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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742244167 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 09/25/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 872 KB |
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CHAPTER 1
IN THE BEGINNING?
For as long as Europeans had read the Bible, it had shaped their ideas of the Great South Land. Way back in the fifth century, St Augustine, one of most important theologians of the Western church, had speculated on whether there were Antipodes – 'that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us'. He thought not: descendants of the first man, the biblical Adam, could not possibly have 'taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other'. Europeans still went looking, all the while speculating on the kind of land they might find and who might inhabit it.
In 1522, more than 1000 years after Augustine, Magellan's expedition achieved the first circumnavigation of the globe. There was almost certainly a Bible on board ship, as the expedition made its way from Spain to South America and across the Pacific Ocean to the Philippine islands and the Malay Archipelago. Voyage records depict Magellan explaining Christianity to the people of Cebu, advancing 'arguments to induce them to accept the faith' and arranging a mass baptism. Journeys like his had long-term consequences for the spread of Christianity through South-east Asia and the Pacific.
The Australian continent itself continued to elude Europeans. The navigator Pedro Fernandez de Quiros thought he had found it in 1605; arriving in present-day Vanuatu, he assumed the largest island was the South Land he was seeking. He promptly hoisted an 'emblem of the Holy Cross – on which Jesus Christ's person was crucified and whereon He gave his life for the ransom and remedy of the human race'. He claimed possession of the land, naming it Austrialia del Espiritu Santo, 'land of the Holy Spirit'. Europeans like Quiros imagined Australia with the mind of faith. They wove stories of discovery and Christian expansion into one grand narrative – anticipating the spread of Christendom to the Great South Land.
The first foreigners to succeed where Quiros had failed were traders more than missionaries. Muslim seafarers from Macassar, in southern Sulawesi, made regular visits to northern Australia, setting up annual camps in Arnhem Land, interacting with the local Yolngu and harvesting trepang, or sea cucumber, for trade as far away as China. Beginning with Janzsoon in 1606, Dutch voyagers visited the coast, charting long sections of the continent's north, west and south. Similarly, English, Spanish and French explorers ventured into Australian waters, carrying their own cultures and beliefs – and possibly hard-copy Bibles.
In September 1770, the English navigator James Cook arrived at the island of Savu, near Timor, having just sailed up the east coast of Australia in the Endeavour. Two and a half centuries had passed since Magellan, and Europeans had made their presence felt in many parts of South-east Asia. By then the Dutch, in particular, were entrenched at Batavia (now Jakarta). Seeking wealth, they had drawn much of Indonesia into a web of unequal exchange. They had also established new places of worship and stationed chaplains among their own employees. Cook noted that the people of Savu 'speake a Language peculiar to themselves into which the Dutch have caused the NewTestament to be Translated'. '[L]etters and writing' had been introduced among them too, he observed, and 'by this means several hundreds of them have been converted to Christianity'. The remark reveals a new phase in the Bible's career in the region, and the spread of the New Testament to within a few days' sail of Australia.
Cook's own voyages dramatically extended these developments. They confirmed a connection between the European Bible and the processes of imperialism and globalisation, inaugurated a British sphere of influence in the Pacific, and opened the way to trade, missionary activity and the formal colonisation of eastern Australia. They also pointed to some of the huge changes that had occurred back in Europe over the previous two and a half centuries, which would have major consequences for Australia.
COOK'S ENDEAVOUR BIBLE IS A LARGE VOLUME, WEIGHING nearly four kilograms, bound in leather and embossed with gold writing. Thanks to Gutenberg's invention, it was mechanically printed, on the rag paper in use at the time. A handwritten note inside the cover explains that it accompanied Cook on all three of his Pacific voyages, and was then kept by his widow Elizabeth. After her death in 1835 it was passed down among her relatives. Eventually donated to the Australian Museum, it is now held by the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
Turning the first page, one sees signs of the great changes that had unsettled the European Bible over the previous two and a half centuries. The title page identifies it as a 1765 Oxford edition of the King James Version: 'The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, newly translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty's Special Command'. A few pages further on, the book of Genesis begins in English: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'. These features underline that Cook's Bible was not just a timeless old book, but a product of the English Reformation.
When Magellan had left Europe in 1519, no English Bible existed in print. The standard text of the Western church was the Latin Vulgate, a version prepared by the scholar Jerome more than a millennium previously. Other versions existed, within the reach of the rich and well educated, including translations of the Vulgate into certain European languages, and new critical editions like Erasmus' Greek New Testament. But the Vulgate was the common version of public worship, the text used to illuminate the Catholic liturgy, and the undisputed reference for Western scriptural theology.
