The Enlightenment Bible : translation, scholarship, culture

Resource Information

The work The Enlightenment Bible : translation, scholarship, culture represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The Enlightenment Bible : translation, scholarship, culture

Title remainder

translation, scholarship, culture

Statement of responsibility

Jonathan Sheehan

Creator

• Sheehan, Jonathan, 1969-

Subject

• Bible -- History
• Bible -- History -- 18th century
• Enlightenment

Language

eng

Summary

"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

Member of

• ACLS Fellows’ publications
• Princeton paperbacks

Cataloging source

NyNyACL

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

• dictionaries
• bibliography

Series statement

• ACLS Humanities E-Book
• Princeton paperbacks