In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492‐1783 Mark A. Noll. Oxford University Press, 2016.

In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 Mark A. Noll. Oxford University Press, 2016.Mark A. Noll, in a book "written first for historical illumination," In the Beginning Was the Word, sets out to examine the presence and impact of the Bible against the historical background of American history from 1492 to 1783 (19). Noll shows how the Bible served as an authoritative text for the colonists, influencing the fight for independence from Britain as well as for the abolition of slavery in a country seeking liberty. He gives readers "the Bible" in contrast to some mosaic of genres or collection of internally diverse texts, these read not in their original form but in translation (17). The Bible he references throughout is the King James Version (1611), this having "achieved an overwhelmingly dominant position for almost all public purposes from early in the colonial period until deep into the twentieth century" (17). Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution with a mission "to promote the kind of specialized research at the highest level" which is demonstrated in his careful and extensive scholarly investigation. For Noll, the Bible clearly is "the unique record of God's dealing with people over the ages..." but more than a record, a "Bible" in which God speaks himself through revelation (18, 4). He employs an empirical methodology to present "an explanatory narrative about changes over time for the place of Scripture" and to provide a balanced assessment of the impact of colonial America's engagement with Scripture for positive and malevolent outcomes (21). This work will likely be read by anyone interested in the widely read Bible, Protestant history in America, and early American history. The book contains fortyone pages of notes, an extensive bibliography of both primary and secondary sources, and, in addition to a General Index, impressively, a sweeping Scripture Index referencing the Bible as a complete work.Noll makes an early point that "The Bible's message-its dynamic accounts of divine creation, divine judgment, divine mercy, and divine guidance-has been appropriated with many differences in countless variations" and remarks that because of the power of the message, "Scripture has featured in public life wherever it has been heard, read, learned, and inwardly digested" (1). From Noll's personal engagement comes a "public history" in a narrative propelled by a Protestant claim to follow the Scripture above all human authority; to use the Bible as a guide, whether primary, the one essential, the crucial, or the only guide, for the lives of Christian believers; and to use it to function within an assumed Christendom and organic "unified social-political-cultural whole" (2). More succinctly than in the chapter layout, Noll explains that biblicism (the profession to follow only the Scriptures) rose "as a powerful force in England during the second half of the sixteenth century," flourished into the middle of the next century, and then receded but "for different reasons and with quite different effects in the mother country and in the colonies" (9).Chapter One shapes the story narrated in the rest of this book (and a proposed "second volume to come on the United States' nineteenth century" [7]) by introducing the controversies laid out in the Reformation concerning how humans could be reconciled to God and how they could know (7). Thus, Chapter One tells the story of Protestant beginnings, with Chapter Two treating the English biblical texts that shaped the history of North America, the Tyndale New Testament, and the Authorized King James (1611). Chapters Two and Three explain how Protestant confessions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries "articulated principles of supreme biblical authority and specified several appropriate secondary authorities" (10) while Chapter Three, more specifically, investigates the ironical context of the Bible only as the religion of Protestants. …