The Book of True Civilization: The Origins of the Bible Society Movement in the Age of Enlightenment

Introduction

The time around 1800 is a truly remarkable period in the history of the translation, production, and distribution of the Bible. These years see the birth of a global network of Bible Societies that produces millions of printed Bibles in very many languages, all within the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, including numerous first translations in the languages of Asia, the Americas, and Africa.

This article addresses the question of the eighteenth-century origins of the Bible Society movement. Which developments in the eighteenth century explain the birth and rapid growth of the Bible Society movement around the turn of the century? What are the historical contexts in which we can understand the characteristics of the Bible Societies, their organizational form, their relationships with church and state, the kinds of Bibles they produced, and their relationship with the missionary societies and with ideologies and practices of religious reform?

The paper has the following structure: First, some key characteristics of the Bible Society movement around 1800 are described. The second part tries to understand and explain these features in the context of developments in the eighteenth century.

There are a number of limitations to this study. First, the perspective is that of the Bible Society movement as a whole and this means that very significant local and national differences among Bible Societies are only lightly touched on. Second, there is a certain bias towards the British and Foreign Bible Society because that society is in many ways the mother of most Bible Societies, and because we have extensive documentation of its history. And there is also a bias toward the Netherlands Bible Society because the translation history of Bibles in Malay and other languages of Asia dates back to 1612 when the Dutchman Ruyl translated Matthew and Mark into Malay. This long history of Dutch involvement in Asian Bibles makes it possible to compare early seventeenth-century Malay Bible translation, in a pre-Enlightenment context, with Bible Society translation in the Dutch East Indies in the early nineteenth century when Enlightenment patterns of thinking strongly influenced the policies of the Netherlands Bible Society in the Dutch East Indies.

Some key characteristics of the Bible Society movement

The British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in 1804 and formed a model for many others, including the Basel Bible Society (1804), the Riga Bible Society (1812), the Finnish Bible Society (1812), the Hungarian Bible Institution (1812), the Russian Bible Society (1812), the Swedish Bible Society (1814), the Hannover Bible Society (1814), the Danish Bible Society (1814), the Netherlands Bible Society (1814), the American Bible Society (1816), and the Norwegian Bible Society (1817).

The British and Foreign Bible Society printed and distributed in the first three years of its existence an incredible 1,816,000 Bibles, Testaments, and Bible books in sixty-six different languages, and by 1834 it had printed 8,549,000 volumes in 157 different languages (Bennet 2004, 5).

Around the same time we see a proliferation of missionary and tract societies. To mention just a few: Baptist Missionary Society, 1792, London Missionary Society, 1795, Church Missionary Society, 1798, and London Religious Tract Society, 1799. By 1817 there are at least 117 missionary societies in Great Britain and its colonies (Bennet 2004, 4).

Although it is true that we see a dramatic increase of Bible agencies around 1800, we do find Bible Societies earlier in the eighteenth century. For example, the Von Canstein Bible Society at Halle, founded in 1712, distributed Bibles on an impressive scale. Bibles were printed very efficiently with a new technique of engraving a complete page on a metal plate rather than working with separate lead letters. Between 1712 and 1812 this Bible Society printed over three million Bibles, which sold for the low price of 50 cents a copy (van Capelleveen 1988, 14).

The Bible Society movement had “societies” of citizens as its basic organizational form. They were the heart of the new social space of civil society that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe and America. Societies were associations of free choice, founded and governed by the citizens themselves. Thousands of societies, religious, secular, scientific, agricultural, educational, and political, were founded in the course of the eighteenth century. Only two things were needed to become a member of any society: to agree with the purpose of the society and to pay the membership fee.

Article 1 of the Laws and Regulations formulated the purpose of the British and Foreign Bible Society as follows:

1. The Designation of this Society shall be The British and Foreign Bible Society, of which the sole object shall be, to encourage the wider circulation of the Holy Scriptures, without note or comment. The only Copies in the Languages of the United Kingdom to be circulated by the Society, shall be the authorized version.

Article 3 described the membership fee: “Each Subscriber of one Guinea annually shall be a Member.”

Socially, the members of Bible Societies tended to belong to the urban bourgeoisie in contrast to the new evangelical groups in Britain and America that had considerable lower-class support, both urban and rural (van Rooden 1996, 10).

