members sitting on British
and Foreign Society’s board, sided with Haldane and pressed for a tougher
resolution that was eventually passed in 1822. This new resolution would only
fully fund Protestant Societies that produced bibles lacking the Deuteros. This
compromise allowed foreign Societies to continue producing bibles with the
so-called Apocrypha, but would have to pay for the printing of that section
with their own funds. Most Societies were glad to do so.

Period of Tolerance

Compromises sometimes alienate both of the parties that they
try to appease. On one side, there were members who felt that the mission of
the Society was to promote the
widest possible distribution
of the
Bible. If wider distribution meant contributing to the printing bibles with the
Deuterocanon, then so be it.
[723]
It was also argued that no Protestant community had the right to dictate what
constitutes the Bible to other Protestant communities.
[724]
  On the other side, there were those
who believed that the compromise had been a mistake to begin with and that
all
funding ought to be cut so as to discourage the printing of bibles containing
the Apocrypha. Finally, the uneasy peace was breached when the boards of the
Edinburgh
Bible Society
and the
Glasgow Bible Society
resolved to withhold
their support to the British and Foreign Bible Society until all funding for such
printing was cut. The Committee Notes of the Edinburgh Society make their
reasons for doing so plain.

The Edinburgh Crusade

The Scottish Societies saw the primary mission of the
British and Foreign Bible Society as an evangelistic effort to spread the
Protestant Faith throughout the world, not merely as a philanthropic effort to
supply Scripture to those without it. The Society, in other words, sought to
achieve the widest possible dissemination of bibles but only in a format that
was conducive to their understanding of Protestantism. Their rationale may be
examined in the Committee Statements of the Edinburgh Bible Society.

The statements record no effort on the part of the Scottish
Society to provide the
bona fides
of the shorter canon or to explain by
what authority the Edinburgh Bible Society sought to dictate to other
Protestant communities what books are and are not canonical. The shorter canon
was merely assumed to be true and self-evident. In the estimation of the
Committee, the mere presence of the so-called Apocrypha between the covers of a
bible either unduly elevates those books or degrades the character of the
Scripture as a whole.
[725]
The Committee continues by listing various doctrines which the Deuterocanon was
held by them to confirm (e.g. intercession of saints, purgatory, that
almsgiving atones for sins, that good works justify, et al.). These things are
said to “strike at the root of some of the fundamental truths which God has
revealed for the instruction and salvation of man.”
[726]
Notice that the common thread uniting this
grab-bag of doctrines is that all of them had been warred upon by the Puritans
and Scotch Calvinists (mainstream Anglicanism allowed room for these
teachings).
[727]

The Edinburgh Committee continues by candidly admitting
something which many Protestant apologists of today hotly deny; that is, that
the Deuterocanonical writings actually present
themselve
s as Scripture:

Great indeed is the demerit of that book which
contradicts the revealed will of God; but its demerit is unspeakably aggravated
when…
it adds the blasphemous assumption of being itself a revelation
of God’s will.
Now such is the Apocrypha. It pretends to a divine original.
Some, it is true, have denied this, and published their denial. No one,
however, who has read the Apocrypha can fail to perceive that the denial is
founded in ignorance and inattention.
So plainly does it affect to have the
sanction of heaven, that it actually apes the phraseology of inspiration
. It
contains messages to mankind which are sometimes represented as proceeding
immediately from God himself, and sometimes as conveyed through the medium of
angels. And frequently its declarations are introduced with that most awful and
authoritative of all sanctions, ‘Thus saith the Lord.
[728]

If the Deuterocanon
sounds like
Scripture and teaches
Catholic doctrine (as the EBS has already stated), then it follows that those
who read the Bible in its traditional format may become Catholic!
[729]

Again, if they are Protestants among whom the
Apocrypha is to be dispersed, it does not on that account lose its qualities of
falsehood, absurdity, and blasphemy…we account it no sin to be instrumental in
deliberately circulating that, which
endangers the souls of men
and
insults the honour of God: And as sent to those who have been emancipated from
the darkness and superstition of Popery [i.e. Catholic converts to
Protestantism], it implies an endeavour on our part, not to perfect and
perpetuate their emancipation,
but to continue them in the errors that
still envelope their minds, or to send them back to the thraldom from which
they had happily escaped
.
[730]

The freedom to read the Scripture in the format of the
earliest Christian codices was deemed too dangerous for Protestants and potential
Catholic converts. It was feared that those who did read these bibles in the
traditional format would abandon the Protestant Faith or that unsettled
Catholics would decide against it. They believed the dissemination of the
Toulouse edition of Scripture confirmed this fear:

