https://www.unz.com/article/ted-cruz-the-gaza-war-and-the-scofield-bible/
Cyrus Scofield was born in 1843 in Lenawee County, Michigan and died in 1921 in New York City. The name “Scofield” figures prominently in the formation and popularization of a unique eschatology that shapes the current world view of millions of American Protestants, including several leading members of the US Congress. The provenance of this eschatology, known as premillennial dispensationalism (PD), has a long, complex history. The current, popular American version of it is largely the creation of 19th-century British and American, low church Protestants. It is a theologically based set of beliefs relating to the approaching end of world as prophesied in certain chapters of the Bible in which the state of Israel figures prominently.
Which brings me to the predominant vehicle for the dissemination of PD, popularly known as the Scofield Reference Bible (SRB), bearing the name of its creator, C. I. Scofield.
It is a useful fact for trivia night that Oxford University Press, one of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, has a bestselling book of all time that it doesn’t often celebrate. That bestseller is the Scofield Reference Bible, edited by C. I. Scofield, first published in 1909, updated in 1917, and revised in 1967. In its first few decades, the SRB sold more than two million copies and, by one estimate, has sold more than ten million copies in its lifetime. It still sells in various formats in dozens of languages. (See The Bestselling Reference Bible That Remade American Evangelicalism)
The SRB is not an ordinary English bible, like the Gideon Bible. For the theologically untutored lay-reader, who is unprepared for making sense of such a vast compellation of ancient history, myth, poetry and prophecy, it provides a path that leads to a “true understanding” of God’s plan for the world and mankind. It is replete with topical references connecting themes, annotations, chronologies, etc. The SRB is overlayed with an elaborate hermeneutical architecture designed to lead the reader’s understanding of the text to conform to the PD eschatological vision.