The Bible Societies were not tied to any denomination or confession. Anyone could become a member. The Bible Societies saw the Bible as the “Book of True Civilization,” as a treasure owned by all Christians, whatever their creed or church, and as a good cause around which Christians of all sorts should and could be united. In practice, the vast majority of members were Protestants. Local and national differences are crucial here, and the background of the members of the Bible Societies influenced the extent to which the societies were non-confessional in practice. For example, both the British and Foreign Bible Society and the Netherlands Bible Society financially supported the German translation of the Catholic professor Leander van Es that contained the deuterocanonical books. But the British and Foreign Bible Society came under pressure from Scottish Presbyterian and Puritan members and stopped support because the Catholic translation included deuterocanonicals. The Netherlands Bible Society, however, continued its support of this Catholic translation and faced no serious problems, because the Netherlands had a tradition of Lutherans who insisted on Bibles with deuterocanonicals (van Capelleveen 1996, 193).

Another interesting case described by van Capelleveen (1996, 195) with regards to the non-confessional and non-denominational nature of the Bible Society movement was the Polish Bible Society. The Polish Bible Society united Protestants and Russian Orthodox, but Pope Pius VII (1800–1823) did not allow Catholics to join, although many Catholics, including clergy, wanted to join the Bible Society. The Pope called Bible Societies “a pestilence against which we must take all measures within reach of papal authority” in his letter of June 29, 1816.

The non-confessional nature of the Bible Society movement clearly faced threats, both within the membership and outside, from confessional authorities that felt threatened by the emerging ideological construction of a non-confessional Christian domain that united Christians of all confessions, a domain in which the idea of a non-confessional Bible and non-confessional Bible Societies played a central role (see the next section for enlightened constructions of a non-confessional Christian domain).

Since paratextual elements (introductions, notes, comments) in confessional Bible translations of earlier centuries, for example the extensive and often rather Calvinistic nota marginalia of the Dutch Authorized Version of 1637, were perceived as a threat to the non-confessional and non-denominational nature of the Bible Societies, Article 1 of the statutes of the Bible Societies always included a phrase that qualified the Bibles to be distributed as Bibles “without note or comment” (see for example Article 1 of the British and Foreign Bible Society quoted above). The Netherlands Bible Society had an Article 1 that talked about Bibles “zonder aantekening of uitlegging” (without notes or explanation). They had a point, because the confessional nature of these earlier Bible translations was expressed most prominently in their paratexts, which explains why, in the sixteenth century, prohibition efforts and lists of prohibited Bibles focused on paratexts rather than texts (den Hollander 2003, 174).

Indeed, Bible Society Bibles of the nineteenth century are devoid of the rich paratextual features so typical for earlier confessional Bible translations. The “without note or comment” policy was strictly enforced and the very first publication by the British and Foreign Bible Society, the Gospel of St. John in Mohawk of 1805, immediately tested the resolve of the Society in this respect. The translator was the Cherokee Indian Teyoninhokarawen who was raised as an adopted Mohawk child. He attached an introduction to his Gospel. The Bible Society immediately issued an order for the introduction to be removed from the Mohawk Gospel (Owen 1816, 131–33).

When the Bible Societies spoke or wrote about the Bible, they did so in a non-confessional manner that pictured the Bible as foundational for society and culture and as a moral, transformative, and civilizing force in the hearts and minds of individual citizens (Sheenan 2005).

The Bible Societies from the very beginning saw Bible translation and distribution as a local, national, and global task, all at the same time. The local need for Bibles in Wales, which had seen revivalist movements, was the initial stimulus to form a Bible Society there, but one of the people who wanted to start that Bible Society, the Reverend Joseph Hughes, member of a local Tract Society, wrote that “a society might be formed for the purpose [of distributing Bibles]—and if for Wales, why not for the Kingdom; why not for the whole world?” (Owen 1816). The very name of the British and Foreign Bible Society reflected the connections between the local and global levels, as did Article 2 of the Laws and Regulations:

2. This Society shall add its endeavors to those employed by other Societies, for circulating the Scripture through the British dominions; and shall also, according to its ability, extend its influence to other countries, whether Christian, Mahomedan, or Pagan.

The British and Foreign Bible Society soon produced and distributed Bibles on an industrial scale; their reports are full of statistics of production and distribution and they employed itinerant salesmen, both at home and abroad, for direct sales. The other major channel of distribution was the hundreds of tract and missionary societies, at home and abroad, who placed large orders. At the same time, membership fees, donations, and other efficient fundraising methods channeled vast amounts of money into the Bible Societies, money needed to invest in an industrial-scale Bible production and distribution that also allowed prices to be relatively low.

