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“Monkeying with the Bible”: Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

R. Bryan Bademan
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Abstract

Devotion to the Bible remains an underappreciated aspect of American religious life partly because it fails to generate controversy. This essay opens a window onto America's relationship with the Bible by exploring a controversial moment in the history of the Bible in America: the public reception of University of Chicago professor Edgar J. Goodspeed's American Translation (1923). Initially, at least, most Americans flatly rejected Goodspeed's impeccably credentialed attempt to cast the language of the Bible in contemporary “American” English. Accusations of the professor's irreligion, bad taste, vulgarity, and crass modernity emerged from nearly every quarter of the Protestant establishment (with the exception of some card-carrying theological modernists), testifying to a widespread but unexplored attachment to the notion of a traditional Bible in the early twentieth century. By examining this barrage of reaction, “Monkeying with the Bible” argues that Protestants, along with some others in 1920s America, believed that traditional biblical language was among the forces that helped stabilize the development of American civilization.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Winter 2006 , pp. 55 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2006

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References

Notes

I am grateful to Mark Noll for stimulating my interest in the cultural history of the Bible in America. I am also indebted to Thomas Kidd, George Marsden, John McGreevy, Tisa Wenger, Francisco Benzoni, Peter Thuesen, Paul Gutjahr, and Timothy Gloege for their helpful criticisms of earlier drafts. Colleagues at Princeton's Center for the Study of Religion as well as the reviews of several anonymous readers for this journal were tremendously helpful as I made final revisions.

1. Edward Newton, A., The Greatest Book in the World and Other Papers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1925)Google Scholar; and Grant, Elihu, “What Shall We Think of the Bible?” in Religious Foundations, ed. Jones, Rufus M. (New York: Macmillan, 1923), 89 Google Scholar.

2. So great was affection for the “Common Version” that, when the Revised Version of the New Testament was published—in what was the biggest publishing event of the American nineteenth century—Philip Schaff exulted that “whole chapters may be read without perceiving the difference” between the new and old translations. On the advent of the Revised Version, see Philip Schaff, ed., Anglo-American Bible Revision, by Members of the American Revision Committee (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1879); Peter J. Thuesen, “Some Scripture Is Inspired by God: Late-Nineteenth- Century Protestants and the Demise of a Common Bible,” Church History 65 (December 1996): 609–23; Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: William Morrow, 1990, repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), chap. 7.

3. “The Bible up to Date,” New York Times, February 11, 1905. Another Times correspondent made a similar point in 1902: There is “no doubt that a falling off in the habit of reading the Bible would be, from a literary point of view alone, a National calamity.” This writer also favorably reported John Henry Cardinal Newman's judgment that the King James Version of the Bible was one of the reasons the British were so forcefully anti-Catholic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “And equally of Americans,” the correspondent added. See “‘Read the Bible,’” New York Times, August 23, 1902.

4. Grant Wacker argues that the 1920s and 1930s witnessed the demise of “biblical civilization” in America, though earlier for the well educated. He suggests that the rise of historicism was the main ingredient in bringing down the walls. As American Christians increasingly saw the Bible as a product of human history, it gradually lost its ability to command divine authority. See Wacker, Grant, “The Demise of Biblical Civilization,” in The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, ed. Hatch, Nathan O. and Noll, Mark A. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 123–38Google Scholar. Despite this important collection of essays, the cultural history of the Bible in America has suffered from considerable neglect largely because it demands a robust interdisciplinary approach. Students of literary culture, for instance, are familiar with modern conservative arguments about language and, therefore, can recognize the significance of an attachment to a particular biblical translation or text. Religious historians know well the twentieth-century threats to Protestant cultural hegemony and can appreciate the ways in which many Protestants sought to come to terms with their diminished public roles. Biblical scholars understand the rapidly changing textual foundations upon which translators and critics relied as they worked to bring the Bible to early-twentieth-century audiences. And cultural and intellectual historians are skilled in dissecting complex ideologies like that of “civilization” and can offer nuanced explorations of its cultural function. To appreciate the role of the Bible in American culture in the early twentieth century, we need at least these perspectives and quite possibly more. For outstanding recent attention to the cultural history of the English Bible, see Gutjahr, Paul C., An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777–1880 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999 Google Scholar); Thuesen, Peter J., In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Noll, Mark A., “The Bible, Minority Faiths, and the American Protestant Mainstream,” in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Sarna, Jonathan D. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 193–99Google Scholar; Daniell, David, The Bible in English (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and McGrath, Alister E., In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2001)Google Scholar.

