H-Net Review Publication: 'How Do I Know? The Bible Tells Me So'

Is it wrong that I love such snobbish rhetoric? I hope not.

>
> Lori Anne Ferrell. The Bible and the People. New Haven Yale
> University Press, 2009. 288 pp. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN
> 978-0-300-11424-9.
>
> Reviewed by Arthur Williamson (California State University-Sacramento)
> Published on H-Albion (February, 2009)
> Commissioned by Brian S. Weiser
>
> How Do I Know? The Bible Tells Me So
>
> Lori Anne Ferrell presents a briskly written discussion of the
> Bible's shifting role and significance within major Anglophone
> cultures. Her trajectory is a long one. Beginning with the early
> Norman Gundulf Bible, she proceeds to the thirteenth-century portable
> Paris Bibles of the traveling mendicant orders, to the Wycliffe
> scriptures and the Lollards. Naturally enough, the Reformation
> figures prominently and, most centrally, the King James Version, her
> study continuing through the world of the Enlightenment, the
> Victorians, and into the present moment. The book closes with a
> discussion of the eighth-century Lindisfarne Gospels and modern
> reproductions of the manuscript, thus joining the medieval world with
> the present and reflecting with Walter Benjamin on "authenticity,"
> reproduction, and text--the central theme of the volume.
>
> The book, therefore, at once offers a history of a book as well as a
> history of what a "book" meant, an undertaking inherently involving
> scribal and print culture studies. Here surely lies a daunting
> challenge for both author and reader. Or does it? Ferrell wears her
> learning lightly. _The Bible and the People_ visibly seeks to be
> accessible, for Ferrell writes in a chatty, self-regarding style that
> many will doubtless find engaging. The formidable complexities lie
> beneath the surface awaiting for those who wish to pursue them.
>
> The thesis is straightforward: throughout its history in the West,
> the Bible has rarely appeared ever in its original languages, has
> been continuously "translated" in every sense of the word, and still
> the text has remained remarkably, even amazingly, stable over the
> centuries. Thus, the Bible has, at times, found itself transformed
> from a working book to a venerated item. It has been universalized
> through vernacular translations. It has been sliced, diced, and
> reassembled by figures as different as the pious Nicholas Ferrar and
> the Deist Thomas Jefferson. It has been gender selected and pared
> down, most notably by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It has been inflated
> and overwhelmed with Victorian illustrations. It has been made
> available in parcels through subscription. It has appeared in
> disposable magazine form. This "impossible book"--unique in the
> Western experience--can never be gotten right, and yet has always
> contrived to be right. It has spoken in a near infinity of voices
> and yet maintained a common coherence. That, for Ferrell, is its
> mystery, its wonder.
>
> Along the way, Ferrell makes a number of interesting observations.
> As she rightly points out, the renowned King James Authorized Version
> (1611) needs to be seen as a reactionary document that sought to undo
> the radicalism of the Geneva Bible (1560). The latter's commentary,
> with its historical vision of human experience--so well suited to
> that revolutionary decade--was stripped away. The word "church"
> replaced the far less hierarchical and less clerical "congregation."
> Further, "congregation" might also carry classical political
> meanings. Scotland's revolutionary leaders in 1559-60 called
> themselves the "Lords of the Congregation," unimaginable as the Lords
> of the "Church." The King James Bible arose during a period of
> deepening conservatism in Britain and throughout Europe. Small
> wonder the Geneva Bible persisted in radical Scotland well after
> 1611. And yet the language of the King James Bible was harnessed to
> revolutionary causes right into the 1960s and beyond. Its cadences
> eventually reached so deeply into the Anglophone mind that more
> accurate renderings of the original could only seem "inauthentic,"
> not "really" the Bible. The well-known line from Isaiah 1:18
> (reputedly Lyndon Johnson's favorite) ran, "Come now, let us reason
> together." The New English Bible (1961) gave the passage, apparently
> closer to the sense of the Hebrew, as "Come now, let us argue it
> out." The accurate and the authentic palpably diverge.
>
> Ferrell's approach to the Bible and its multiple Anglophone
> incarnations is decidedly conservative, one characterized by awe,
> splendor, wonder, and reverence rather than critical distance.
> Higher criticism of the late nineteenth century barely surfaces,
> while the anticlericalism and anti-scripturalism of Anatole France,
> Robert Ingersoll, or even the Quakers run completely counter to the
> spirit of the book. Theirs is a vanished world, however much of the
> people, and out of tune with late twentieth-century sensibility.
> Ferrell notes the Tridentine prohibition of any vernacular version of
> scripture or any Latin version other than the Jerome's Vulgate. But
> she declines to consider the fraught confessional conflict about
> understanding the Bible, where skepticism emerged as the great weapon
> of the Counter-Reformation.[1] It is hard to imagine a more central
> dispute about spirituality and its connection to the sacred text.
>
> Perhaps surprising, neo-Catholic revisionism also informs _The Bible
> and the People_ in important ways. We encounter sixteenth-century
> "Reformations" rather than a single coherent Reformation. In
> contrast, the medieval world emerges as an integrated, almost organic
> structure from which heretical departure occurred only inadvertently.
> The Reformation itself was backward looking. Protestants were
> simply wrong to claim that the Middle Ages did not know the Bible;
> medieval people learned Bible stories (and messages) through plays,
> images, and clerical reading aloud.
>
> Ferrell does comment at various points that medieval literacy was
> "discouragingly low" (e.g., p. 38). But, we might well ask,
> discouraging to whom? It did not discourage the Middle Ages because
> salvation did not require scripture but a sacramental system--derived
> from scripture, to be sure, but much more as well. That, of course,
> was the reformers' point. The Reformation proposed instead a
> historical vision of salvation, founded on scriptural prophecy, that
> was altogether unprecedented and that confronted the atemporal
> symbols of the medieval period. The sacred drama, the unfolding of
> the apocalypse--the story of the rise of Antichrist--underwrote the
> Reformation and Protestant piety, working a far-reaching
> temporalization of European culture.[2] Ferrell mentions Antichrist
> and the apocalypse but neither concept informs her argument (pp. 82,
> 153). Her preoccupation with transcendent mystery, no less than her
> ambivalence about the Reformation, does not bespeak confessional
> choices, but instead suggests deep reservations about modernity. The
> book is very much a part of our increasingly sacralized post-1960s
> age.
>
> None of this can take away from the book's achievement. Whatever its
> assumptions or implications, _The Bible and the People_ succeeds in
> drawing together a vast range of material within a comfortable
> compass; in combining extraordinary learning with an almost folksy
> accessibility; and in introducing highly abstruse concepts with
> grace, wit, and often considerable charm. Such a book inherently
> required high levels of selectivity, and the selections have largely
> proven to be wise. To conclude in the style favored by the author:
> way to go Lori Anne!
>
> Notes
>
> [1]. Richard Popkin has provided the foundational discussion of the
> early modern debate about the authority and interpretation of
> scripture, in T_he History of Skepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle_
> (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
>
> [2]. There now exists an enormous literature on this subject. For a
> recent survey, see A. H. Williamson, _Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and
> the Making of the Modern World_ (Westport: Greenwood, 2008).
>
> Citation: Arthur Williamson. Review of Ferrell, Lori Anne, _The Bible
> and the People_. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. February, 2009.
> URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23532
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.