In 1893, Washington Gladden remarked that Americans aged fifty or older “are feeling that they have in their hands to-day a new Bible,” which was very different from what they had encountered in Sunday School, or in family readings. By implication, that “new Bible,” interpreted much more critically than hitherto, was something to which anyone under fifty was already well accustomed. Tracing the origin of that new Bible, Gladden cited a turning point that occurred in 1869, and which owed nothing to the insights of either Darwin or the Higher Critics, but rather to some thrilling documentary finds of the age. In the mid-century, German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf had found the ancient Bible manuscript known as the Codex Sinaiticus. Using this and other very early manuscripts, Tischendorf presented his extensively revised version of the Greek text of the gospels, and an English translation followed in 1869. This was Nathaniel S. Folsom, The Four Gospels Translated From The Greek Text Of Tischendorf, With The Various Readings Of Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Meyer, Alford, And Others, And With Critical And Expository Notes (Boston: A. Williams, 1869).
The book sold very well, mainly among clergy and seminarians, giving those readers “facts which to many of them were as novel as they were astounding.” They suddenly became aware of the countless variant readings that underlay every word of the Biblical text as it was commonly received:
and in the mind of every man who could put two and two together, the dogma of inerrancy at once went by the board. Those who had this book in their hands knew, then, that what they had been taught concerning the absolute verbal accuracy of the Bible could not be true. A human element there must be; the theory that omniscience had guarded the Book from the possibility of error was simply blown to fragments.