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The Enlightenment Bible: translation, scholarship, culture
Jonathan Sheehan
"How did the Bible survive the Enlightenment? In this book, Jonathan Sheehan shows how Protestant translators and scholars in the eighteenth century transformed the Bible from a book justified by theology to one justified by culture. In doing so, the Bible was made into the cornerstone of Western heritage and invested with meaning, authority, and significance even for a secular age. The Enlightenment Bible offers a new history of the Bible in the century of its greatest crisis and, in turn, a new vision of this century and its effects on religion. Although the Enlightenment has long symbolized the corrosive effects of modernity on religion, Sheehan shows how the Bible survived, and even thrived in this cradle of ostensible secularization. Indeed, in eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, biblical scholarship and translation became more vigorous and culturally significant than at any time since the Reformation. From across the theological spectrum, European scholars - especially German and English - exerted tremendous energies to rejuvenate the Bible, reinterpret its meaning, and reinvest it with new authority. Poets, pedagogues, philosophers, literary critics, philologists, and historians together built a post-theological Bible, a monument for a new religious era. These literati forged the Bible into a cultural text, transforming the theological core of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the end, the Enlightenment gave the Bible the power to endure the corrosive effects of modernity, not as a theological text but as the foundation of Western culture." -- Publisher's description.
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Frontmatter
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Preface: Forging the Cultural Bible (page ix)
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Abbreviations (page xvii)
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CHAPTER ONE The Vernacular Bible: Reformation and Baroque (page 1)
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PART I: The Birth of the Enlightenment Bible
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CHAPTER TWO Scholarship, the New Testament, and the Englishh Defense of the Bible (page 27)
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CHAPTER THREE Religion, the New Testament, and the German Reinvention of the Bible (page 54)
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PART II: The Forms of the Enlightenment Bible
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CHAPTER FOUR Philology: The Bible from Text to Document (page 93)
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CHAPTER FIVE Pedagogy: The Politics and Morals of the Enlightenment Bible (page 118)
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CHAPTER SIX Poetry: National Literature, History, and the Hebrew Bible (page 148)
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CHAPTER SEVEN History: The Archival and Alien Old Testament (page 182)
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PART III: The Cultural Bible
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CHAPTER EIGHT Culture, Religion, and the Bible in Germany, 1790-1830 (page 230)
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CHAPTER NINE "Regeneration from Germany": Culture and the Bible in England, 1780-1870 (page 241)
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Afterword (page 259)
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Index (page 261)
Journal Abbreviation | Label | URL |
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JBS | 45.2 (Apr. 2006): 396-397 | http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/504191 |
ES | 40.3 (Spring 2007): 487-492 | http://www.jstor.org/stable/30053522 |
ENHR | 121.492 (Jun. 2006): 943-945 | http://www.jstor.org/stable/3806436 |
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Citable Link
Published: 2007
Publisher: Princeton University Press
- 9780691130699 (paper)
- 9780691118871 (hardcover)
- 9781400847792 (ebook)