5. Already, in 1910, a New York Times correspondent had cast aspersion on attempts, as he put it, to “rewrite” the Bible “in ‘United States.’” See “Revivifying the Ancients,” New York Times, August 14, 1910. The early twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a self-consciously “American” variant of English. Songwriters like Irving Berlin and pundits like H. L. Mencken began to pay closer attention to the way Americans spoke. Slang, especially, expressed this linguistic self-identity. Indeed, some English writers even crossed the Atlantic to learn “American” in its native land. See Mencken, H. L., The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States, 2d ed. (New York: Knopf, 1921)Google Scholar; Dohan, Mary Helen, Our Own Words (New York: Knopf, 1974)Google Scholar; and, especially, Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), 357ff.Google Scholar The American Standard Version (1901) merely changed Americanized spelling and the more conspicuously British renderings.

6. While several other modern Bible translations offered comparable features, these were either British or widely understood as “sectarian” translations (produced by Unitarians, Mormons, Roman Catholics, “immersionist” Baptists, or others); such translations had no pretensions to serve the American Protestant mainstream. For Bible publishing activity prior to Goodspeed, see especially Gutjahr, An American Bible. The failure of Americans before Goodspeed to generate lasting modern-language translations has prompted Harold P. Scanlin to credit him with stimulating the activity that eventually led to the late-twentieth-century proliferation of translations, such as Kenneth Taylor's Living Bible (1962–71) or J. B. Phillip's influential 1958 translation. See Scanlin, Harold P., “Bible Translation by American Individuals,” in The Bible and Bibles in America, ed. Frerichs, Ernest S. (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 43–82 Google Scholar. It is also important to note that the KJV did not impress all Americans. Mark Noll has shown how immigrant communities, women, blacks, Roman Catholics, Jews, and Mormons dissented in sometimes subtle but substantial ways from the Protestant mainstream's use of the KJV. See his “The Bible, Minority Faiths, and the American Protestant Mainstream,” 222n1; as well as Gutjahr, An American Bible, preface.

7. Among many examples, see Daily Palo Alto Times, May 27, 1924, Edgar Johnson Goodspeed Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago, Box 44, Folder 2 (hereafter listed as EGC 44:2).

8. Goodspeed's American Translation was frequently compared to previous modern-language efforts by British scholars. These other translations, though quite significant in the history of English-language Bible translation, did not generate much of an American reaction. Indeed, it was Goodspeed's translation that prompted journals and newspapers to notice other translations. The Literary Digest put Goodspeed's translation of the Beatitudes alongside the KJV, the American Standard, and the Moffatt translation. “The New Testament in ‘American,’” Literary Digest (September 22, 1923): 34–36. From 1900 to 1937, an average of one modern speech translation was released per year in England or America. Most scholars attribute this wave of modernlanguage translation to manuscript discovery. For historical background on many of these versions, see especially Bruce, F. F., The English Bible: A History of Translations from the Earliest English Versions to the New English Bible (London: Lutterworth Press, 1961)Google Scholar.

9. “Bible, Ancient and Modern,” Christian Century (September 6, 1923): 1126–28.

10. Christian Century (October 11, 1923), EGC 42:3.

11. The Revised Version created such interest that one million American orders were awaiting its publication and three million copies in twenty-six editions were issued during the first year. Hills, Margaret, The English Bible in America: A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible and the New Testament Published in America, 1777–1957 (New York: American Bible Society, 1961), 295–96Google Scholar.

