Jonathan Sheehan. The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. xvi + 273 pp. $37.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-11887-1.

Reviewed by John Holloran (Department of History, Oregon Episcopal School)
Published on H-German (February, 2007)

What is the Enlightenment Bible?

Explaining the creation of the Enlightenment Bible is the task Jonathan Sheehan sets for himself in this intriguing and learned book. Sheehan divides his book into three parts: "The Birth of the Enlightenment Bible," "The Forms of the Enlightenment Bible" and "The Cultural Bible." He begins his story by recounting the rise of the "vernacular" Bible of the sixteenth century, the Luther Bible and the King James Bible being the two most noteworthy examples. By the end of the book he is able to stretch his analysis well into the nineteenth century. Along the way Sheehan identifies five main forms that translations took during the eighteenth century: the documentary Bible, the moral Bible, the literary Bible, the archival Bible and, finally at the end of the century, the cultural Bible. These categories make for a useful heuristic to help organize the flood of translations Sheehan was able to find, the vast majority of which grew out of the initial process of "reinventing" the Bible in Germany that began in the final years of the seventeenth century.

According to Sheehan, Germans invented the Enlightenment Bible during the eighteenth century by employing English scholarly tools invented during the seventeenth. The Enlightenment Bible, as Sheehan defines it, however, was not a single authoritative translation, akin to the Vulgate, the King James or the Luther Bibles, but rather a new understanding of the Bible as "divinely inspired culture," instead of the literal word of God, which included a cultural treasure chest containing poetry, lessons, stories, ideas, ethics, outlooks, attitudes and so on. The emergence of this "enlightened" view of the Bible represented a dramatic shift in the way that eighteenth-century scholars, theologians and educators came to see the text and content of the Bible, as well as its study and translation. "The Enlightenment Bible" thus encompassed the familiar set of content found in the earlier confessional Bibles, but drew ultimately from many sources, in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, that could be variously translated for a variety of audiences to serve a variety of needs. Heavily annotated scholarly translations were prepared for those interested in philology, just as emphatically literal translations appeared that were designed to emphasize the strangeness and spiritual, even mystical, qualities of the Bible. Sheehan argues that the willingness of eighteenth-century thinkers and writers to accept that different translations could suit different audiences goes to the core of what was peculiarly "enlightened" about this new concept of the Bible.

For Sheehan, what made the Enlightenment "The Enlightenment" was the emergence of new modes of communication, new avenues made familiar by a generation of Enlightenment scholars, such as salons, coffee houses, newspapers, literary magazines, scientific academies, dictionaries, encyclopedias or in this case, an explosion of new Bible translations. Translating and then discussing the merits and techniques of the process and its products became the enlightened mode of perceiving the Bible. These scholars saw the Bible less as a set and stable authority and more as an artifact that needed curators to make it accessible. Prior to the eighteenth century, Sheehan argues, translating served confessional and theological ends and, once established, the confessional churches embraced the growing familiarity with and appreciation for a single received translation and began to discourage new attempts to "retranslate" the Bible.

The trouble came in the seventeenth century at the hands of British Deists, who mischievously noted the thousands of variations discernable from among the earliest manuscript editions of the Bible. Which variation was correct? If the word of God was to be taken authoritatively, which version was divinely inspired and which contained errors? But the Deists' questioning did not lead to a rush of new translations in England; the move to new translations happened instead in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

At its heart, the story Sheehan follows is the story of the many new translations that appeared and were published, reviewed, debated and occasionally censored. Here Sheehan's erudition and ability to tell an engaging story really shine. While his effort to depict the entire spectrum of Bible translations as constituting collectively a new cultural attitude about the "Enlightenment Bible" may strike more determinedly content-oriented scholars of "the Enlightenment" as disconcertingly non-committal, at other points Sheehan makes clear that he rejects the notion that the Enlightenment was secularizing or pagan or downright anti-clerical and anti-religious. Instead, he argues that far from eclipsing religion, the Enlightenment transformed the Bible into the cultural foundation of the West that it has since become, a process made possible once "Germans broke [the] essential link between theology and the Bible" (p. 90). And yet, breaking this link did not bring about the widespread secularism one might expect--instead, Sheehan observes, "religion is always receding and returning, and its repeated tidal flow is essential to the self-image of modernity, which can no more dispense with religion than embrace it" (p. ix). So while the Enlightenment did not kill off religion, it did succeed in rejecting the Bible's "prescriptive content" (p. ix) and thereby transformed and reconstructed religion. In the process of this transformation the Bible obtained the status of one of the "sturdiest pillars of Western 'culture'" (p. ix).

