Thuesen on Mauro, Wilkinson, Fuller

Peter Johannes Thuesen, an historian of the United States and of American religion, and a Professor at Indiana University Indianapolis, offers his perspective on the battle for the English Bible, in his book In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Here are a few excerpts.

On page 61, Thuesen relates that Philip Mauro in the 1920s “resurrected the late Dean Burgon’s arguments for an American audience. Hidebound conservatives were against not only higher criticism but also lower criticism and, in some cases, any revision of the Authorized Version. Mauro feared that modern textual critics and translators had imbibed too much German higher-critical ideology, thereby rendering even well-intended Bible revision subversive of Christian truth.”

Thuesen on page 62 notes Benjamin Wilkinson following the work of Mauro. “Wilkinson echoed Mauro when he complained that the Revised Version had been ‘built almost entirely on the Vatican Manuscript, kept in the Pope’s library, and upon the Sinaiticus, found in a Catholic monastery.’ Yet he carried the argument a step further, pointing out a number of passages where the Revised Version rendering read like the ‘Jesuit Bible,’ that is, the Rheims New Testament of 1582.” 

One page 118 Thuesen connects David Otis Fuller to the “McIntire faction” mentioning his speech at Carl McIntire’s American Council of Christian Churches in 1956, saying “‘Without a moment’s hesitation I can say that this ‘Revised Standard Version of the Gospel Perverts’ is the vilest, boldest, most deliberately devilish attack upon the holy Word of God and the holy Son of God in the past two thousand years.’ Fuller surveyed the destruction wreaked upon the Bible by modern textual criticism and thanked Carl McIntire for defending Holy Writ from its modernist assailants.”

Page 65 provides something of a summary of the conservative support for the King James Bible. “Wilkinson’s indictment of the Revised Version, published nearly a half-century after the translation itself, appeared to beat a dead horse, yet in succeeding decades new Bible battles would lend his work perennial relevance. Indeed, treatises by the Revised Version’s most colorful opponents—Burgon, Mauro, and Wilkinson—would enjoy a remarkable shelf-life as late twentieth-century Protestant conservatives reprinted them as virtual classics. Equally notable was the ecumenical character of opposition to Bible revision. Wilkinson made no reference to his Seventh-day Adventist affiliation in Our Authorized Bible Vindicated, concentrating instead on issues of broad evangelical appeal. Mauro, who rejected the Episcopal Church in favor of A. B. Simpson’s Christian and Missionary Alliance, cited the Anglican Dean Burgon without compunction, as did Wilkinson. Similarly, David Otis Fuller, a minister in the General Association of Regular Baptists, during the 1970s edited reprints of works by Burgon, Mauro, Wilkinson, and others—all without apparent regard for denominational loyalties. ¶ Such pragmatic alliances among like-minded Protestants would take on additional significance in future Bible battles, for although modern critical consciousness drove conservatives and liberals apart, it also fostered intraconservative and intraliberal cooperation. The legacy of ‘King Truth’ was therefore ambiguous—as relentlessly paradoxical as the legacy of sixteenth century Protestant-Catholic disputation. The old Reformation debates over authority and interpretation would help set the terms of twentieth-century translation controversies, generating in the process rich rhetorical and ecumenical ironies.”