12. As historians of the 1920s have shown, journalism during Goodspeed's day was undergoing rapid change. Part of this change was a numerical increase in tabloid-style newspapers and a rise in sensationalistic and exaggerated reporting in more established papers (the Chicago Tribune being one well-documented example). Thus, a good deal of the early reporting on Goodspeed's Bible likely reflects the conventions of the day, which were to create controversy whenever possible for the sake of sales. However, I argue that the abiding presence of the concerns raised—especially in forums not commanded by journalists—suggests that such sensationalistic reporting was partly rooted in popular views of the Bible at the time. For a contemporary account of the moral crisis facing journalism in this time, see Bleven, Bruce, “Our Changing Journalism,” Atlantic Monthly 132 (1923): 743–50Google Scholar; and, on the history of journalism generally, see Mott, Frank Luther, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962)Google Scholar.

13. Butte Post [Mont.], September 5, 1923, EGC 42:3; San Francisco Chronicle, May 1924, EGC 43:5.

14. Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1923, EGC 42:3; Pittsburgh Press, August 25, 1923, EGC 42:1; Boise News, August 24, 1923, EGC 42:2; South Bend Times, August 24, 1923, EGC 42:2; Sioux Falls Daily Argus-Leader, October 13, 1923; and St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 27, 1923, in order quoted. For Goodspeed's own account of the last week of August 1923, see Goodspeed, Edgar J., As I Remember (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), 169 Google Scholar.

15. Fond du Lac Comm. [Wisc.], August 29, 1923, EGC 42:3.

16. These papers included the Chicago Evening Post, Halifax Herald [Nova Scotia], Rocky Mountain News [Denver] Birmingham News [Ala.], Toronto World, Galesburg Register Gazette [Ill.], Port Arthur News [Tex.] Pasadena Post [Calif.], Seattle Union Record, Cleveland Press, Omaha World-Herald, Buffalo Evening News, Moline Dispatch [Ill.], Columbus Dispatch, the Democrat, the Long Beach Telegram [Calif.], Gloversville Leader Republican [N.Y.], the Glendale Daily Press [Calif.], the Olean Times [N.Y.], the Warren Tribune [Pa.], the Hornell Tribune Times [N.Y.], and the Trenton Evening Times [N.J.]. Another two dozen papers made inquiries to the University of Chicago Press about obtaining syndication on the translation. Newspapers that published miscellaneous syndicated articles on or fragments of the translation are too numerous to list. See EGC 9:14 for Goodspeed's list of newspapers that actively followed his translation. The portion of the Goodspeed Collection that pertains to his American Translation consists largely of newspaper clippings that Goodspeed either collected himself or that his friends and colleagues sent to him.

17. On fundamentalism, see especially Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980 Google Scholar); and Marsden, George M., Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991)Google Scholar; and, on theological modernism (or the movement among liberal Protestants to adapt Christianity to the modern era), see Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

18. For a challenge to the two-party historiography of twentiethcentury Protestantism, see Jacobsen, Douglas and Trollinger, William Vance, eds., Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)Google Scholar.

19. Readers familiar with the later controversy over the Revised Standard Version will know that quarrels over Bible translation have been a persistent theme in twentieth-century American religious culture. The controversy surrounding Goodspeed is distinct, however, in that it did not principally reflect or contribute to a liberal/conservative divide in American Protestantism. Rather, I argue that it was a controversy over aesthetics and the developing character of American culture, waged principally within a broad Protestant establishment. To be sure, some tried to denigrate Goodspeed's work as modernist (Goodspeed was a modernist), but their success in so doing was mixed, since part of his project was to make the Scriptures as clear as possible for modern readers. Fundamentalists, in theory, supported such efforts at clarification.

20. Goodspeed, As I Remember, 42.

21. Saturday Review of Literature 23 (December 23, 1950): 9, as quoted in Cook, James I., Edgar Johnson Goodspeed, Articulate Scholar (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981)Google Scholar, x. Throughout his long career, Goodspeed also worked assiduously to bring expensive manuscripts to America for scholarly research. The collection of patristic manuscripts at the University of Chicago, which bears his name, is second in the nation only to that of the University of Michigan.

22. Goodspeed followed the Hort-Westcott text except in six instances: John 19:29; Acts 6:9, 19:28, 34; James 1:17; and Revelation 13:1.