All this changed in the heat of the Reformation. In September 1522, the monk Martin Luther published a translation of the New Testament into contemporary German. Luther had been in rebellion against the Catholic Church for five years by then, but his Bible took the conflict to a whole new level. It epitomised his rejection of the Pope's authority and came to symbolise the reformers' catch-cry of 'Scripture alone'. His Bible challenged many established doctrines with its new translations of key terms and verses. (Luther famously rendered Romans 3:28 as 'we reckon a man to be justified by faith alone'.) Most radically, Luther placed the Bible in the hands of ordinary people – along with an encouragement to read and understand it for themselves. It marked a turning point, eventually felt in most parts of the world.
The first English translator of the Reformation era was William Tyndale. Influenced by Luther and himself a gifted linguist, Tyndale sought refuge in Germany, where he began turning the Greek and Hebrew into crisp and memorable English. Some of the phrases he coined in the 1520s are still in common use: 'the signs of the times', 'the powers that be', 'fight the good fight', 'it is a sure thing'. All these and more originate in his English New Testament. Tyndale's goal, however, was more subversive. He declared: 'I defy the Pope and all his laws! If God spares my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the Scriptures than the Pope himself!'
Copies of Tyndale's Bible were printed in the new Protestant cities of northern Europe, pushed into bales of cloth and smuggled back to England. There they were read in great secrecy or burned on discovery. (Only one copy of the first edition survived. It is now among the greatest treasures of the British Library in London.) Tyndale remained abroad, but was eventually caught, imprisoned, and in 1536 executed for heresy. His work nevertheless survived to provide a foundation for many more English editions. Within a few years of his death, a vernacular Bible was authorised by Henry VIII for reading in English churches. This 'Great Bible' (1539) incorporated large chunks of Tyndale's original translation, and helped make the Bible familiar even to illiterate English speakers. Decades later, the translators of the King James Version similarly retained many of Tyndale's phrases: 'In the beginning was the word'; 'For God so loved the world'; 'Give us this day our daily bread'. Cook's Endeavour Bible included these words.
Cook's Bible embodied broadly Protestant ideas about God's word. At the same time, it hinted at the challenges posed by the vernacular Bible. If there were many competing translations, who decided what the Bible actually said? And if anyone could read it, who decided what it taught? Should 'laymen and silly old women' be allowed to interpret Scripture, Luther's adversaries had asked? And what if people read the Bible in ways that threatened the whole social and political order? What if they used it to instigate rebellions and found republics in the place of monarchies? As the poet John Dryden rhymed in the decades after England's civil war:
The book thus put in every vulgar hand Which each presumed he best could understand The common rule was made the common prey And at the mercy of the rabble lay.
The King James Bible was meant to rein in such conflict and confusion; to stem the tide of competing translations and provide a common reference point. As the name suggests, too, it was the product of a church and crown establishment. Its alternative name, 'the Authorised Version', points to its status as the sole standard for public worship.
The illustrations of Cook's handsome edition give a similar impression. Most of the etchings depict Bible characters and their well-known stories. But some depict the rites and ministries of the Church of England, including infant baptism, Holy Communion, the visitation of the sick. A few combine Bible verses with scenes from recent monarchical history. For instance, the foiled gunpowder plot against James I accompanies Psalm 9:16 – 'The Wicked is snared in the Work of his own Hands'. Cook's Bible was a political as well as a religious thing; it subtly expressed a particular vision of the nation, its politics and history. Later, in Australia, such politics would rise to the surface as colonists fought over the Bible and the society they were building.
THERE IS ONE MORE CLUE TO THE EUROPEAN BIBLE AND ITS characteristics in Cook's era. It is a chronology stretching from the beginning of the world to the life of Jesus Christ, developed by the Irish scholar and Archbishop James Ussher in the mid- seventeenth century. An index at the back of Cook's Bible gives the relevant dates; they are also printed inside the margin at the top of each page. The date of creation, for example, is given as the year 4004 before Christ. The Great Flood survived by Noah is said to have happened in 2348 BC. To many readers now, such dates seem absurd, even a religious denial of science. But Cook lived prior to the discovery of an old earth. Ussher's dating of Genesis roughly corresponded with the calculations of scientific giants Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. In Cook's time, an idea of creation about 4000 years before Christ was still the consensus of European science.
This chronology reminds us of the great shifts between Cook's time and ours. It warns us against projecting our own assumptions and worldviews into the minds of people in the past. It also alerts us to the ingrained habits of thought that defined the European Bible. In particular, it highlights the historic European habit of calibrating knowledge about the world with the text of the Bible. This was a crucial legacy of the theological Bible. If Scripture was God's revelation about himself, humanity and the world, it was the unrivalled starting point for knowledge, the framework for understanding the world and its workings. It meant the Bible was a tool not only for private and public devotion, but for social and political thought, for science, geography, and scholarship of all kinds.
