Apocrypha Controversy

The Apocrypha controversy of the 1820s was a debate around the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the issue of the inclusion of the Apocrypha in Bibles it printed for missionary work. The Society did include the Apocrypha in Bibles for use in continental Europe, where it was normal for Protestant as well as Catholic readers to have the texts of the Apocrypha. Robert Haldane criticised this policy.[1]

The British and Foreign Bible Society had in fact dropped the Apocrypha from its bibles published in English in 1804. This decision broke with the tradition of Myles Coverdale, of consolidating the Apocrypha between the two Testaments.[2]

Haldane and William Thorpe began a general campaign in 1821, against all Bibles with the Apocrypha and their printing with funds raised from British sources. The Society was divided over the issue, but the majority view favoured the existing policy of case-by-case inclusion. In Spring 1826 an attempt to reach a compromise with the Haldane ("Recordite") view broke down. As a result, the major Scottish branches in Edinburgh and Glasgow left the Society. Most Scottish branches followed, and a few in England.[3]

Notes
  1. David W. Bebbington (9 March 2004). Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. Routledge. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-134-84767-9.
  2. Daniel Daniell (2003). The Bible in English. Yale University Press. p. 187. ISBN 0-300-09930-4.
  3. Leslie Howsam (8 August 2002). Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Cambridge University Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-521-52212-0.

Further reading
  • A Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen: Supplement Abercrombie-Wood, By Robert Chambers, Thomas Thomson, 1855, Blackie, pp. 276-78, a detailed and impassioned account from a strongly Protestant perspective.
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