23. Edgar J. Goodspeed, “The Ghost of King James,” Atlantic Monthly 133 (1924): 71–76.

24. Edgar J. Goodspeed's own work with papyri (including letters, petitions, wills, etc.) was extensive. See his Greek Papyri from the Cairo Museum, together with Papyri of Roman Egypt from American Collections (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902); with Grenfell, B. P. and Hunt, A. S., The Tebtunis Papyri (London: Oxford University Press, 1907)Google Scholar; Chicago Literary Papyri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912); and, with David Meuli, Untersuchungen über einige Papyrusfragmente einer griechischen Dichtung (Zürich, 1920). Adolph Deissmann was the first to recognize the grammatical similarity between New Testament Greek and the various Greek papyri.

25. Goodspeed, Edgar J., “Preface,” in The New Testament: An American Translation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923)Google Scholar, v.

26. Acutely aware of philological developments in New Testament scholarship, Goodspeed was never likely to be satisfied for long with any translation: “Not a year passes,” he wrote in 1937, “that items of New Testament language do not receive new illumination from our advancing knowledge of papyrus materials.” See Goodspeed, Edgar J., New Chapters in New Testament Study (New York: Macmillan, 1937), 99 Google Scholar.

27. Wind, James P., The Bible and the University: The Messianic Vision of William Rainey Harper (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 48 Google Scholar. Wind demonstrates that “modernism” at the University of Chicago was not just “adaptation, progress, and immanentism” (the view put forth by Hutchison, William in his edited volume, American Protestant Thought: The Liberal Era [New York: Harper and Row, 1968], 88)Google Scholar; more important, at Chicago, it was a correctly understood and interpreted Bible. See Harper, William Rainey, “Bible Study and the Religious Life,” in Religion and the Higher Life: Talks to Students (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904)Google Scholar. For background, see also Cherry, Conrad, Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Dorrien, Gary, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

28. Mathews, Shailer, New Faith for Old (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 72 Google Scholar.

29. Goodspeed, As I Remember, 42. For this culture, see Wind, The Bible and the University; Hynes, William J., Shirley Jackson Case and the Chicago School: The Socio-Historical Method (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Marsden, George M., The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

30. “We really believe,” Goodspeed explained in his 1923 William Vaughn Moody Lecture, “that by improvements in machinery [and] advances in science, new comforts, conveniences, and joys are being added to life, and I venture to suggest that it is precisely the grip that faith has upon us that most distinguishes us as a people.” Goodspeed went from this preliminary discussion of progress to a defense of his American Translation. Moody Lecture, “Why Translate the Bible?” EGC 39:1.

31. Fosdick, Harry Emerson, The Modern Use of the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 2 Google Scholar.

32. Goodspeed, As I Remember, 161. Much of the ideological agenda of Goodspeed's project parallels the broader aims of what scholars are calling “middlebrow” culture, which emerged in this period. See Radway, Janice A., A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar, esp. part II; Rubin, Joan Shelley, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Ohmann, Richard M., Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (London: Verso, 1996)Google Scholar. Radway suggests that opposition to the Book-of-the-Month Club came as a result of a rejection of the emerging concept of middlebrow literature, a literature in which a new (antiacademic) definition of culture merged with a certain marketdriven production and distribution apparatus.

33. Goodspeed, As I Remember, 162.

34. W. E. Garrison in The University of Chicago Magazine (Fall 1923), EGC 43:3. The Rev. Dr. J. A. MacCullum of Philadelphia stated, in no uncertain terms, that “it is given to few books to come into existence with so much antecedent publicity as that which has attended this new translation of the New Testament.” Philadelphia Public Ledger, n.d., EGC 43:4. I have found advertisements for the American Translation primarily in religious periodicals, including the Christian Advocate, Augsburg Sunday School Teacher, Baptist Leader, Advance, Christian Evangelist, Christian Register, Church Management, Forth, Social Progress, Union Signal, the Christian Century, and Living Church. For a contemporary account of the phenomenal growth of advertising during this period, see Bok, Edward W., “The Day of the Advertisement,” Atlantic Monthly 132 (1923): 533–36Google Scholar.

