How The Bible Came to the Philippines
(Special Document)
When we speak of the coming of the Bible to the Philippines, we really refer to the Protestant Bible. The Catholic bible (Latin Vulgate) was in the hands of priests and friars in the Islands—but not within reach of the common believers, in fact it was forbidden for them to have a Bible. Reading had to be guided by the Church as the sole authority on interpreting the Bible.
History recalls several people, among them Filipino leaders, who were put in prison or deported to faraway jails like Chefarina or Marina Islands, just because a Bible, or a portion of it, was found in their possession. The Bible—read outside the church—was a subversive book.
There are many stories about the way the first Bibles got into the islands, some of them supported by historical data, and most of them only hearsay. But the most reliable record starts with the efforts of the British and Foreign Bible Society to introduce the Bible into the country in the second half of the XIX century.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND (Theoretical View)
1. We have no certain data of how the first Bible got into the Philippines, but Valentino Sitoy, in his work “An Aborted Spanish Protestant Mission to the Philippines”, citing reports of the Bible Societies, says that by 1853 there were more than 1000 bibles and more than 100 New Testaments circulating in the Islands.
2. There also is another story that an English businessman disguised the cover of several Spanish New Testament and so distributed them in Manila.
3. It is also said that many Bibles were brought in during the liberal period of Governor-General De La Torre’s rule (1869-1871). But most attempts to bring in the Bible ended in failure and confiscation. Freedom to read the Bible was never granted during the Spanish regime.
4. The next story that we have is the attempt of Father Manrique Alonso Lallave and Senior Felipe P. Castells to introduce a shipment of Bibles into the country. Lallave was a priest (either Augustinian or Dominican) in Pangasinan. He is said to have received a Protestant Bible from a British sea captain. The Bible reading resulted in inner changes and his preaching became Protestant, so he was removed from his position and sent back to Spain. In 1872 he renounced Roman Catholicism and joined the Spanish Christian Church, which was Protestant. Next year he translated the Gospel of Luke into Pangasinan, the first translation of the Bible into a Filipino language. He continued his translations and nearly completed the whole New Testament. He became a Protestant pastor and the father of seven children. In his fifties in 1889, he returned to the Philippines accompanied by a young Spanish Protestant pastor, Felipe P. Castells. Both came under the auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Lallave and Castells were not allowed to bring the Bibles out of the Custom House. Nevertheless, it seems they were able to smuggle some of them. Once the Spanish authorities discovered the real objective of the visit, both men were arrested. Alonso Lallave died suddenly. Two months later his daughter received a cable from the doctor: “Don Manrique Alonso died of a bad fever”. But two subsequent messages from Manila told her that her father had been poisoned. Castells was released from jail through the British consul’s intercession, on condition that he leaves the Islands immediately.
5. There are other stories. In the archives of the Presbyterian Historical Society is found a handwritten note over a portion of the Bible. It says: “This copy of the Gospel of Matthew in Spanish was given to Domingo Nocum, local evangelist of the Presbyterian Church at San Francisco de Malabon, Cavite, in the Philippine Islands, by the Filipino priest Zamora, who was later executed by the Spanish Government in 1872.He kept it for many years and, by means thereof, came into some knowledge of the Gospel. He hid the Gospel with two copies of Rizal’s works, also prohibited by the Spaniards, in a box under a culvert. When the Revolution was over, he found the book had been consumed by white ants, leaving only the Gospel”. James B. Rogers, the first Presbyterian missionary, sent this Bible to the American Bible Society for its collection of rare Bibles.
6. Another story of the introduction of the Bible in the Philippines is that of Paulino Zamora. He was a nephew of Jacinto Zamora, one of the three Filipino priests executed in 1872 accused of having participated in the uprising of Cavite in January that year. There are two versions of how Paulino got a Bible.
· According to Gerald H. Anderson in his work Studies in Filipino Church History, Paulino smuggled a Bible into Manila through a sea captain. Curios about the book that launched a Reformation in Europe, he started to read the Bible. To get away from the scrutiny of the Spanish authorities, he moved his family to Bulacan.
· The other version, by Valentino T. Sitoy in his book Several Spring: One Stream, is that Paulino got the Bible through the efforts of Alonso Lallave and Enrique P. Castells.
Whichever was true, what is certain is that in Bulacan, Paulino soon invited some friends to read the Bible with his family. One night—shortly after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1896—Spanish soldiers surrounded his house and he was arrested. Without trial, he was deported to the Chefarina Island in the Spanish Mediterranean Sea. He remained there until the Treaty of Paris was signed at the end of 1898.
