Censorship of the Bible

Type of work: Book

Written: ca. Fourth century b.c.e.—First century c.e.

Authors: Multiple scribes

Subject matter: Sacred text of Christianity

Significance: Because the Bible is the sacred book of Christianity, it has frequently been the object of censorship in struggles to control religious belief and practices among Christians

The Bible contains books that are sacred in both Judaism and Christianity. The first portion, called by Christians the Old Testament, elaborates God’s dealings with his chosen people, the Jews, and is sacred to Judaism and Christianity. The second portion, referred to by Christians as the New Testament, describes events associated with the life of Jesus, whom Christians called Christ, and the early church and its teachings. This latter portion is not accepted as scripture by Judaism. When the Jewish and Christian scriptures were assembled, some texts were challenged and eventually omitted (or censored), often on grounds of heresy and largely by individual compilers. Some Christians view certain other books known as the Apocrypha as an integral part of the Bible. The Bible has been a frequent target of censorship efforts, both among Christians themselves, who sometimes disagreed vehemently over its proper interpretation, and by government authorities hostile to Christian faith and thus hostile to its central sacred text.

The Bible and the Vernacular

Christians themselves have sometimes been ready to censor certain forms in which the Bible has been made available to lay Christians. In the decades immediately prior to and following the Protestant Reformation, Roman Catholic authorities were often vigorous opponents of attempts to make the Bible available in the vernacular, that is in a tongue readily accessible to lay readers, unlike Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. Medieval church authorities widely agreed that giving common people access to the sacred Scriptures was the equivalent of casting pearls before swine. Ordinary men and women needed most to listen to the learned teach about the Scriptures, rather than read the Scriptures themselves. For centuries, the learned had no problem enforcing their preferences in this regard, as only they knew how to translate the Hebrew or Greek or Latin texts. Shortly before the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, a handful of scholars became convinced that common people would benefit from reading the Scriptures themselves, in their own tongues. William Tyndale, for example, partially completed translating the Bible into English, with the aim of allowing “the boy that driveth the plough” to understand its words and teaching. Opponents of Tyndale’s enterprise ultimately captured him, however, and had him strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. With the advent of the Reformation, the numbers of those committed to the work of translation swelled, and their efforts began to produce one after another translations of the Bible into languages that ordinary men and women could read. Where the Roman Catholic Church still held political power, however, it frequently used this power to staunch the ever-increasing current of vernacular translations. even burning copies along with other banned materials. In many places mere possession or publication of a vernacular translation was a crime punishable by death.

The Bible and Indecency

Long after vernacular translations of the Bible had become commonplace, a new crop of censors arose who feared that certain passages in the Bible—notably, those describing violence or containing sexual content—might be too much for some souls to handle. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, a steady stream of “family” Bibles began to appear, in which indelicate passages had been excised or dislocated from the main body of text to facilitate the public reading of the Bible in mixed company. The most famous of these attempts to make the sacred scriptures of Christianity fit for ordinary consumption was that undertaken by the great American lexicographer Noah Webster. Webster produced his version of the Bible in 1833. In some respects this version, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, in the Common Version, with Amendments of the Language, simply revised the text of the ever-popular but seriously dated King James Bible to make its language conform more closely to usage of that era. However, Webster also made changes in the text with an eye to cloak what he viewed as indecent matters in either obscurity or euphemism.

As recently as 2007 in Hong Kong, more than two thousand complaints against the Bible with government regulators at the Television and Licensing Authority; however, officials did not find it indecent or improper enough to merit sales restrictions.

Modern Political Correctness

Less concerned with indelicacy than sexism and racism, some modern translators of the Bible have launched efforts to purge it of its perceived male chauvinism and racially offensive language. In 1995 the prestigious Oxford University Press introduced The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version. The “inclusion” that this version achieves is purchased at the price of excluding the male-specific and patriarchal language of the original text of the Bible. Biblical references to God as “Father” are replaced by references instead to “the Father-Mother.” Concern for anti-Semitic overtones strips references in the Gospels of their finger-pointing at the Jews for having killed Jesus in favor of an indefinite pronoun. Whereas the original text of the Bible asks what fellowship hath Light with Darkness, the editors of the inclusive version ask instead what fellowship hath Day with Night.

The Bible in Public Schools

The establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbids government from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Applying this clause, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that public schools cannot sponsor devotional religious exercises or otherwise attempt to advance the cause of religion in the public schools. For example, the Court held in Stone v. Graham (1980) that a school may not post a copy of the Ten Commandments from the Bible on a wall, even if for the alleged purpose of informing the students of an important source of the Western legal tradition. Nevertheless, the Court has also declared that the establishment clauses poses no barrier to the objective study of the Bible for its literary or historical significance.

School officials have sometimes demonstrated uncertainty about the place of student-initiated study of the Bible in light of the Supreme Court’s establishment clause holdings. Apparently, prior to the mid-1980’s, some school officials viewed the court’s decisions as requiring that school officials prevent any religious use of the Bible by students at school, even in clubs and informal gatherings not sponsored by the school itself. In 1984 Congress acted to abolish these attempts by school officials to censure private student-initiated Bible study and religious fellowship by passing the Equal Access Act. This law provides that religious students in secondary schools must be given the same right to Bible study, or other forms of religious fellowship, as are accorded other noncurriculum student clubs to pursue their chosen interests.

Bibliography

Lawton, David. Faith, Text, and History: The Bible in English. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1990. Print.

Miller, Timothy C. “The Bible.” Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. Ed. Derek Jones. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print.

O’Neil, Robert M. “The Bible and the Constitution.” Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints. Ed. Nicholas J. Karolides, Lee Burress, and John M. Kean. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1993. Print.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Reformation of the Bible/The Bible of the Reformation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.

Reed, Annette Yoshiko. “The Afterlives of New Testament Apocrypha.” Journal of Biblical Literature 134.2 (2015): 401–25. PDF file.

“X-Rated Bible?” U.S. Catholic 72.9 (2007): 10. PDF file.