35. See advertisements in the New York Times, October 7, 1923; October 17, 1923; and March 16, 1924.

36. The possible exception was the publication of the highly anticipated and demanded Revised Version in 1881. Yet, the RV did not generate the level of newspaper coverage reached by the Goodspeed translation, largely because of advances in media-related technology and the increase of advertising. For the advent of the RV, see Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 216–19; Thuesen, “Some Scripture Is Inspired by God,” 609–10; and Hills, The English Bible, 295. Judge Frederick A. Henry surmised that Goodspeed's greater popularity over Frank Schell Ballentine's Riverside New Testament owed to advertising. See “Professor Goodspeed and Alexander Campbell,” Scroll (January 1924): 117–21, EGC 43:5.

37. Judging from Goodspeed's personal collection of newspaper clippings (surely not comprehensive), the dozens of syndicated articles likely appeared in many more than fifty papers across the country, with a majority from the Midwest.

38. News of the “shortened” Lord's Prayer even reached Cape Town, South Africa, and other syndicated articles made their way to London and Paris. See Goodspeed, As I Remember, 166ff.

39. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, August 30, 1923, EGC, 42:3. News of the “Abbreviated Prayer” made its way into Time (September 3, 1923).

40. Indianapolis Star, September 2, 1923, EGC 42:3.

41. The decade of the 1920s witnessed a dramatic increase in sensationalistic journalism. For a contemporary account of the changing morality of the industry, see Bliven, “Our Changing Journalism.”

42. Keen Ryan continued to warn Goodspeed that God will judge him who lays “his calloused hands upon the holy of holies, the sacred and inspired word of God.” See Chicago American, August 24, 1923, EGC 42:3.

43. Chicago Daily Journal, August 25, 1923, EGC 42:2.

44. This was the view of the editor of the Greenville News, August 26, 1923, EGC 42:3.

45. Madison Journal, August 29, 1923, EGC 42:3. The editor of the [Boston?] Transcript critiqued Goodspeed's use of the familiar “you” as opposed to “thee,” believing it appropriate that Scripture employed the old pronouns, for “in so doing we have enriched the language, and prevented the virtue of democracy from degenerating into the vice of vulgar familiarity with the Divine” (November 3, 1923, EGC 43:3).

46. Janesville Gazette, August 29, 1923, EGC 42:2; and St. Louis Post- Dispatch, September 9, 1923, EGC 43:5.

47. “Goodspeed Defends Bible Translation,” Chicago Daily News, August 25, 1923, EGC 42:1.

48. Indianapolis Star, September 2, 1923, EGC 42:3. Between 1860 and 1925, American publishers produced more than 448 editions of the King James, Revised, or American Standard versions of the Bible. See Noll, “The Bible, Minority Faiths, and the American Protestant Mainstream,” 196. Noll argues that the KJV's dominance was strictly limited to English-lineage Protestants and not immigrant communities or other minorities. The KJV was, in this sense, bound up with the cultural hegemony of the white Protestant “middling sorts.” Mainstream Protestant devotion to the King James Version in American Christianity is still a largely unexplored phenomenon, though recent work by Peter J. Thuesen and Paul C. Gutjahr is helping to sketch the outlines.

49. Cmiel, , Democratic Eloquence, 103 Google Scholar.

50. See Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 103ff., and see especially his reference to “English Translations of the Bible,” Bibliotheca Sacra 15 (April 1858): 287.

51. “Editor's Table,” Harper's Monthly 18 (February 1859): 406.

52. Bruno Lessing, “Jazzing the Bible,” Los Angeles Hearst Organ (December 1924), EGC 44:2. This editorial originally appeared in a Bloomington, Ill., paper.

53. New York World, August 25, 1923, EGC 42:1. This article was one of the more frequently syndicated and reprinted in American papers. Three months later, small local papers were still using excerpts.

