Edgar J. Goodspeed

"Four hundred years ago the Bible of England was the . Few men could read it, and fewer women. For knowledge of it ordinary people were dependent upon the clergy, who were themselves none too well acquainted with its meaning. It was at such a time that a young Oxford man, William Tyndale, undertook the task of making a translation of the New Testament directly from the into the , and thus laid the foundation of the . The disfavor with which the medieval church regarded the circulation of the Bible among the people had found expression in a regulation of the , passed in 1229 , that no layman should be allowed to have any book of the Bible, especially in a translation, except perhaps the ."

"Not a few of the experienced times of , when in s they felt themselves in the very presence of God, heard him speak, and saw celestial realities."

"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 : the public reception of 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."