Enlightened origins of the Bible Society movement

Enlightenment developments gave religion a new place in society, especially in Protestant countries, from an outward, state-controlled or state-backed, confessional place in the public domain to religion as an inner moral and civilizing conviction located in the individual, in the private domain, as a choice of the heart of free and equal citizens, choices that had to be respected, including different confessional choices that citizens made (van Rooden 1996). Van Eijnatten (2003), using hundreds of eighteenth-century Dutch documents, provides a detailed description of the process of rethinking the place of religion in the Low Countries. The old place was the state-backed public position of the Calvinistic confession in the seventeenth century that created a kind of top-down and outward religious concord and unity, forcing religious minorities to remain invisible in the public domain.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century a new consensus emerged, at least in the Low Countries:

By far the greater number of people who favored full religious emancipation were probably also quite content to remain within traditional denominations. What had changed was the religious public. Its focus had shifted from the outward confessionalism supported by the state to the inward moral persuasion of the individual citizen. (van Eijnatten 2003, 304)

The different religious communities were increasingly conceptualized as associations of free citizens based on the individual decision to join, in a new civil middle ground or civil space independent from, but not necessarily opposed to, the state or to the (former) state churches. Of course, not everyone agreed with these new views on the relations between state, church, and individual, and to this day there are ultra-orthodox Protestant congregations in the Netherlands that reject the new place of religion in the private domain.

The vast majority of the eighteenth-century Dutch writings studied by van Eijnatten did not see an opposition between being “verlicht” (enlightened) and being Christian. Modern associations of Enlightenment with atheism and with oppositions of reason and religion are constructions of later centuries that should not be projected back to the eighteenth century. The terms “verlichting” (enlightenment) and “beschaving” (civilization) are often used together by Dutch theologians, publicists, and preachers, and in close connection with Christianity and the Bible, as in a synodal address of 1784 where the Protestant minister Winter refers to Christianity as the way “to the true enlightenment and civilization of a Nation” (van Eijnatten 2003, 479).

The changing place of religion also created fear and uncertainty. When religious unity and concord are no longer coming from state authority backing a (majority) confession, what will prevent religious wars and chaos? Is it possible for people of different confessions to live together in harmony and unity, agreeing to disagree? Many people in the eighteenth century had four remedies in mind to create unity among Christians and to guarantee a peaceful civil Christian society.

The first line of defense against social chaos and religious conflict was the ideological construction of a non-confessional religious domain supposedly shared by all Christians, whatever their confession, uniting them, with an emphasis on doctrinal simplicity, supposedly simple truths shared by all Christians (van Eijnatten 2003, 369–71). Central to this non-confessional common ground was the Bible, constructed as a non-confessional entity, not owned by any church or confession, one Bible for all. This theme of non-confessional unity and the one non-confessional Bible shared by all Christians resonates in this report by Owen of the meeting to celebrate the first birthday of the British and Foreign Bible Society on May 1, 1805:

Persons of various communions, circumstances and stations; the Prelate and the Presbyterian, the Lutheran and the Calvinist, the Peer and the Quaker, here mingled in new and undissembling concord; and “agreeing in the truth of God’s holy word,” mutually professed their determination to “to live in unity and godly love.” Pride and contention, prejudice and bigotry fled before the genius of the Bible. (Owen 1816, 165)

Within this non-confessional Bible a core of “simple,” fundamental Christian (non-confessional) truths was constructed, usually located in the moral teachings of Jesus, and this formed the second line of defense against fragmentation and chaos, a critical distinction between fundamentals and historically grown non-fundamentals (van Eijnatten 2003, 309–69).

The third line of defense was the construction of a non-confessional core of “enlightened” Christian ethics: virtues of reasonableness, politeness, civilization, and tolerance as central Christian values become very prominent in the discourse of the eighteenth-century theologians and pastors (van Eijnatten 2003, 381–464).

The fourth line of defense against chaos and disintegration was education of the masses, of the poor and destitute, both at home and abroad where heathens badly needed Christian Enlightenment that would turn them not only into virtuous Christians but also into good subjects of colonial rulers, subjects who embraced the blessings of progress brought about by these colonial rulers.

The German Enlightenment created a special term for this drive to enlighten the unruly and potentially intolerant and uncivil masses: Volksaufklärung (enlightenment of the people). Education in this context means civilizing and pacifying the masses by spreading the core Christian virtues of reasonableness, politeness, and tolerance, and disseminating knowledge and skills (from literacy skills to modern agricultural methods). This education would enable the masses to participate as virtuous citizens in Christian civil society, and was seen as crucial to the fragile new non-confessional religious domain: only polite, civilized, tolerant people could deal with the freedoms based on moral individual convictions only and not on outward force and pressure (van Eijnatten 2003, 381–476).

