The Bible in America

The transition of the bible into the America’s is an interesting one. No one really thinks about how the bible was assimilated into the New World because we have been exposed to the Bible for centuries; that and with the amount of religious history in the United States, no one takes into account that we could have ever had difficulties with acquiring Bibles. There are two things that are bothering me about our history of the bible. In the reading In the Beginning: The King James Bible in America, McGrath notes that “the first English bible to be brought to the New World was the Geneva Bible” (293). I found this interesting since settlers didn’t arrive in the Americas until 1607, but the Geneva Bible was claimed to be too radical for the church in 1568. Did they take those bibles with them because that’s what they could afford?

Another hiccup I have is with Robert Aitken. This man “did not wait for congressional approval before” he produced the first English Bible in America (297). I understand that since their trade with Europe was cut off because of the war and they had no way of importing any bibles, that the people were desperate to get more bibles. However, not only did Aitken go through with printing the King James Bible without permission, he went ahead and changed it by omitting the Apocrypha in the original bible. If he had gained consent from either the church or the government officials, I would probably not feel so bad about his actions, but as it stands even though he took the back ways of fulfilling his own ambition he was eventually given permission to continue making copies of the bible.