Transcripts from
Tennessee versus John Scopes,
1925
Excerpted from Famous Trials in American History.

Toward the end of the trial, Darrow put Bryan on the stand to give expert testimony on the Bible. The transcript excerpts below include some reference to crowd noises. With hundreds of people standing in the back of the courtroom, Judge John T. Raulston feared the floor might collapse and moved the trial outdoors, where about 5,000 people listened to the heated exchanges between Bryan and Darrow. The transcripts also include comments from "the Court" (i.e. Judge Raulston, who was a conservative Christian). -smv

Summary of the Defense

The purpose of the defense will be to set before you all available facts and information from every branch of science to aid you informing an opinion of what evolution is, and of what value to progress and confort is the theory of evolution, for you are the judged of the law and the facts, and the defense wishes to aid you in every way to intelligent opinion.

The defense denies that it is part of any movement or conspiracy on the part of scientists to destroy the authority of Christianity or the Bible. The defense denies that any such conspiracy exists except in the mind and purpose of the evangelical leader of the prosecution. The defense maintains that the book of Genesis is in part a hymn, in part an allegory and work of religious interpretations written by men who believe that the earth was flat and whose authority cannot be accepted to control the teachings of science in our schools.

The narrow purpose of the defense is to establish the innocence of the defendant Scopes. The broad purpose of the defense will be to prove that the Bible is a work of religious aspiration and rules of conduct which must be kept in the field of theology.

The defense maintains that there is no more justification for imposing the conflicting views of the Bible on courses of biology than there would be for imposing the views of biologsts on courses of comparative religion. We maintain that science and religion embrace two separate and distinct fields of thought and learning.

We remember that Jesus said: "Render unto Ceasar's the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's."

This is wholly improper, argumentative. It is not a statement as to what the issues are. Your honor has already held that this act is constitutional, it being the law of the land, there is but one issue before this court and jury, and that is, did the defendant violate the statute. That statute interprets itself, and says that whenever a man teaches that man descended from a lower order of animals as contradistinguished from the record of the creation of man as given by the word of God, that he is guilty. Does the proof show that he did that, that is the only issue, if it please the honorable court, before this jury. . . .