Nothing did more to spread the theology of dispensationalism, including Christian Zionism, than the Scofield Bible.The Scofield Bible, published in 1909, was a King James Bible with interpretive notes written by Cyrus Ingerson Scofield.
Scofield was a Confederate veteran of the Civil War who became (briefly in all three instances) a lawyer, a state legislator, and a U.S. Attorney. He married Leontine LeBeau Cerrè, who was from a prominent Roman Catholic family in St. Louis. But he had a corruption problem, taking bribes from the railroad as U.S. Attorney for Kansas. He became a drunk and abandoned his wife and children. He also wrote fraudulent checks and was disbarred.
He had a conversion experience and began almost right away working with Dwight L. Moody, the foremost Christian evangelist in the United States in the late 19th Century. In October 1883, Scofield somehow managed to be ordained as a Congregationalist minister, even though his divorce from his first wife—granted to her on grounds of abandonment—was not even final! He remarried soon after the divorce became final, even though he was the spouse at fault, and could not biblically remarry. He never attempted to return to his original family.
He became the pastor of a small church in Dallas, Texas, which grew to over 500 members. In 1895, he accepted a call to a Congregational church in Northfield, Massachusetts. He began styling himself “Reverend C. I. Scofield, D.D.” but he had no formal theological training, much less a doctorate of divinity (earned or honorary).
This all might be believable, given that things were looser and freer in the 19th Century, but what happened next should raise some red flags. In 1901, eight years before Cyrus Scofield published his annotated Bible, he was admitted to membership in an elite private club in New York City called the Lotus Club. The membership included former presidents Grover Cleveland and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as famous literary figures such as Joseph Pulitzer and Mark Twain.
Somehow, although he was not a famous political or literary figure—again, this was before he published the annotated Bible—Scofield was nominated to membership in this club. We don’t know for certain why he was nominated, nor do we know how he could have paid the costs associated with the Lotus Club, including the annual membership fees and dues, and the cost of rooms and meals. Nor do we know how he found the money to take repeated trips to England and Europe during this time.
But anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see that some rich and important people fingered Scofield to do a job they wanted done.
One of the men who had to approve Scofield’s membership in the Lotus Club was Samuel Untermyer, a very prominent Jewish corporate lawyer, and a committed Zionist. Untermyer was instrumental in convincing Woodrow Wilson to appoint Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Brandeis was the first Jew ever to serve on the Supreme Court and, like Untermyer, a committed Zionist.
The other piece of evidence that should grab your attention is that Scofield’s annotated Bible, when it was published in 1909, was published by the Oxford University Press. There is no plausible explanation as to why Oxford University would publish an annotated Bible by an America pastor of middle-sized churches, a self-taught amateur theologian with no formal theological training, who had never published anything noteworthy in his entire life. Moroever, they published it with Scofield’s false claim of being a “Doctor of Divinity” in the front matter. How did that happen?
It is obvious that, behind the scenes, powerful people took Cyrus Scofield’s career in hand and made certain that nothing prevented him—no personal, professional, or financial problems—from producing his annotated Bible, and that it would be published by a prominent publisher who would add luster and scholarly gravitas to the project. I wouldn’t call this a “conspiracy theory,” I would call it a rather obvious conspiracy.
Below is a 25-minute video that explores all the things that don’t make sense about Scofield and his Bible.