“This is 1864!” from “Fun” (1864)

This is 1864!

Matt Morgan

Fun (21 September 1864): 15

Peterborough: — “Eh, hor! Eh, hor! It’s all very well, Mr. Colenso, but you don’t preach here! [continued below]

This depiction of a muzzled Bishop Colenso comments on one of the more explosive religious issues of mid-Victorian Britain — whether or not the Bible was literally true in every word and every detail, even in its English translation. [continued below]

Bishop Colenso and the Literal Truth of the Bible

Source: Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

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When John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal in South Africa, was working with Zulu parishioners to create a Zulu translation, his assistants, experienced herdsmen, pointed out the impossibility of the numbers of animals reputed to have crossed a river. Taking a careful look at the numbers used in the Old Testament, Colenso came upon numerous inconsistencies and contradictions and realized they were the kind of metaphors used in oral cultures, where, say, “100,000 animals” might mean little more than “a very large number of animals.” When Colenso published his incendiary The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined in 1862, it caused a great scandal, particularly when it stated that

the Pentateuch, as a whole, cannot personally have been written by Moses, or by anyone acquainted personally with the facts which it professes to describe, and, further, that the (so-called) Mosaic narrative, by whomsoever written, and though imparting to us, as I fully believe it does, revelations of the Divine Will and Character, cannot be regarded as historically true.

Church authorities attempted to remove him from his post but failed. The sympathies of the cartoon become apparent when one realizes that Bishop Peterborough, who attempted to silence Colenso, appears as an ass.

More than a year later Fun referred to the affair in one of its brief punning jokes, entitled “Præ-Adamite”: “Our own charity boy says that BISHOP COLENSO is right, and Adam was not the first man, because though he is mentioned, at the beginning of Genesis, the ‘1st Chap.’ comes before him” (15 December 1865: 139). Ugh. — George P. Landow

Last modified 19 February 2016