| The Reformation has long commanded the attention of scholars of the Early Modern Bible This dissertation insists, however, that the eighteenth century, not the sixteenth, was the great century of German Bible translation, not because of the literary quality of the translations, but for the net effect they had both on the Bible and on Germany's cultural life. While the Reformation made the Bible accessible to the lay reader, the Enlightenment transformed the Bible entirely, from a work of theology into a monument of humanity and human culture.; The road to a “cultural” Bible began in an unlikely place, with the religious radicals that dominated much of Germany's early Enlightenment. These radicals—the first to challenge Luther's translation on its own ground—and their bizarre translations succeeded in alienating the Bible from everyday use, and forced the question of the relevance and authority of the Bible out into the open. The challenge of the radicals was taken up by scholars, who turned Bible translation into a scholarly activity par excellence. This convergence of philological scholarship and translation created extreme difficulty for translators, most of whom believed in the extraordinary stature of the Bible, since it threatened to relegate the Bible to the ranks of ordinary secular literature. In order to retain the preeminence of the Bible, German Bible translators and scholars were forced to develop new strategies of giving it mewing and authority. These strategies each produced their own tradition of translation: poetic, historical, and philosophical traditions, that dominated the later eighteenth-century.; Though differing in means, these traditions all sought to ground the importance of the Bible in its humanistic content. Whether as a moral parable, a monument of literature, or a prize historical document, the Bible was reinvented as a human text, one that offered unparalleled insights into the nature and history of mankind. A new Biblical humanism, created by these translations, emerged in the late Enlightenment, a humanism that purged the Bible of its theological authority and rediscovered its meaning in the archives of humanity. |
