Ireland and the Bible can conjure a spectrum of mental images ranging from the magnificent ninth-century Book of Kells to the more contemporary bellicose rantings of some Ulster fundamentalists. Yet the rich tapestry of Irish history is interwoven with biblical threads of varying hues including the monastic Irish church which spawned numerous illustrated manuscripts and biblical scenes depicted on various high crosses. Ireland was not unique, though certainly persistent, in hosting ‘Bible wars’ in which all protagonists acknowledged a general biblical authority but developed particular sets of proof texts to support opposing religious beliefs and practices. The failure of the Protestant Reformation in Ireland seeded the knotweed of religious conflict in which the Bible was frequently utilised as a quarry from which to mine further ammunition.
The genre of this volume is certainly not traditional theology as it in no way melds into customary sub-sections such as biblical studies, church history, systematic or practical theology. While elements of the aforementioned are all present to some degree, this book comprises a collection of twenty-one thematically arranged essays which focus upon aspects of Irish social and cultural familiarity with the Bible. Clearly the Bible is deeply embedded in Irish society and this central notion is explored through the lens of reception history in a variety of spheres. This collection of essays represents a major contribution within the rapidly expanding field of reception history in biblical studies.
The essays explore beyond traditional biblical interpretative and exegetical traditions and helpfully map out a broader landscape encompassing the use, influence and impact of the Bible in Ireland. In addition to organised religion, and much more commonly, Bible ideas and influence have percolated into Irish society at several levels as evidenced in numerous literary analogies and commonly expressed outlooks, for example the linking of sacrificial death in the Easter Rising and the crucifixion of Jesus.
Eighteen of the twenty-one contributors work in Ireland and the entire scholarly input is multidisciplinary, including, for example, ethnomusicology, philosophy and English literature. The range of scholarly expertise also reveals a variety of methodologies which enhances the sweep of reception history examined in this volume.
The essays are grouped under four categories; transmission, identity, reciprocal influences and cultural and artistic appropriation. The first section covers textual production and transmission from the pre-Norman to the twentieth-century with a quest to discover how ordinary people accessed biblical material. Fearghus Ó Fearghail's essay explores the tortuous production of Bible text in the Irish language with peaks in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and consequential influence on language and Bible society conflicts. The second section investigates the place of the Bible in the establishment of varying Irish identities in which religious affiliation played a major role and examples range from the 1641 depositions to contemporary Ulster evangelicals and African Pentecostals in Dublin.
Joshua Searle's essay examines the use of the Bible in the recent Northern Ireland Troubles and notes the complex phenomena of fundamentalists extracting proof texts to support anti-Catholic and anti-ecumenical stances while others use the same sacred source to support dialogue and understanding in a divided community. The reciprocal influences section examines the role of engagement outside Ireland in shaping Irish Bible reception, including misplaced nineteenth-century assumptions that the Bible provided answers to emerging questions in other fields of learning such as history and archaeology. David Edgar's essay explores the provenance, global importance, preservation and exhibition of the Chester Beatty collection of biblical manuscripts.
The cultural and artistic appropriation section includes such diverse mediums as stained glass, music and the work of James Joyce. Amanda Dillon's essay explores how the graphic designs in the Book of Kells have become the defining visual cultural identity of Ireland, and discusses numerous aspects of the process including potential subliminal connections with patterns on the excrement daubed walls of Long Kesh during the blanket protest in the late 1970s. Suffice to say, the quaternary thematic arrangement of this volume aids the overall arrangement of the wide-ranging material in explaining something of the multiplicity of expressions of Bible reception in Ireland.
In addition to encompassing a lively collection of excellent essays, the major strength of this book that is that it clearly demonstrates the range, diversity and complexity of how the Bible has impacted upon life in Ireland. While each contributor focuses upon their own area of expertise, the resultant collection opens a panoramic view of how the Bible in particular and religion in general has played and continues to play a significant role within a rapidly changing Ireland.
It is the nature of diverse essay collections such as this that the book profile is as wide as it is deep. While Ireland and the reception of the Bible admirably succeeds in demonstrating that Bible reception history merits a seat at the biblical studies table, it is also true that specialists in any of the essay areas may bemoan the restricted individual word count allocation. Such criticism is unfair and this book represents a notable accomplishment in providing a fascinating snapshot of the new, multidisciplinary and rapidly growing field of reception history.