A good example of enlightened discourse of eighteenth-century Christians in the Netherlands, among the many given by van Eijnatten, would be the speech given by Gerrit van Bosvelt in 1792, his “Redevoering over den aard en de natuur der verlichting” (Essay on the character and nature of enlightenment). The audience of his speech was the “Maatschappij tot Nut van het Algemeen” (The Society for the Good of the Public). Van Bosvelt argued that “only Enlightenment can produce true conviction, and virtue results exclusively from conviction” (van Eijnatten 2003, 483). The thrust of the speech was that virtuous citizens, inwardly convinced of fundamental Christian truths, formed the only true basis for relations between state, church, and individual, the basis for ordered social and political life. The Society for the Good of the Public that van Bosvelt was addressing, and other Societies such as the Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap (Dutch Missionary Society, founded in 1779), actively encouraged and organized literacy programs for the poor, to give them access to the Bible and to books that could help them to improve their lives.

Van Eijnatten also studied the link between missionary societies and Enlightenment as reflected in the writings of the Nederlandsch Zendeling-Genootschap and concluded,

No less than evangelicalism as such, late eighteenth-century missions exemplified the polite religious public. The Bible, said one member of the Missionary Society, is “the Book of true politeness [beschaafdheid].” It contains a “pure and excellent moral philosophy” and “the true grounds and rules of politeness.” Only the Bible can turn us into “truly polite people”; for it is the exclusive font of enlightenment and civilization.” (van Eijnatten 2003, 457)

Van Eijnatten concludes that “conversion and civilization had essentially the same purpose, the educational and spiritual moulding . . . of citizens” (2003, 457).

Pietist, Methodist, and other evangelical groups reaching out to the lower classes, were a very important factor in the broadening of the readership of the Bible in the eighteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States. Such religious movements reflect and express the new place assigned to religion in the age of Enlightenment, in the private domain of the hearts and minds of individuals. In the words of van Eijnatten and Yates,

The important point here is that both Enlightenment and Pietism attached more significance to “the individual” than mainstream Christianity had done under the ancien régime. Since the Reformation (if not earlier), the established churches of Northern Europe had privileged communal confessions over individual insights, public organizations over private associations, and clergymen over laypeople. The Enlightenment now empowered individuals by stressing reason, freedom and equality; Pietism did the same by calling attention to heartfelt beliefs and literal readings of orthodox Bible translations. . . . The two currents differed in many respects but they shared an emphasis on the freedom of individual men to judge for themselves. . . . Pietistic churches were really very modern: they were communities of choice rather than tradition. (van Eijnatten and Yates 2010, 14)

The combined and sustained literacy efforts, aimed at poor and illiterate adults, of Enlightenment societies (such as The Society for the Good of the Public in the Netherlands), of missionary societies, and of Pietist, Methodist, and other evangelical groups led to a veritable literacy wave towards the end of the eighteenth century that significantly contributed to the broadening market for printed Bibles, an important increase of a demand to which Bible Societies would respond (van Capelleveen 1996, 191).

The Bible Society movement is in many ways an almost perfect expression of the developments in the age of Enlightenment. It was at the center of efforts to create a non-confessional Christian domain, uniting Christians of all confessions around a non-confessionally constructed Bible, “without notes or comment.” The Bible Society movement was located in the new civil space of associations of choice that included thousands of societies with all sorts of goals, including religious goals, and it was ruled by enlightened urban elites bent on civilizing and pacifying the unruly masses at home and abroad, in the colonies.

Enlightenment Bibles and the Bible Society movement

Everywhere in eighteenth-century Europe we see the emergence of enlightened Bible translations, “enlightened” in both texts and paratexts. The skopos of these translations was the use by individuals in the home, to be educated and edified, not for use in church, and they aimed at complementing rather than replacing the authorized versions (Heringa 1990). ¹ Volksaufklärung (enlightenment of the people) was indeed the central goal, often reflected in the (sub)titles of these translations, for example Michaelis with his Deutsche Übersetzung des Alten Testaments, mit Anmerkungen für Ungelehrte (German translation of the Old Testament with notes for the unlearned). Michaelis was a leading historical-critical scholar who contextualized Mosaic Law in his Mosaisches Recht (1770–1775), placing it in the historical context of ancient Egypt (van Eijnatten 2003, 341). Enlightened Bible translations incorporated new insights from textual criticism, exegesis, and studies of ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Egypt into their translations (Heringa 1990, 156).

The enlightened translators increasingly saw the Bible as ancient literature and had a tendency to translate the Bible in the same way that other ancient literature, for example Homer, was translated. Now Homer and other ancient texts were translated rather freely in the eighteenth century, and were often adapted to suit the receptor audience, especially in Britain and France where the dominant translation style for the classics was very fluent and domesticating (Venuti 1995). The result was that enlightened Bibles also tended to be relatively free translations, certainly in comparison to the authorized versions used in most churches, with a distinct inclination to insert enlightened ideologies and ideas into the translation, both in the text of the translation and in the often very extensive paratexts.