54. Muir, William, Our Grand Old Bible, 2d ed. (London: Morgan and Scott, 1911), 5, 7.Google Scholar With this conviction driving the narrative, Muir provided a 238-page history of the English bibles that contributed to the KJV, the making of the KJV itself, and its subsequent three hundred years of influence. For other celebrations of the cultural influence of the Bible, see McComb, Samuel, The Making of the English Bible, with an Introductory Essay on the Influence of the English Bible on English Literature (New York: Moffat, Yard, and Co., 1909)Google Scholar; Brown, John, The History of the English Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911)Google Scholar; McAfee, Cleland Boyd, The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1912)Google Scholar; Dobschütz, Ernst von, The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914)Google Scholar; Canton, William, The Bible and the Anglo-Saxon People (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1914)Google Scholar; Phelps, William Lyon, Reading the Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1919)Google Scholar; Penniman, Josiah, A Book about the English Bible (New York: Macmillan, 1919)Google Scholar; Lea, John W., The Book of Books and Its Wonderful Story: A Popular Handbook for Colleges, Bible Classes, Sunday Schools, and Private Students (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1922)Google Scholar; Gaebelein, Frank E., Down through the Ages: The Story of the King James Bible (New York: Publication Office of “Our Hope,” 1924)Google Scholar; Baikie, James, The English Bible and Its Story: Its Growth, Its Translators, and Their Adventures (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1928)Google Scholar; Marion Simms, P., The Bible from the Beginning (New York: Macmillan, 1929)Google Scholar; Wild, Laura H., The Romance of the English Bible: A History of the Translation of the Bible into English from Wyclif to the Present Day (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1929)Google Scholar; McClure, James G. K., The Supreme Book of Mankind: The Origin and Influence of the English Bible (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930)Google Scholar; and, for a Jewish viewpoint, Margolis, Max L., The Story of Bible Translations (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917)Google Scholar.

55. Cook, Albert S., The Authorized Version of the Bible and Its Influence (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1910), 2–3 Google Scholar. See also Cook, Albert S., ed., The Bible and English Prose Style: Selections and Comments (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1892)Google Scholar.

56. Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1923, EGC, 42:3.

57. Chicago Herald and Examiner, August 25, 1923, EGC 42:3.

58. See Butterworth, G. W., “The Translation of the New Testament,” Church Quarterly Review 98 (July 1924): 247–65Google Scholar.

59. Louisville Post, April 28, 1924, EGC 44:1.

60. For Goodspeed's twenty-year effort to demythologize the KJV, see his “The Ghost of King James,” 71–76; The Making of the English New Testament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 41–51; The Translators to the Reader: Preface to the King James Version, 1611, ed. E. J. Goodspeed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935); and “The Misprint that Made Good,” Religion in Life 12 (1943): 205–10.

61. See Hartford Times, August 25, 1923, EGC, 42:2; Fond du Lac Comm., August 29, 1923, EGC 42:3; Columbus Dispatch, August 30, 1923, EGC 42:3; Chicago Evening Post, April 19, 1924, EGC 44:1; and Henry, “Professor Goodspeed and Alexander Campbell,” 119, EGC 43:5.

62. Hartford Times, August 25, 1923, EGC, 42:2

63. W. G. Sibley, “Modernizing the Bible,” Chicago Journal of Commerce (December 8, 1924), EGC 44:2; Lessing, “Jazzing the Bible,” EGC 44:2; and Bloomington Pantagraph, September 1, 1923, EGC 42:3.

64. Chicago Herald and Examiner, August 25, 1923, EGC 42:2; and Mencken, The American Language, 388. Mencken's work was a statement of American linguistic independence from Britain. See Raymond Nelson, “Babylonian Frolics: H. L. Mencken and The American Language,” American Literary History 11, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 668–98.

65. Goodspeed, “The Ghost of King James,” 72.

66. Peart, however, strongly held that the new translation would not replace the KJV. See the Chicago Herald and Examiner, August 26, 1923, EGC 42:3.

67. Other critics performed a reversal on this logic by suggesting that his attempt to colloquialize the New Testament was part of an effort to dumb down the masses. One reader denounced Goodspeed's effort to make the New Testament easy reading: “The ‘antique diction’ of which the good Doctor complains does not worry the plowboy, and the plowboy's mother, as much as it worries the intelligentsia.” For this writer, the cultural authority of the KJV was a means by which the “plowboy” could reject the patronizing initiatives of liberal ministers and still identify himself with the Protestant mainstream. Traditional versions of the Scriptures were defended by plowboys and pundits alike. Louisville Times, n.d. [though obviously a response to two articles in the Louisville Courier-Journal of April 6 and 28, 1924], EGC 44:1. The Minneapolis Tribune (as quoted in the Literary Digest, September 22, 1923) argued that “millions of English readers … have loved the [KJV] Bible without any knowledge of literary criticism, without any conscious appreciation of its literary eminence. It came to the poor and lowly as the Word of God in the Voice of God, and it went to their hearts unchecked by anachronisms or quaintnesses [sic] of construction.” Another writer urged that Goodspeed's translation was an “impudent presumption upon the intelligence of the reading public.” The Freeman, December 1923, EGC 43:3.

