Excursus on Dake

Thinking about Bibles in the Holiness churches of my childhood this morning. Thompson Chain Reference was standard issue. Everyone who wanted to study the Bible had one of these. (Needless to say, Holiness churches were KJV-only.) The conceit of the Thompson–and what made it appealing to Holiness folks–was that it was not a study Bible full of “man’s opinions”; it was a study Bible that directed you back to the text itself. Of course, it’s clear to anyone reading this claim critically that the building of the chain was itself an ideological task. What verses were included as a link, and which were not? Oddly, apart from one I’ll mention momentarily, I don’t recall any serious contender to Thompson as a Holiness study Bible. Scofield was known to those who were really into dispensationalism (the accepted eschatology of the Holiness folks) but it would have been particularly niche, and very rarely owned by a layperson. The distant second to Thompson was the Dake study Bible, which I’ve…