Sheehan's reproach of the secularization hypothesis comes out of a methodological privileging of culture over social or institutional history. Sheehan also clearly prefers cultural explanations to political or economic ones. At the end of chapter 5, where he discusses "the end of the pedagogical Bible," Sheehan rejects an explanation that attributes the disappearance of pedagogical Bibles, such as Karl Friedrich Barhdt's, to the change of regime following Frederick II's death and the "repression of this polemical form" as "that would be to miss the wider transformations in German cultural and intellectual life that made the pedagogical Bible obsolete" (p. 144). Sheehan's ability to trace these cultural shifts relies on the representative nature of the texts he identifies and discusses. The locations of cultural change are notoriously difficult to substantiate and document, however, as are attempts to explain the origins of a movement on the basis of religious devotion, and Sheehan is at his strongest when he recounts and discusses the evidence he has drawn together into his overarching narrative. But while reading his opening salvos, for example, when he anchors his story in late-seventeenth-century Germany, one begins to see how shaky the foundations for sweeping cultural change can be.

The larger historical problem Sheehan faces is how to account for the fact that this new urge to translate happened among German-speaking Protestants and not among English or, for that matter Dutch Protestants or French Catholics. He attributes the initial appearance of new translations to the unique character of "German Pietism," a movement whose appearance in the polemical press roughly corresponded to the first new translations. Sheehan largely embraces the term "Pietists" as it was used in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and accepts it as a term that identified a meaningful set of ideas and loyalties. By founding his theory of emergence on a cultural foundation such as the "emotional" or "mystical" qualities of the "Pietist" movement, Sheehan declares his willingness to take his sources at their published word. He attributes the appearance of new translations, such as Gottfried Arnold's, to the "zeal" of German Pietism with its "subjective religion of love and rebirth" and its desire to "break free from the chains of dogmatic theology" (p. 57). He claims, moreover, that "[t]he fire of religious reform would, in the end, set the stage for the Enlightenment Bible" (p. 57). Rarely does he accompany his discussion of these "Pietist" translations with accounts of the institutional, economic or political contexts of their respective authors. As a result, Sheehan's study has to rely on internal text-inspired explanations for the intentions, attitudes, motives and "cultural" perspectives signified by these translations and the reviews that accompanied them.

In contrast to the many scholars who have looked into the darker motives, political struggles, turf battles, petty feuds and economic circumstances of "enlightened" individuals, Sheehan portrays the age as principled, high-minded and largely civil in its disagreements. As a result of his approach, historians of eighteenth-century Germany are likely to take issue with Sheehan's larger explanation of how and why the transformation he so brilliantly documents transpired. Certainly grouping so many authors under a single category such as "Pietism" alone should give one pause. So many political and institutional factors were at work at the end of the seventeenth century in Protestant Germany, so many competing jurisdictions and principalities, shifting populations, territorial gains, new universities, growing bureaucracies, new periodicals and vernacular scholarship, to name but a few considerations, that one might well imagine a fuller explanation that could account for the rise of new biblical translations.

But rather than seeing Sheehan's approach as reason to dismiss it, however, one ought to see his work as opening a new line of inquiry. Sheehan makes a good point by looking to uncover more of what was written, widely discussed and debated in the eighteenth century and examining what his characters "did with the documents" (p. 59). Far too many historians go over the same material only to give it a new theoretical spin. Sheehan's scholarly accomplishment and historical contribution comes from the extensive new research he has done on the largely unrecorded history of Bible translation, even as scholars such as Hans Frei have acquainted us with the transformation of Biblical scholarship and schools of interpretation ranging from Semler to Schleiermacher.

Now that Sheehan has brought to life the intriguing emergence of a new genre and the explosion of new translations, he has offered scholars a phenomenon to track down and explain, which is no small accomplishment in a field once so stifled by "secularization" and the rise of Kant, Goethe or Prussia. Sheehan has thus introduced a whole new set of books and characters to track down and lines of questioning to explore. For that gift alone, German historians should rejoice.

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Citation: John Holloran. Review of Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12880

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