A Sociedade Bíblica e a promoção da influência educativa e civilizadora da Bíblia no Portugal do século XIX

The project of biblical diffusion promoted and led in the 19th century in Portugal by the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) was based on a fundamental objective: make the Bible available to the Portuguese. The universalization of the Scriptures, which the BFBS took an effort not to make dependent of the higher or lower literacy degrees of the environments where it intervened, corresponded nonetheless to a broad educational project which, being represented as a contraposition between «knowledge» and «ignorance», valued the direct to access to the biblical texts and endorsed literacy as a matter of principle. The history of the Bible Society in Portugal is therefore also that of the promotion of the «educating influence of the Bible», with a wide translation in the fields of teaching and youth dynamics, in the definition of moralising programs and in the diversification of the literary and theological Christian landscape.