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.

Jonathan Sheehan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of a number of articles on European religion and its transformations, and winner of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation.

Preface: Forging the Cultural Bible ix
Abbreviations xvii
Chapter One: The Vernacular Bible: Reformation and Baroque 1

Part I: The Birth of the Enlightenment Bible Chapter Two: Scholarship, the New Testament, and the English Defense of the Bible 27
Chapter Three: Religion, the New Testament, and the German Reinvention of the Bible 54

Part II: The Forms of the Enlightenment Bible Chapter Four: Philology: The Bible from Text to Document 93
Chapter Five: Pedagogy: The Politics and Morals of the Enlightenment Bible 118
Chapter Six: Poetry: National Literature, History, and the Hebrew Bible 148
Chapter Seven: History: The Archival and Alien Old Testament 182

Part III: The Cultural Bible Chapter Eight: Culture, Religion, and the Bible in Germany, 1790-1830 223
Chapter Nine: "Regeneration from Germany": Culture and the Bible in England, 1780-1870 241
Afterword 259
Index 261