68. Helene Buhlert Bullock, “The Bible and Young America: A Constructive Suggestion,” Churchman (January 26, 1924): 15–16. See also Muir, Our Grand Old Bible, 187ff.; and Memphis Comm’l Appeal, March 26, 1924, EGC 43:6.

69. W. G. Sibley, “Modernizing the Bible,” Chicago Journal of Commerce (December 8, 1924), EGC 44:2.

70. W. G. Sibley, “Along the Highway,” Chicago Journal of Commerce (December 29, 1924), EGC 44:2.

71. New York Times, August 27, 1923, EGC 42:2. Indeed, even John F. Lyons of McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago (one of the schools endorsing the Goodspeed translation) reported that he liked the translation but still thought the KJV superior in language. See the Chicago Herald Examiner, August 25, 1923, EGC 39:2.

72. Gene Stratton-Porter authored Laddie: A True Blue Story (1913) and Freckles (1904). For background, see Long, Judith Reich, Gene Stratton-Porter: Novelist and Naturalist (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1990)Google Scholar.

73. Gene Stratton-Porter, “A Word about the Bible,” McCall's Magazine (May 1924): 1–2, 40, 71, 109.

74. Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1924, EGC 43:5. Several years later, Goodspeed, having sent a copy of his work to former president Theodore Roosevelt, received this equally discouraging, albeit considerably more polite, correspondence: “Many thanks for your letter and for your recent translation of the New Testament, which I have read with the greatest of interest. I do think it is a good idea to translate the New Testament into colloquial English, but I am afraid I am too old and crabbed to wish to see it take the place of the authorized version. In addition, of course, there is the problem involved in picturing truely [sic] oriental reactions and scenes from the standpoint of Twentieth century America. I am afraid I know too much of the East to be able to entirely separate from my mind the scenes as I know they must have occurred.” Theodore Roosevelt to Edgar Goodspeed, April 19, 1927, EGC 8:2. Perhaps Goodspeed sent the translation to Roosevelt because he knew of the ex-president's interest in the Bible's relationship to nations. See Roosevelt, , “The Bible and the Life of the People,” in Realizable Ideals (San Francisco: Whitaker and Ray-Wiggin Co., 1912)Google Scholar.

75. P. L. [Philip Littell], New Republic (November 28, 1923): 21, EGC 43:4. Others expressing this viewpoint were Frank Eakin of Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh (“New Translations of the New Testament,” Journal of Religion 4 [1924]: 133–46) and Wilbur Larremore Caswell (“Will the King James Version Do? Lest One Good Translation Should Corrupt the Church,” The Churchman [October 2, 1926]: 10–12).

76. Guelph Daily Mercury, December 20, 1923, EGC 43:3. See also the Mormon Deseret News, August 31, 1923, EGC 42:3.

77. Living Church (November 10, 1923), EGC 43:3.

78. Goodspeed, The New Testament: An American Translation, vi; and Goodspeed, William Vaughn Moody Lecture, EGC 39:1.

79. Ibid.

80. “Goodspeed Bible Is Belabored by Princeton Man,” Chicago Evening Post, February 5, 1924, EGC 43:6. Machen accused Goodspeed of returning Christendom to the theological “bondage of the middle ages.”

81. Gresham Machen, J., What is Faith? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1925), 24–25 Google Scholar.

82. Presbyterian (December 25, 1924), EGC 44:2. D. A. Hayes also elaborated on the failure of most translation efforts undertaken by individuals. See “An American Translation,” Garrett Forum (November 1923), 3-5, EGC 43:3.

83. Baptist Beacon (May 1924), EGC 44:2, contains the vitriolic reaction of a Minneapolis fundamentalist to Goodspeed's visit to a Unitarian congregation and is one of the few truly alarmist fundamentalist reactions to the translation I have found.

