Censorship of the Bible

• TYPE OF WORK: Book
• WRITTEN: ca. Fourth century BCE—First century CE
• AUTHORS: Multiple scribes
• SUBJECT MATTER: Sacred text of Christianity

SIGNIFICANCE: Because the Bible is the sacred book of Christianity, it has frequently been the object of censorship in struggles to control religious belief and practices among Christians

The Bible contains books that are sacred in both Judaism and Christianity. The first portion, called by Christians the Old Testament, elaborates God’s dealings with his chosen people, the Jews, and is sacred to Judaism and Christianity. The second portion, referred to by Christians as the New Testament, describes events associated with the life of Jesus, whom Christians call the Christ, and the early church and its teachings. This latter portion is not accepted as scripture by Judaism. When Jewish and Christian scriptural canons developed over several centuries, some texts were disputed and ultimately excluded from official canons through theological debates and decisions by religious communities and church authorities. Some Christians view certain other books known as the Apocrypha as an integral part of the Bible. The Bible has been a frequent target of censorship efforts, both among Christians themselves, who sometimes disagreed vehemently over its proper interpretation, and by government authorities hostile to Christian faith and thus hostile to its central sacred text.

The Bible and the Vernacular

Christians themselves have sometimes been ready to censor certain forms in which the Bible has been made available to lay Christians. In the decades immediately prior to and following the Protestant Reformation, Roman Catholic authorities were often vigorous opponents of attempts to make the Bible available in the vernacular, that is, in a tongue readily accessible to lay readers, unlike Hebrew, Greek, or Latin. Some medieval church authorities discouraged unauthorized vernacular translations of Scripture because they feared inaccurate interpretation and the spread of heretical teachings. Ordinary men and women were expected to listen to learned authorities teach about the Scriptures, rather than read the Scriptures themselves. For centuries, the learned had no problem enforcing their preferences in this regard, as only they knew how to translate the Hebrew, Greek, or Latin texts. Shortly before the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, a handful of scholars became convinced that common people would benefit from reading the Scriptures themselves, in their own tongues. William Tyndale, for example, partially completed translating the Bible into English, with the aim of allowing “the boy that driveth the plough” to understand its words and teachings. Opponents of Tyndale’s enterprise ultimately captured him, however, and had him strangled and burned at the stake in 1536. With the advent of the Reformation, the number of those committed to the work of translation swelled, and their efforts began to produce translation after translation of the Bible into languages that ordinary men and women could read. Where the Roman Catholic Church still held political power, however, it frequently used this power to staunch the ever-increasing current of vernacular translations, even burning copies along with other banned materials. In some regions during periods of religious conflict, unauthorized translation or distribution of vernacular Bibles could lead to severe penalties, especially when associated with charges of heresy.

The Bible and Indecency

Long after vernacular translations of the Bible had become commonplace, a new crop of censors arose who feared that certain passages in the Bible—notably, those describing violence or containing sexual content—might be too much for some souls to handle. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, a steady stream of “family” Bibles began to appear, in which indelicate passages had been excised or dislocated from the main body of text to facilitate the public reading of the Bible in mixed company. The most famous of these attempts to make the sacred scriptures of Christianity fit for ordinary consumption was that undertaken by the great American lexicographer Noah Webster. Webster produced his version of the Bible in 1833. In some respects, this version, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, in the Common Version, with Amendments of the Language, simply revised the text of the ever-popular but seriously dated King James Bible to make its language conform more closely to usage of that era. However, Webster also made changes in the text with an eye to cloaking what he viewed as indecent matters in either obscurity or euphemism.

In 2007, in Hong Kong, more than two thousand complaints against the Bible were made to the Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority (TELA); however, officials did not find it indecent or improper enough to merit sales restrictions.

Modern Political Correctness

Less concerned with indelicacy than sexism and racism, some translators of the Bible have launched efforts to purge it of its perceived male chauvinism and racially offensive language. In 1995, the prestigious Oxford University Press introduced The New Testament and Psalms: An Inclusive Version. The “inclusion” that this version achieves is purchased at the price of excluding the male-specific and patriarchal language of the original text of the Bible. Biblical references to God as “Father” were altered in some passages to make the translation more gender-neutral while retaining many traditional references to God. Concern about anti-Semitic interpretations led some inclusive translations to revise passages referring collectively to “the Jews” in order to avoid language viewed as promoting anti-Semitic attitudes. Whereas the King James Version asks what fellowship hath light with darkness, the editors of the inclusive version ask instead what fellowship hath day with night.

The Bible in Public Schools

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution forbids the government from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Applying this clause, the US Supreme Court has held that public schools cannot sponsor devotional religious exercises or otherwise attempt to advance the cause of religion in the public schools. For example, the Court held in Stone v. Graham (1980) that a school may not post a copy of the Ten Commandments from the Bible on a wall, even if for the alleged purpose of informing the students of an important source of the Western legal tradition. Nevertheless, the Court has also declared that the Establishment Clause poses no barrier to the objective study of the Bible for its literary or historical significance.

School officials have sometimes demonstrated uncertainty about the place of student-initiated study of the Bible in light of the Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause holdings. Apparently, prior to the mid-1980s, some school officials viewed the Court’s decisions as requiring that school officials prevent any religious use of the Bible by students at school, even in clubs and informal gatherings not sponsored by the school itself. In 1984, Congress acted to abolish these attempts by school officials to restrict private student-initiated Bible study and religious fellowship by passing the Equal Access Act. This law provides that religious students in secondary schools must be given the same right to Bible study, or other forms of religious fellowship, as are accorded other noncurriculum student clubs to pursue their chosen interests.

Into the twenty-first century, the Bible continued to face censorship. In China, the Bible is unavailable from online bookstores, and in North Korea, having a Bible is a punishable offense. Still, complaints about the Bible’s violent and sexual content led the Davis School District in Utah to remove the book from elementary and middle school libraries in 2023, though the district later returned it to those libraries.

Bibliography

Lawton, David. Faith, Text, and History: The Bible in English. U of Virginia P, 1990.

Miller, Timothy C. “The Bible.” Censorship: A World Encyclopedia. Edited by Derek Jones. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2015.

O’Neil, Robert M. “The Bible and the Constitution.” Censored Books: Critical Viewpoints. Edited by Nicholas J. Karolides, Lee Burress, and John M. Kean. Scarecrow, 1993.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Reformation of the Bible/The Bible of the Reformation. Yale UP, 1996.

Pickrell, Ryan. “Christians Caught with a Bible in North Korea Have Faced Death and Had their Families, Including Children, Thrown in Prison for Life, a New Report Says.” Business Insider, 26 May 2023, www.businessinsider.com/getting-caught-christian-north-korea-death-life-in-prison-report-2023-5. Accessed 5 May 2025.

Reed, Annette Yoshiko. “The Afterlives of New Testament Apocrypha.” Journal of Biblical Literature, 2015, pp. 401–25.

“X-Rated Bible?” U.S. Catholic, 2007, p. 10.