To illustrate enlightened Bible translations of the eighteenth century, I will discuss a more radical English example and a more moderate Dutch example. Edward Harwood based his translation of the New Testament (Harwood 1768) not on the Textus Receptus but on his own critical reconstruction of the Greek text (published in 1776). ² This is his “enlightened” translation of Matthew 6.9-10:

thou great governour and parent of universal nature [God]—who manifestest thy glory to the blessed inhabitants of heaven—may all thy rational creatures in all the parts of thy boundless dominion be happy in the knowledge of thy existence and providence, and celebrate thy perfections in a manner most worthy of thy nature and perfective of their own! ¹⁰ May the glory of thy moral government be advanced and the great laws of it be more generally obeyed—May the inhabitants of this world pay as cheerful a submission and as constant an obedience to thy will, as the happy spirits do in the regions of immortality.

The King James has this rather more compact translation of the same verses:

⁹ Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. ¹⁰ Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

In the introduction to his New Testament, Harwood describes the goals of his translation work as follows:

I can truly say, and I appeal to that Being for my sincerity, before whom I must very shortly appear, that my first and primary design in this work was to exhibit the Christian Religion in its native purity and original simplicity, unadulterated with human systems, creeds, doctrines, and modes of faith. In this work I have considered myself as belonging to no one party, sect, and denomination of Christians, but have given a fair and honest version of the divine Volume, just as if I had sat down to translate Plato, Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch, or any other Greek writer, with a mind exempt, as much as frail humanity can be exempt, from prejudices and prepossession, and solely intent upon investigating and discovering truth.

Harwood’s preface illustrates the Enlightenment construction of a non-confessional domain, with a non-confessional Bible in the center. He aims to give people a translation that exhibits the Christian Religion in its pure, non-confessional, and non-denominational form (“unadulterated with human creeds or modes of faith”). The preface also shows the ideological construction of a body of non-confessional simple fundamentals of Christian faith (“original simplicity”). His second important goal is to translate the Bible as he would translate any other ancient Greek writer. And it is this second aim that explains his very free and domesticating translation, full of adaptation towards eighteenth-century Enlightenment values, because such a style of translation was routinely applied to Homer and other classics in France and Britain. It was to this fluency tradition that German Romantics such as Schleiermacher would react strongly in the beginning of the nineteenth century (Venuti 1995, 83–98).

Of course, not all enlightened Bible translations went as far as Harwood did. A good example of a more moderate enlightened Bible translation was the Dutch translation done by Ysbrand van Hamelsveld (1743–1812). He was a prominent pastor and theologian in the Dutch Reformed Church of the late eighteenth century and became a theology professor in Utrecht in 1784, but was fired in 1787 because of siding with the political faction of the Patriots (van Eijnatten 2003, 298). As a member of the National Convention in 1796 he wrote separation of state and church into the new constitution (2003, 299). Van Eijnatten compares van Hamelsveld with moderates such as William Robertson and Hugh Blair in Scotland because of the shared emphasis on politeness, gentility, and virtue as core Christian values. Van Hamelsveld’s translation had a primary educational aim, to be used in the home, and it was not meant to replace the Dutch authorized version, the Statenvertaling of 1637 (Heringa 1990, 157–62).

Van Hamelsveld’s translation was a rather free translation compared to the literalism of the Statenvertaling, but moderately free, certainly compared to Harwood’s enlightened experiment. Van Hamelsveld did not insert Enlightenment ideas in the text of his translation in the extreme way Harwood did. But there is a subtle layer of Enlightenment values inscribed in his translation. For example, the Dutch word deugd (virtue) summarized for van Hamelsveld the Enlightenment ethics of tolerance, reasonableness, gentility, and politeness, and it is that word that he is fond of using in his Bible translation. Hebrew roots such as ṣdq (righteous) are often translated in Dutch with words that contain this word deugd, for example, in Ps 1 where it is rendered in v. 5 with deugdbetrachters (virtue-practitioners) and in v. 6 with deugdgezinden (virtue-minded).

The Bible Society movement did not print, publish, or distribute Enlightenment Bibles. Rather, Article 1 of the British and Foreign Bible Society stipulated that “the only Copies in the Languages of the United Kingdom to be circulated by the Society, shall be the authorized version.” With regard to translations into any language, Ellingworth observed that “during this period (1804–1885), the official policy of the British and Foreign Bible Society was that New Testament translations must be based on the Textus Receptus; it was also expected that the whole Bible would generally conform to the KJV/AV. Where, as in Tongan, translators failed to conform to this requirement, the Bible Society refused to publish” (2007, 136). Just as the translator of the Mohawk Gospel of John, Teyoninhokarawen, had unsuccessfully challenged the “without note or comment” policy of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1805, James Moulton and the Tongan collaborator David Finnau had unsuccessfully challenged the policy that the Textus Receptus, the base for the King James Version, should be the Greek text to be translated. Finnau, working in London from 1877 to 1880, wanted to follow the Revised Version, then in progress, a translation that was based on a Greek text that was significantly different from the Textus Receptus (Ellingworth 2007, 136).

