English Bibles on Trial by Avner Shamir

Author:Avner Shamir [Shamir, Avner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315513959
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

4 The gesture

Faustus’ Bible burning was a direct, albeit nominal, way of demonstrating a break with Scripture. As demonstrated above and shown in this chapter, violence towards the Bible was not purely nominal and the message it communicated was far from being direct and clear; it depended on changing circumstances. However, if the physical reaction to the Bible is treated as a theoretical construct, the gesture seems to present some regularity. In the following, I analyse five aspects of the gesture and suggest ways of reading the gesture. First, I discuss the disfigured book and what the remains of a disfigured book signified. Second, I discuss the act of throwing the Bible away. What did this gesture of rejection intend to say? Third, I focus on the burning itself and discuss a few descriptions of imaginary Bible burnings. Fourth, I treat Bible burning as a rhetorical devise; a tool at the hand of controversialists and propagandists, by which attitudes regarding Scripture are expressed. Last, I offer a few ways in which contemporaries could resist the gesture of Bible burning.

The disfigured book

In a sequel to John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion, it was said that in 1688, in a church in the diocese of Dublin, rebels hung a black sheep from the pulpit and placed a Bible in front of it.1 The gesture was clear: The Protestant sermon was useless. This gesture was performed without defacing or destroying the Bible. Nonetheless, the effect was the same as if violence had been used: The Protestant Bible was rendered ineffective, silent and impotent. Paradoxically, the non-violent gesture might have been more effective than Bible burning, since the Bible was left as a witness to the act of ridicule and abuse. In contrast, when Bibles were burned, there was typically nothing left of the physical Bible to bear witness to the abuse. Indeed, burning (aside from what it symbolises) is about material annihilation. Yet, antagonism towards the Bible could sometimes best be expressed by forms of abuse and disfigurement that neither left the Bible untouched (as in the Church in Dublin) nor destroyed it entirely.

During the period discussed here, Bibles were torn apart, thrown into water, mud or gutters and were defaced and abused with bodily waste. They were not simply destroyed or removed and put away somewhere where they could do no damage; rather, they were disfigured. Rebels in Ireland, soldiers in England, the Quaker-schismatic Elizabeth Barens, and the politician Tom Wharton and his friends all disfigured Bibles. Charles Bull tore his wife’s Bibles apart before he burned them. In fact, soldiers, rebels, clergymen and laymen of all religious convictions abused religious books and religious objects in one way or another during the religious conflicts of the Reformation and post-Reformation era (some examples are given below). There was some logic to abusing and disfiguring the book of the Bible rather than entirely destroying it. Whereas burning annihilates paper, tearing it apart or making it wet and muddy annihilate the function of the book and leave the disfigured “body” of the book to bear witness to its defeat.

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