With respect to the Protestants also, the circulation
of the Apocrypha is inexpedient. Such of them in France…even though they were
better informed on the subject…[They may] peruse it [the Deuterocanon] with
some portion of those reverent impressions with which they peruse the inspired
books; and,
of course
,
not only to imbibe the erroneous
notions which it inculcates, but to lose that exclusive submission to the word
of God which is so dutiful and so becoming.
An example of this is to be
found in Mr. Chabrand’s correspondence relative to the Toulouse edition of the
Bible. He objected to the addition of the Apocrypha because
‘there was
danger of the Protestant confounding the Apocryphal with the canonical books;
and of their being thus led to adopt some of the errors of Popery,
(particularly that of purgatory)....This is the natural, and will be the
frequent, effect of circulating the Bible containing the Apocrypha…
[731]

The Committee Statement also adds:

…[T]hat practice judicious or wise, which,
instead
of confirming or improving the principles of those who have, in a Catholic
country, embraced or been educated in the Protestant faith, threatens to darken
what had been made light, to corrupt what had been reformed, and in any measure
to pave the way for backsliding or apostasy?
…But the evil of circulating the
Apocrypha as a part of the Scripture volume is not limited to those Protestants
who get the book to peruse; it is also injurious to the minds of Protestants,
who merely see or know that such a union and such a circulation are permitted.
[732]

According to the Edinburgh Society, the only bibles safe to
disseminate are those that have been sanitized from the presence of these
“popish” books.
[733]
Clearly, it was too dangerous to leave it up to the individual reader to decide
the merits or demerits of the Deuterocanon.
[734]
Not only does this statement arrogate an
enormous amount of authority to the Scottish Society, it also calls seriously
into question the
Westminster Confession’s
teaching on the perspicuity
of Scripture. That Confession states:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves,
nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known,
believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in
some place of Scripture or other,
that not only the learned, but the
unlearned,
in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient
understanding of them.
[735]

Would not the actions of the
Edinburgh Society
circumvent
the believer’s innate ability to recognize the “falsehoods of popish errors” in
these books? Did not the Confessions often speak about an inner witness of the
Holy Spirit that enables the believer to distinguish truth from error? The
Committee Statement argued that even the learned had difficulty separating the
false from the true in the so-called Apocrypha; therefore, the task would be
impossible for the unlearned.
[736]

At least the Committee of the Edinburgh Society may be
credited with frankness: they disliked the
doctrine
they found taught in
the Deuterocanon; they wished, therefore, to have it censored. Plain and
simple, without dragging in poor Jerome. This line of reasoning becomes
especially clear in the following passage: 

…by sending them the Apocrypha, we are, in fact,
abetting
the church of Rome
in an impious attempt to establish the inspiration of
that spurious document and seconding her efforts to compel those who
acknowledge her spiritual dominion, to listen to its lying wonders as to the
voice of the Almighty.
[737]

Anti-Catholics often charge Trent with being reactionary and
claim that the Council added books to the Bible in an effort to subvert
Protestantism. Is it not clear, however, that in this matter of the Edinburgh
Society, the very reverse is true? Here we find a Protestant Bible society
waging a veritable crusade rather than to allow an unedited Bible to be
examined by the common folk. In a clear, candid, and passionate manner, the
Edinburgh Committee’s notes advocate the removal of the Deuterocanon
as a
countermeasure against Rome
—and specifically against the Council of Trent:

…[I]t
is countenancing and supporting the
church of Rome in her system of imposition.
She, by her decree, has made
that canonical which is uncanonical, and compelled the people to receive as the
Word of God what is only the word of man. And the London Committee, in name of
the British and Foreign Bible Society, and of all who have contributed to its
funds,
instead of resisting that act of spiritual despotism and delusion by
which she props up her power, helps and encourages her to persist in it.
She
can, perhaps, check the circulation and the perusal of the Bible, but she can
tell the people at the same time,
and they will have too good reason to
believe her,
that the Protestants themselves believe in the divinity of
those passage which she brings from the Apocrypha to establish the doctrine of
purgatory and of the saving merit of good works. And she will plead from what
has been done, as far as Protestant authority can be of any weight, that her
decrees can make any sayings or doctrines which she chooses to fix upon,
tantamount to a revelation from heaven. And thirdly, when Protestants give the
Apocrypha intermixed with the Scriptures, they excite the contempt of the papists,
instead of securing either their respect or their gratitude.
The Papists
must conclude either that the Protestants are altogether indifferent to the
Canon of Scripture, which would be discreditable both to their piety and their
judgment, or that, believing the Apocrypha to be a mere human composition, they
yet are guilty of so much duplicity as to give under the form and appearance of
having a divine original.
[738]