To understand why the Bible Society movement preferred Bible translations based on the Textus Receptus as the Greek base text for the New Testament and the Authorized Version as translation model, and why it kept its distance from enlightened Bible translations of the eighteenth century, we must understand the rather difficult dilemma that the Bible Societies faced around 1800.

If the Bible Society movement had chosen to distribute enlightened Bibles, even very moderate ones like the one done by van Hamelsveld, they would have utterly failed in uniting Christians around the Bible cause, since the Bibles for the vast majority of their members were the authorized versions in the various countries, literal versions based on the Textus Receptus in the New Testament. Also, the commissioners and translators of the enlightened Bibles themselves did not have the goal to replace the authorized versions. Their goal was to produce a kind of study Bible avant la lettre for the instruction and edification of individual readers.

But choosing these authorized version translations also had serious drawbacks from the perspective of the Bible Society movement. Translations such as the Dutch Statenvertaling or the English King James were historically confessional and state-sponsored Bibles, and therefore problematic for the Bible Society movement that stood in the center of Enlightenment efforts to construct a non-confessional Christian domain. The solution of the Bible Society movement was to “deconfessionalize” these versions as much as possible by stripping them of all paratextual elements that betrayed their confessional, denominational, or state origins. This explains the prominence of the “without note or comment” phrase in the statutes of the Bible Societies and the sharp contrast between seventeenth-century editions of authorized versions, rich in paratext, and the editions of the same versions of the Bible Societies, Bibles with an absolute minimum of paratext. The “without note or comment” article, essential to safeguard non-confessionalism and the role of Bible Societies as servants of all churches and denominations, was put into practice rather strictly, even when the paratexts were completely “innocent” and non-confessional (as in the case of the Mohawk translation discussed above, where the British and Foreign Bible Society rejected the introduction, although it recognized that the content did not reflect confessional points of view).

The Bible Society movement and missionary societies

The Bible Societies were active at home and abroad and it was for people abroad, in the colonies and beyond, that they produced and distributed Bible translations with a new skopos, or function, new because these translations functioned in a new institutional and religious context that emerged in the course of the eighteenth century, the context of Protestant missionary societies. In fact, the birth of these late eighteenth-century missionary societies marks the start of Protestant missionary activity as a regular and continuous endeavor (van Rooden 1996, 123–32). Thousands of missionary societies were founded in all Western countries, and, although some printed and distributed their own translations of the Bible, they needed the help of the Bible Societies to produce the millions of Bibles for which they created a demand as a result of their missionary activities.

The Bible Societies and the missionary societies had the same roots in the eighteenth-century age of Enlightenment that reformed religious life in fundamental ways, making the inner moral convictions of individuals foundational, and redefining the relationships between individuals, the state, and (former) confessional state-churches. Bible Societies and missions had the same organizational form: “societies,” that is, associations of choice, part of civil society, self-governing bodies, associations of free individuals coming together for a shared Christian purpose, with their Christian goals defined in non-confessional and non-denominational terms.

According to van Rooden (1996, 172), who studied the ways the notion of mission is constructed in the journal of the Nederlandsch Zendelings-Genootschap (Dutch Society of Missionaries), founded in 1797, Christianity is portrayed as a moral force operative in the inner hearts of individuals. From this individual moral center, human societies, both at home and abroad, are transformed. Mission is the effort to plant the faith in the hearts and minds of individuals, to transform humans and the communities they live in. There is an assumption of a fundamental distinction between the public sphere and the personal, private sphere, and mission is located in the individual sphere, with missionary societies as associations of individuals, by choice, in the civil domain independent of state and church, and with missionary activity aimed at individuals, their inner personal convictions (van Rooden 1996, 172).

Within this mindset, the distinction between missionary activity at home and abroad is hardly relevant; it is in essence the same mission: transforming, educating, enlightening, and “civilizing” dark hearts, full of prejudice and superstition, dead dogmatism, and insincere faith. The methods at home and abroad also overlap: salesmen selling cheap Bibles and Christian tracts to individuals. Within and outside traditional denominations, revivalist or pietistic missionary movements were active, with emphasis on personal, individual, heartfelt convictions being expressed in the practical virtues of civilization and a personal relation with the Bible as God’s word. Missionary societies in England and the USA were involved in teaching people to read and educating lower-class people (e.g., the Sunday school movement).

