By Seth Perry

Bibles are both static objects and active places of cultural activity. They are things – objects made of paper and ink, or digital media – but they are also more than things: they are places where editors, commentators, publishers, clergy, and readers work out authoritative relationships and personal identities. Bibles are less “sources” of authority, as is often said, than they are sites of authority. All of this activity means that the text itself is constantly being made and remade – it is never really static.

This activity was particularly important in America in the decades after the Revolution, as the culture around the Christian Bible underwent rapid, fundamental changes in concert with developments in technology, politics, and religious life. In my new book, Bible Culture and Authority in the Early United States, I look at the process of American bible making between the American Revolution and the 1840s. “Making a bible” in early America involved both paper and ink and a universe of cultural practices and assumptions by which early Americans related to each other and to the Bible’s history, origins, and content.

In a literal sense, printers made a lot of bibles in the early United States. These were mostly in English, though the first American-made bible was in a Native American language, and German, Spanish, French, and Hebrew bibles, among others, had been printed in the New World by the early nineteenth century.

Eliot Indian Bible, 1663. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e1/Up-Biblum_Bible_1663.jpg)

Between 1777 and 1840, printers turned out at least eleven hundred editions of English testaments and full bibles. They distinguished their bibles with diverging extra-canonical content: illustrations, charts, historical essays, cross references, concordances, and commentaries were added to encourage readers and attract buyers. These “paratexts” made it possible for people who had not had advanced theological training to cite the Bible as if they had, to make arguments and to perform other sorts of religious authority. They also reminded people that the Bible was important by making it plain that citation of the Bible was an expected way of using it.

Many paratexts reinforced the Bible’s importance by explaining a version of the Bible’s transmission history, connecting the book to its ancient origins for lay readers. The most common preface in early American bibles was written in 1789 by John Witherspoon, president of Princeton University and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

John Witherspoon. (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Peale%2C_Charles_Willson%2C_John_Witherspoon_%281723-1794%29%2C_President_%281768-94%29.jpg)

“The providence of God,” he wrote, is “particularly manifest in [the scriptures’] preservation and purity.” God trusted the Hebrew text to “the Jews,” Witherspoon wrote, and they fulfilled their responsibility with “scrupulous exactness.”

Witherspoon described the texts of the New Testament, meanwhile, as a solitary whole. Witherspoon’s “To the Reader” was commonly accompanied by a chart, also of his composition, giving the “Account of the Dates or Time of Writing the Books of the New Testament.” In accordance with most scholarship of Witherspoon’s time, it presented all of the texts as having been composed in the first century CE, such that “the Bible” (Witherspoon did not mention the process of canonization) existed in pristine manuscript form in time to be translated into Syrian “as early as the year 100.”

Witherspoon’s story goes on to make the translation of the King James Version (Protestants’ favorite) the culminating episode in the Bible’s providential transmission history. Imagining a history of the text that is simultaneously historically grounded and divinely inspired had important analogues to other forms of “bible making” in early America. For example, in the late eighteenth century both British and American Protestants took an increasing interest “Bible biography,” collections that extracted individual personalities from the Bible and made elaborate stories out of their lives and actions, drawing on scriptural content, other traditions, and contemporary authors’ imaginations. Paralleling the development of the novel, these works developed biblical figures as characters: active historical figures, not static icons for worship.

At least by a simple count of editions, the most popular scriptural biography of the early national period was John Macgowan’s The Life of Joseph.

John Macgowan’s The Life of Joseph. (https://ia800608.us.archive.org/zipview.php?zip=/5/items/olcovers560/olcovers560-L.zip&file=5608151-L.jpg)

First published in London in the 1770s, it saw at least twenty American editions between 1792 and 1818. The Life of Joseph reads like a novel and opens with a scene of biblical storytelling: “It was at the end of autumn, when the bounties of providence were safely gathered in,” Macgowan wrote, “that venerable Jacob entertained his convened family with the history of his own life, and the lives of his father Isaac, and Abraham his grandfather.” Macgowan humanizes and contextualizes the patriarchs, inviting readers to think of Abraham as Jacob’s “grandfather,” someone about whom a young Joseph would sit and listen to stories.

Interest in biblical characters multiplied opportunities for biblical self-characterization, what I call “performed biblicism.” This sort of self-description is particularly important in the activities of those staking “outsider” claims to religious authority in early America, such as women and African Americans.

Memoirs of Fanny Newell. (https://archive.org/details/memoirsoffannyne00newe/page/n5)

Methodist itinerant Fanny Newell wrote of various circumstances in which she acted or felt “like young Samuel of old, [not knowing] that it was the Lord”; “like Nehemiah of old, my countenance was sad for about one week”; she prays “like poor blind Bartimeus of old, ‘Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me’ ”; “[l]ike Abraham” she is “surrounded with a body of darkness”; she is made new, “like Naaman of old, who dipped himself seven times in Jordan”; her congregation sings “[l]ike the inhabitants of Zion” while walking; “low on my knees, like Mary, at the footstool of mercy, I besought the Lord’s direction”; “I, like Isaiah, cry aloud, and spare not my voice or lungs.”

Direct self-comparison to biblical figures is a double claim to authority: it brings up a biblical figure to lend authority to the author and acts as a demonstration of scriptural facility – the ability to cite the right text at the right time. At the same time, this kind of citation is a sort of bible making, being part of the constant evolution in what Americans imagined “the Bible” to be as they applied its words, characters, and images to new lived circumstances. Remaking the bible in the context of contingent lived experience changed the text itself – this is why, I argue, it is misleading to talk about “the Bible” as if it were a static object.

Radical forms of “bible making” in the early United States further illustrate this active process. Visionary performance was a widespread form of performed biblicism during this period – many people claimed that they had direct information from God, and turned it into writing. This writing depended on a shared understanding of the Bible among speakers and audiences for its comprehensibility. Biblically-resonant visionary accounts functioned by citing the Bible, both implicitly and explicitly. The new texts and new communities created by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and those around him are the preeminent example of the type of religious authority made possible by early national bible culture.

Book of Mormon. (https://history.lds.org/exhibit/historic-sites/new-york/palmyra/grandin-building?lang=eng#mv19)

Smith’s texts invited their readers and auditors to regard them as scriptures and therefore to regard Smith, their immediate source, as a prophet. These texts reaffirmed the importance of the Bible while associating it with new ancient texts.

Some scholars have seen the increasing ubiquity of the Bible in nineteenth century America as a sort of dilution of its actual importance, arguing that the wide variety of materials packed into bibles distracted from the text, as did things like “scripture biography” and people constantly comparing themselves to biblical characters. My book argues, though, that all of this activity and the way that it changes the text itself just marks an evolution in the nature of the Bible’s persistent authoritative presence. The text’s constant evolution, as a necessary product of its very use and usefulness, is the story of the Bible in America, not an ironic or unfortunate aspect of the story.

Seth Perry is Assistant Professor of Religion at Princeton University.