I’m researching a snake-oil type medical scam at the moment (about a supposed miracle cure for every type of visual impairment) and one of the things that happens in the long rambling video salesletter thing is that the main presenter guy talks about how he was overjoyed to be able to read his father’s bible once more (after his supposed miraculous recovery from glaucoma and macular degeneration). He claims it’s the Bible his father carried with him at all times in active service in WWII and presented to him as a gift when he himself entered military service.
The claim is bullshit, because for one thing the bible he shows to the camera is a 6 by 9 inch study bible, which it seems unlikely a soldier would carry into battle.
This lie is further compounded by the fact that the bible shown is the NKJV, which was first published in 1982, you know, just a little bit too late to have been available in WWII.
But another thing that caught my eye was that the pages of the bible he showed had extensive scribbled notes, underlining and highlighting all over the pages (I mean, loads of it - to the extent of being useless except as a display of piety - if everything is underlined, nothing is).
I’m very familiar with the practice of writing/underlining/highlighting in a personal bible, within Evangenlical Christianity, but I’m wondering when this became a widespread practice. It seems to me like maybe this might not go back as far as the start of the Evangelical Movement as I feel that before the 20th century (maybe before the second half of the 20th century), people might have had a bit more reverence for the printed bible.
So when did it become a very widespread thing for Christians to do this?
The creation of marginalia is a very old practice, and goes back to medieval times. I particularly like the satirical illustrations added by Hans Holbein to his copy of Erasmus.
However I don’t know whether there was a taboo against writing in Bibles among Evangelicals at any point, so the practice you describe may be a recent one.
No apparentl distinctions between them - it was all just scribbly underlinings in black ballpoint.
Edit: actually, on rewatching the clip, it’s not as complete across the page as I remembered it being; I think my memory must have substituted an image from a friend’s bible I saw in the past.
The KJV has some extra verses many other versions do not, some have speculated that those extra verses were notes written in that got accidentally incorporated as Bible verses (as everything was hand written back then). Which seems to suggest that notes in Bibles may go way back.
I have such a Bible, and still find those useful and still will note it. Remember that the Bible is not a book, but a collection of books, thus decreasing the number of notes per book. I also have references to notes on the cover page where I have the topic discusses. And also the books are considered interconnected, so highlighting some of the interconnected verses do help in cross referencing, and again perhaps why the KJV has those extra verses as some of the extra verses appear elsewhere in the Bible.
Fair enough, but I suppose I’m really wondering when it became a thing for the whole congregation to be underlining and highlighting stuff in real time, all together.
Here’s a screenshot of one of the views from the scam video - I think we may be able to agree this has different qualities to Melville’s Marginalia…
I was going to suggest that it was always a bit of a thing to leave marginalia, but the point has been well-made already.
Although I’ve not looked at bibles, other cheap books were happily being annotated by their owners by the late 19th century with no sense of them ‘damaging’ a valuable object. It seems to be a late Victorian thing, allied to the later 19th century rise in cheaper papers and printing processes, and also literacy, where books became household consumables that could be used in various ways, rather than being treated as venerated objects. It became possible for the pious to have a personal mark-up copy they could keep and scribble on, as well as the fancy family copy.
Well, yes, I’ve witnessed many instances of Bible “study” being more about the display of piety than what I’d actually call studying, you know, attempting to truly understand what one is reading. Never underestimate the use of displays to groups standing.
This is not meant to diminish actual Bible study. I knew a person once who was very methodically going through the whole thing start to finish and would mark what they had already read/studied which could also in the end result in a very marked up book.
I met my late wife in 1980. The few years before, she had attempted to save her fading faith by joining an Evangelical church. The final nail in the coffin of her beliefs(besides the general rank hypocrisy), was what would fit under “My Bible Is More Underlined Than Yours” displays during the bible reading and the general attitudes of smug.
The current movement to cover the pages of the Bible in highlighting, underlining and notes in the margin is probably exacerbated by social media. I see it from time-to-time in my newsfeed from people who want to show how important God is in their life. They probably feel that the more markup they do in the Bible, the more it shows their devotion to God. Just like most social media, the people who see that may feel pressure to mark up their Bible in a similar manner. At a minimum, it at least shows that they have looked at those pages.
WAG here, but I suspect many people acquired the habit of underlining/highlighting and writing in books they were studying when they were in college. Which would suggest that the behavior the OP asks about would have arisen when it became more common for people in general, including Evangelical Christians, to have gone to college.
The later edition of the book may clearly indicate that the claim was false, but the size of the book does not.
During WWII, soldiers would often ask family members to send books to read. The Army actually tried to gather up a bunch of books for soldiers but folks higher in the chain of command wouldn’t approve the budget for it. So libraries all around the country got together and made large organized book donations to be sent to soldiers.
Some of these books were bibles.
These books came in all shapes and sizes. A common complaint was that they were often too bulky. While most soldiers carried pocket bibles, it is entirely possible that a soldier would have a 6x9 size bible. A lot of larger bulky books were carried into battle.
As the war progressed, the Army tried to reduce the bulk, both to ease shipping and to reduce the bulk that a soldier had to carry into battle, and would reject big bulky books gathered in book drives for soldiers. A bunch of publishers got together and started printing “Armed Services Editions” of books which were small enough to fit in a standard uniform pocket.
The size of Armed Services Editions books varied a bit, but they were generally around 6x4 inches.
Here is an Armed Services Edition compared to a normal edition:
When I was a Christian Teen back in the 1980s, I was encouraged to highlight, underline, annotate and otherwise abuse the shit out of my Bible. The church youth group version of “show your work,” as it were. And the youth pastor always a library full of fresh ones, in multiple translations, in case we wore one out.
May well be right. Personally I never acquired the habit of writing in books (bibles or otherwise); I would make my notes in a separate notebook. Having been a somewhat impoverished student, perhaps at the back of my mind I was thinking I would eventually resell the textbooks on the second hand market. The damn things were always ridiculously expensive anyway…
Which would also point to the annotations being post-WW2. Which is when the treating your “Study Bible” like a secondhand last-edition sociology textbook seems to have taken off in some churches especially Evangelicals.
My mother, a Christian missionary of sorts, and her father, a Presbyterian minister, and my Father, a Methodist lay preacher among other things, all made extensive notes while studying. But not in the bible.
I think that underlining in the book indicates an attitude of disposable text, seen in books you intend to discard later, (or return to the library after use )
The link to Melville above is interesting. In defending a position I have already adopted, against the evidence, I would say that (1) He’s an author. (2) He seems to have written in ‘erasable’ form, and (3) He seems to have been not an ‘evangelical Christian’, because his family apparently erased some of the comments.
Not directly to the issue of highlighting and marginalia: but pious people certainly had been writing in Bibles for quite a long time. They used to record births, deaths, and marriages in them; and some bibles were printed with blank pages for the purpose.
So people used to thinking of that as OK may well have seen no problem with writing on other pages as well.
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