Humble Protestant missionaries read the world solely through the Bible
Evidence
In the British context, the missionaries themselves were characteristically of relatively humble origins, members of the upper strata of the working class and the lower ranks of the middle class. Robert Moffat, the influential missionary who spent important years at the court of the mighty Ndebele king Lobengula, was a gardener. Norman McLeod, who worked in Japan as a missionary, had previously worked in the herring industry. The great Livingstone had started his working life in a cotton mill. The same goes for many of the other missionaries mentioned in the following remarks. Such men had a good knowledge of the Bible, but not perhaps of much else. Practically all the Protestant missionaries explicitly believed in the Bible as an undifferentiated body of information and as their sole and infallible source of authority both for belief and praxis. It was, in every sense, their guide to life. It was natural then that they should have sought in its pages the explanation for the strange things they encountered. Their reading of the Bible was mediated by a European culture in which Enlightenment concepts were present; the Bible was an infallible source but the way it was understood was a way specific to a time and a class. In this case, specifically, ideas equating noble savages with Jews were extracted from Scripture and Scripture was mined to explain strange peoples’ lives and customs. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 316 (
#complicates, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: British Protestant missionaries were working-class men who read the Bible through Enlightenment biases — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 316; British missionaries’ humble origins meant the Bible was their only analytical toolkit
Broader Connections
- British Protestant missionaries were working-class men who read the Bible through Enlightenment biases
#complicates(0.82) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 316