84. For example, one fundamentalist end-times enthusiast wrote an editorial in the Chicago Evening Post (October 19, 1923, EGC 43:1) praising Goodspeed's translation for its rendering of Matthew's “end of the world” (KJV) as “the close of the age.” He suggests that the prophecy contained in Matthew 24 and 25 had been fulfilled in the past decade. Goodspeed was skillful in preempting the conservative reaction. In his lecture on Bible translations, given to thousands of church people in 1923 and 1924, he carefully argued that every significant revival of religion was accompanied by an increase in translation activity, thus identifying his work with revivalistic evangelicalism.

85. Mangasar Magurditch Mangasarian, “A New New Testament,” Truth Seeker (December 13, 1924), EGC 44:2.

86. “Holy Writ,” reprinted from the Baltimore Evening Sun in the Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1926, EGC 42:3. In a 1931 review of the complete American Translation (both testaments), Mencken later admitted the American Translation's obvious superiority in certain respects, such as clarity and accuracy. However, even while conceding these matters, Mencken remained convinced that the Authorized Version was superior—because of its poetry. Goodspeed's efforts may be appreciated by theologians, but “the rest of us are bound to feel as we would feel if the glowing dithyrambs of the Gettysburg Address were reduced to the shabby English of Lord Hoover.” Seemingly, no measure of hyperbole was spared on the work of Edgar Goodspeed: “As a work of art [the American Translation] is to the Authorized Version as a college yell is to Bach's B minor mass.” See H. L. Mencken, “New Translation of the Bible,” Baltimore Evening Sun, December 5, 1931.

87. D. G. Hart has suggested that Mencken's dislike for the Protestant establishment partly explains his peculiar fondness for Gresham Machen. See Defending the Faith: J. Gresham Machen and the Crisis of Conservative Protestantism in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 1–5.

88. Edgar J. Goodspeed, “Why Translate the Bible?” EGC 28:13.

89. Henry Sloane Coffin to Edgar J. Goodspeed, December 8, 1931, EGC 2:9

90. R. W. G., Congregationalist (September 13, 1923).

91. Lippmann, Walter, A Preface to Morals (1929; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

92. In the 1930s, Goodspeed translated the Apocrypha, and, with it, the Complete Bible: An American Translation was published in 1939. Goodspeed's translation of the Apocrypha remains popular (still in print by Vintage Press) long after his New Testament translation has been superceded.

93. Goodspeed, As I Remember, 190. Exact sales figures are no longer available from the University of Chicago Press. For comparison, Goodspeed's American Translation rivaled in sales C. I. Scofield's influential and best-selling dispensationalist study Bible. Scofield's work, released in 1909 and published by Oxford University Press, sold a million copies by 1930. A copy of Goodspeed's “Short Bible” even made its way into the hands of Chiang Kai Shek via Sherwood Eddy. See EGC 3:10.

94. Gideons to the University of Chicago Press, September 8, 1941, EGC 4:2.

95. Goodspeed, As I Remember, 155. As Goodspeed noted, the literary and linguistic arguments for modern-language translations prevailed. Both the Catholic revised New Testament of 1941 and the Revised Standard Version (NT, 1946) extensively used the principles of modern-language translation. Goodspeed, along with James Moffatt, W. R. Bowie, M. Burrows, H. J. Cadbury, C. T. Craig, F. C. Grant, and A. R. Wentz, served on the committee of New Testament revisers for the RSV. Allen Paul Wikgren notes that “the influence of the Goodspeed and Moffatt versions are (happily) apparent in the revision and may be clearly seen in the use of unusual vocabulary and phraseology, especially where complete verses or sentences represent a rather free rendering of the Greek.” Wikgren discerns this influence especially in Luke 19:48, John 8:44, Romans 2:11, 2 Corinthians 1:14ff. and 4:2, 2 Thessalonians 3:11, and Hebrews 9:16. See Wikgren, Allen Paul “A Critique of the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament,” in The Study of the Bible Today and Tomorrow, ed. Willoughby, Harold R. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 383–400 Google Scholar.