This collection of essays commemorates the bicentenary of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), established in 1804, one of the most successful offspring of the Protestant evangelical awakening. It includes contributions from specialists in Bible translation, former employees of the Society, those with a serious amateur interest in its history, as well as professional historians.

The BFBS was both characteristic and uncharacteristic of the evangelical missionary societies founded in Britain at the dawn of the nineteenth century. It typified their expansive mood in the global extent of its ambition and in its confidence that the gulf between Anglican and Dissenter could be bridged by co-operation in the task of disseminating the Scriptures. It was, however, atypical of evangelical voluntary societies in at least four respects.

First, it regarded itself not as a missionary society but as a publishing society supplying the means of vital religion: its agents were forbidden to preach or engage in religious instruction; their business was confined to the production and distribution of Bibles. Second, it succeeded in maintaining its ecumenicity in an age when other originally interdenominational societies, such as the London Missionary Society, succumbed to the pressures of ecclesiastical partisanship. Third, wherever possible, this interdenominational principle was uniquely extended to co-operation on the European continent with Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox. Fourth, it saw itself, not as a British society that had the world as its field of operation, but as an international institution administered from London. The original committee, alongside fifteen Anglicans and fifteen Dissenters, included six members from continental Europe. Later, this Protestant internationalism acquired imperial overtones. A 1932 booklet describing the Society's grand Italianate headquarters in Queen Victoria Street declaimed that ‘it is in accord with the fitness of things that the world's chief distributing centre for the Book of books should stand in the heart of the world's greatest city’. The BFBS had rebuffed a suggestion from the American Bible Society in 1919 that an international association of national Bible societies be created by insisting that it was not a national Bible Society but an international body. Even after the formation of the United Bible Societies in 1946, traces of this Christian imperialism remained. As late as 1960 the secretary of the American Bible Society, when seeking a share in the supervision of Bible Society work in Africa, was forcibly reminded that Africa was ‘BFBS territory’.

The history of the BFBS revolves around the implications of its fundamental principle that its Bibles should be ‘without note or comment’. The phrase was intended to preserve the fragile peace between Anglican and Dissenter by guaranteeing that the Society had no denominational or doctrinal agenda to pursue. It also reflected the evangelical belief that the Bible was self-authenticating, capable of communicating its message without the aid of priest or theologian. In Britain it came under strain from over-zealous agents, especially women organized into their own local associations (of which there were 350 by 1819), who saw no need to distinguish between disseminating Scripture and disseminating the gospel. In Catholic Europe the insistence on circulating vernacular Bibles with no ecclesiastical interpretation attracted periodic condemnation, from Metternich in 1816 to Franco's Spain. In 1844 Gregory XVI issued a bull, which fulminated against the rapidly proliferating Bible societies as ‘daring Heralds of Infidelity and Heresy’. Nevertheless, the principle was indispensable to the BFBS goal of operating on an inter-confessional basis beyond the frontiers of Protestant Christendom.

Some of the most interesting essays in the volume describe the work of the Society in imperial Russia. Under Alexander I, the St Petersburg headquarters, established in 1812, flourished, becoming the largest distributor of Bibles in the Russian empire. The disapproval of Nicholas I forced its closure in 1826, but after the accession of Alexander II, the Society was able to collaborate with the Russian Orthodox Church in the Russian Synodal translation of 1875. Although this never replaced the use of the Old Slavonic text in the liturgy, it remains the most commonly used Russian version to this day. St Petersburg was also the scene from 1833 to 1835 of the first labours on behalf of the Society of George Borrow, remembered more for his subsequent and somewhat wayward itinerations in Spain, as recounted in his best-selling The Bible in Spain (1843).

If there is an overall argument to this disparate collection, it is that vernacular Bible translation, pace John and Jean Comaroff, proved a vehicle of cultural renaissance, even of political emancipation. In China, the translations attributed to European missionaries such as Robert Morrison were in fact heavily indebted to Chinese scholars whose efforts were crucial in the initial steps towards the ‘Sinofication’ of Christianity. In Canada, BFBS translations were frequently the first printed expressions of the languages of First Nation peoples, supplying them with cultural resources that retarded the process of assimilation. In the Levant, Bibles in modern Greek or karamanlidika (Turkish written in Greek characters) nourished the aspirations of Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire. In the Balkans, the first Bibles in Serbian (1868) and Croatian (1895) were milestones in the emergence of Serbian and Croatian as distinct literary languages, and hence were foundational to the creation of Serbian and Croatian identities.

This volume will not redraw the map of scholarship, but it will serve its purpose well if it alerts historians to the wealth of resources contained in the Society's extensive archive in the Cambridge University Library.