With all the continuities between Bible Societies and missionary societies, it is important to remember that Bible Societies were socially and culturally rather different from revivalist groups and most missionary societies in the sense that their membership was mostly from urban middle and higher classes, and their leadership usually from the political, ecclesiastical, and social elite, in contrast to missionary and revivalist groups, who recruited members from all walks of life, especially from the masses (van Rooden 1996, 140).

The enlightened concept of mission as non-confessional, independent of state and church authorities, having its own resources, and located in civil society, was a new concept (van Rooden 1996, 133–34). For people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was very difficult to conceptualize the spreading of Christianity and Bibles independent of the state (and of the state-backed church) in areas not controlled by the state and without the finances and other support of the state (1996, 135–36). Van Rooden mentions two early exceptions of missionary activities outside state control: seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation expansion of Christianity in China and Japan by Jesuits, and Herrnhuter (Moravian) work in Greenland, Labrador, and South Africa (1996, 136).

The eighteenth-century invention of mission, with the “society” as its organizational form, as a religious activity by individual citizens for citizens of other countries, proved to be a crucial context for the rise of the Bible Society movement and a new type of evangelistic Bible translation: the thousands of missionary societies in many Western countries soon targeted hundreds of ethnic groups around the globe that could only be effectively reached in their own languages, resulting in hundreds of new Bible translations in non-European languages. These missionary translations in non-European languages were truly evangelistic translations and it is useful to contrast these evangelistic Bibles of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Bible movement with Bibles in non-European languages of earlier centuries.

Take, for example, the translation of Matthew by the Dutchman Ruyl into Malay, translated in 1612 and printed in 1629 (de Vries 2002, 2005; Soesilo 2013). This translation has been hailed by Nida and North as the earliest example of a missionary translation in a non-European language: “The first Malay Gospel, printed in 1629, is significant as the earliest example of the translation and printing for evangelistic purposes of a portion of the Bible in a non-European language” (1972, 269). But, as a matter of fact, the Malay translation by Ruyl was not meant as a missionary tool to evangelize “heathens” in the archipelago in areas beyond the control of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC, Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). Rather, it served as a church Bible for the Dutch Reformed congregations in Java and the Moluccas, congregations that consisted of Dutch East Indies Company personnel, their dependents (slaves, servants), and families of mixed Dutch and local origin (de Vries 2005, 13–25). Malay was the interethnic lingua franca of the whole archipelago and as such it was also used on the VOC trade posts. Ruyl was a junior merchant with the VOC. The Staten-Generaal of the Dutch Republic made a contract (octrooi) with the VOC in 1623 that gave exclusive trade rights to the VOC in the East but also delegated certain state powers to the VOC, including the duty of “conservatie van het publieke geloof” (maintaining and protecting the public faith). This phrase is very significant because the “publieke geloof” was the Calvinistic confession, the official “public” religion of the Republic. The trade posts controlled by the VOC were seen as places where Dutch laws and regulations were valid, including the “conservatie van het publieke geloof.” Being a commercial company, the VOC had no interest in territorial gains outside the trade post and the duty to maintain the public faith did not extend to the vast archipelago surrounding their trade stations.

The Ruyl translation is a diglot, with the Dutch Deux-Aes version in the left column and the Malay translation in the right column. It also contains translations of hymns, creeds, and other texts used in the liturgy of the Dutch Reformed Church. The VOC Bibles and Bible portions were expensive, high-quality books printed in the Netherlands, designed to be used by the pastor as a church Bible during the liturgy, during catechism classes, and by schoolmasters in the VOC schools.

Malay (and Portuguese until around 1800) functioned as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago, also in the homes of Dutch families and in church. It is significant that it was only in these two languages with lingua franca function that the VOC had Bibles translated. The other languages of Indonesia, spoken by millions and millions of people (e.g., Javanese, Balinese, Achenese), were not on the radar, because a concept of mission was lacking within which such evangelistic translations would have become a priority. These peoples and languages would have to wait for the birth of missionary and Bible Societies around 1800 to see Bible translation activity. The Netherlands Bible Society published Bibles in Javanese, Balinese, Batak, and other major languages of the Dutch East Indies in the course of the nineteenth century.

