So what was this obscure verse from the Old Testament prophets doing in newsprint so often in America’s centennial year?

Then Mullen figured it out: Samuel Tilden was making a run for president that year, against Rutherford B. Hayes. And the Republican was using “The Lord called Samuel” as a campaign slogan of sorts.

That’s the sort of historical tidbit that Mullen, a George Mason University professor, has turned up since he put the Bible and 11 million pages of old newspapers into a computer and mashed the two together.

Bible verses were once everywhere in newspapers. Nineteenth-century periodicals printed Sunday school lessons, ran Bible clubs for readers and circulated sermons. Editorials alluded to well-known scriptural references, and verses even turned up again and again as the punch lines of jokes.

Two New Testament verses that contain the “Golden Rule.” Can you guess why their use fluctuated over time? (Screenshot from America’s Public Bible, used with permission)

Mullen didn’t have to read all those newspapers himself. He coded Bible verses into a computer, and sent the computer looking for matches to those phrases in the newspapers archived online by the Library of Congress’s “Chronicling America” project. When the computer came back with results, he trained it how to recognize which ones were true matches.

The tool still gets some false positives, Mullen said, but it’s about 90 percent accurate.

“Any human who’s been to a few Sunday school lessons is going to be a lot better at picking up on these references and allusions,” Mullen said. “But humans are a lot slower.”

He’s a proponent of “digital history” — the idea that computers can let historians make discoveries they never would have made manually, just like mathematicians or physicists. He’s also a scholar of American religion, and plans to use the tool, which he called America’s Public Bible, in his own work.

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