In practice, European theology encompassed several specific methods for reading and interpreting the Bible. History has also shown that changes in the ways people read Scripture often went along with changes in understandings of the world. During Cook's lifetime, new theories and findings in the observable world prompted new questions of the Bible.
WHEN COOK RETURNED TO ENGLAND, HAVING CLAIMED eastern Australia for its King, he returned to a society steeped in the Scriptures. It can be hard for twenty-first-century people to grasp the extent of the Bible's ubiquity – but in the late eighteenth century, roughly 250 years after Tyndale, the Bible was by far the most widely available book in English, the central product of the British printing industry. It circulated as a whole volume, in individual Testaments, and in its separate books. It was also extracted, abridged and interpreted in a host of aids, guides, compendia and other commonplace books – a reminder that the Bible was a very flexible thing. Not only that, the sermon was the dominant literary genre of the day, easily eclipsing the popular novel. (Present estimates suggest that for every page of secular fiction published in Britain in the eighteenth century, there were about fifteen pages of sermons or other explicitly religious material!) Church services were also the most common form of community gathering, which meant many people had a thoroughgoing familiarity with the Scriptures.
The published version of Cook's Endeavour journals proved a bestseller. Offering a fascinating account of the Pacific and its many societies and peoples, they prompted a range of responses, from the sceptical to the evangelical. For some, Cook's voyages magnified a question they were already asking: What should Europeans make of places and people not directly mentioned in the Bible? Was there only one true revelation for all humanity? What was the nature of religion, morality, society and politics?
For others, reading Cook galvanised a vast missionary vision. This response was especially common among people buoyed by the rising tide of evangelical religion. For them, Cook's voyages highlighted the extent of the non-Christian world and prompted fresh efforts to convey the gospel to the nations. John Newton, for example, was a former slave captain turned evangelical minister and hymn writer, now most famous as the author of 'Amazing Grace'. Engrossed by Cook's account, he responded with a prayer: 'May I be suitably affected with the case of the countless thousands of my fellow creatures, who know thee not, nor have opportunities of knowing thee'. (He went on to mentor the first clergyman to the colony of New South Wales – advising him, praying for him and encouraging him in regular letters – dubbing him, in the process, the Apostle to the South Seas.) The shoemaker William Carey read Cook and had his attention awakened to missions. In 1792, he responded with his famous Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use means for the Conversion of the Heathens. Carey co-founded a missionary society and soon departed for India, where he spent most of the rest of his life in Bible translation.
These responses to Cook's voyages reflected beliefs and mentalities which European colonists would soon convey to Australia. When it was eventually decided to send a fleet to the place Cook had named and claimed as New South Wales, the colonists hauled hard-copy Bibles ashore with them, along with the swirling history of the Bible in Europe, from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. The British arrived with diverse ways of reading Scripture, with unresolved debates about its status and meaning.
Dry land: the European Bible at Sydney Cove
The first hard-copy Bibles in Australia arrived in the luggage of Richard Johnson, the sensitive young chaplain to the British colony of New South Wales. He was a Church of England clergyman, and a protégé of some of the leading evangelicals of his day. He joined the First Fleet with his new wife Mary – whom he described as 'about half a Baptist and Half a Methodist' – and hundreds of copies of the Bible. There was his own, of course – a very plain, unillustrated King James. There was also a Book of Common Prayer which he likely used in his private as well as public devotions. Both these books survive today, among the historical treasures of St Philip's Anglican Church, Sydney. Both show signs of frequent use and repair. Apart from several worn pages, the Bible is missing its original cover and title piece – presumably damaged by fire when the colony's first church burned down. As for the Prayer Book, the marriage service is spattered with ink and the page with the order for Communion is torn from turning.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Bible in Australia"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Meredith Lake.
Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Under the skin 1
Part 1 Colonial Foundations 17
1 In the beginning? 19
2 Indigenous encounters 42
3 God's immigrants? 76
Part 2 The Great Age of the Bible 107
4 Spreading the Word 109
5 Seeking the good society 136
6 Re-evaluating the text 166
Part 3 Bible and Nation 195
7 Advancing Australia Fair 197
8 Politics and the Bible 221
9 War and its aftermath 250
Part 4 A Secular Australia? 281
10 The turning point 283
11 Re-imagining Australia 310
12 The Bible in the new millennium 346
Select bibliography 370
Notes 375
Acknowledgments 423
Index 425