The differences between the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century VOC-commissioned translations in Malay (and Portuguese, the other lingua franca) and these Bible Society Bibles of the nineteenth century in Indonesian languages follow from the radical shift in the place of religion in society. The VOC Bibles in Malay were state- (and state-church-) controlled translations that functioned as church and school Bibles in places under VOC control where the VOC, with powers delegated to it by the Republic, fulfilled its duty of “conservatie van het publieke geloof” in the public domain (de Vries 2005). They were not used, or designed to be used, as tools to spread Christianity among the many ethnic groups of the archipelago. By contrast, the Bibles in the vernacular languages that the Netherlands Bible Society printed and distributed in the Dutch East Indies were wholly located in the private domain. They originated as the result of the activities of private Dutch citizens coming together in “societies” to offer citizens of the East the Book of True Civilization that would transform their hearts and minds.

Conclusion

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century rethought religion and Christianity but did not, as rule, abandon it. Rethinking religion as a private matter, in the hearts and minds of citizens, and as a moral, transformative force of virtue was a process that was more or less complete around 1800, at least in most Protestant countries. It created the conditions for the rapid emergence of the Bible Society and the missionary society movement. The characteristics of the Bible Society movement—for example, its organizational form, its laws and regulations, its non-confessionalism, its discourse about the Bible as foundational for culture and civilization, the Book of True Civilization—all follow from the new position of religion in the age of Enlightenment.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment context altered the course of Bible translation in many ways. Institutionally, Bible Societies replaced the political and ecclesiastical authorities of the Old Order as the most prominent commissioners of Bible translation. But they were far more than commissioners. They were also printers, publishers, and distributors.

Two new types of Bible translations emerged in the context of Enlightenment developments. The first was enlightened Bibles meant for personal study and piety, Bibles that incorporated new insights of enlightened biblical scholarship in the domains of textual criticism, historical-critical contextualization of biblical texts, and the close relationships between biblical texts and other ancient forms of literature. These translations were very different from the authorized versions, not intended to replace those but to complement them as instructional Bibles in the home.

The second new type was evangelistic translations in non-Western languages, including minority languages, commissioned, translated, printed, and distributed by typical eighteenth-century Enlightenment “societies.” This new type of missionary translation not only originated in the private domain of civil society but was also meant for that same private domain: to be a transformative, civilizing moral force in the hearts and minds of individual citizens in the colonies and beyond. The Bible Society movement modeled these non-Western translations on the authorized versions because that was the only way for the early Bible Society movement to unite Christians of many different denominations and sects around a non-confessional and non-denominational Bible cause. But only the textual model of the authorized versions was followed, not the paratextual model. Notes, comments, and introductions were a threat to the notion of the Bible of a non-denominational, non-confessional Book of True Civilization.

The Bible Society movement’s enlightened theme of the Bible as a Book of True Civilization was not as innocent as it may seem: it was also used in the colonial project of empire-building to coordinate the agendas of missions and colonial rulers and to provide an ideological underpinning of colonialism as spreading the blessings of True Civilization. This link to the politics of colonialism is explicitly made in policy papers of Western Bible Societies (de Vries 2005).

A good example would be the speech of Gijsbert Karel van Hogendorp, the most influential and powerful Dutch politician of his day and president of the Netherlands Bible Society branch of The Hague. He addresses the Board of the Netherlands Bible Society in 1816 with an important policy speech. He wanted the Netherlands Bible Society to broaden its activities to the Dutch East Indies and then formulated the goals of these translations in the languages of the East. They should not aim at proselytizing, and not even have a hidden aim to do so. The Bibles to be translated and distributed in the East should aim at civilization: “‘Europe’—Napoleon said . . . —’has become civilized because of Christianity.’ Everyone knows to what extent the Heathens are backward in terms of civilization. Also for the operation of the State therefore it can be seen as important to distribute a means of civilization.” ³

The leaders of the Bible Societies tended to come from political and business elites with international experience, often in the colonies. The Right Honorable Lord Teignmouth, first President of the British and Foreign Bible Society and its president for thirty years, was a former governor general of the British East India Company. The Dutchman Baud was, until 1819, General Secretary of the Dutch Indies government in Batavia (Jakarta) and an influential member of the Board of the Netherlands Bible Society branch in The Hague. The emphasis on the avoidance of proselytizing as a basic policy of the Netherlands Bible Society in the colonies was also explicitly linked to colonial rule and its goals. These seasoned colonial officers on the boards of Bible Societies knew that proselytizing guaranteed revolts and unrest in the colonies, especially in Islamic regions. For example, Baud wrote a policy paper entitled “Consideratien over de vertaling en verspreiding van de Heilige Schriften” (Considerations about the translation and distribution of the Holy Scriptures). In that paper, he emphasizes that the Netherlands Bible Society must send the message to the colonial government that they will stay away from any proselytizing and also will keep proselytizing missions at a safe distance because, he says, the colonial government will only tolerate Bible Society activities in the East in as far as “the stability of beautiful and rich Java, the important source of our East-Indian finances, is not being threatened.” ⁴