(Re-)Translating Scripture in Early American Protestantism: A Comparative Study of Cotton Mather’s “Biblia Americana” and Radical Pietist Revisionings of the Bible

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan Stievermann
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Early Modern History
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432593169

The project aims to conduct comparative, side-by-side studies of scriptural translations that various individual Protestant exegetes and groups from British North America undertook during the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. We ask why, how, and with the use of which resources did these New World Bible translations challenge existing translations, specifically the widely predominant King James Version (KJV) and Luther Bibles? And in what ways did these revised translations reflect particular theologies (esp. millenarian and Philadelphian speculations) and support diverging identity formations in the intellectual cross-currents of the Enlightenment and the Protestant evangelical awakenings? The project has an interdisciplinary research design that brings together interests and methods of traditional church history/history of biblical interpretation with those of the history of “lived religion”-paradigm and early American cultural and literary studies.The first sub-project deals with the manuscript Bible commentary "Biblia Americana" written by the New England theologian Cotton Mather (1663-1728). The project will examine Mather’s never-before-studied re-translations and interpretations contained in his commentaries on the biblical books of Hebrews through Revelation. Throughout Mather was concerned with amending the KJV in hundreds of places. He sought to correct philological mistakes but also to explicate the literal truth of the Bible in the light of historical and scientific knowledge, while, at the same time, elucidating its higher spiritual senses through different forms of non-literal interpretation. The second sub-project compares aspects of Mather’s "Biblia" with revisionings of the Bible and Scripture-based religious practices that German Pietist groups brought to or originated in Pennsylvania. It will specifically focus on the Schwarzenau Brethren, the Ephrata community, and the Moravians, who all engaged in "heterodox" re-translations of Scripture, especially the Song of Songs and Book of Revelation. The project will investigate how these translations were embodied in practice and supported the constitution of separate communities and identities in addition to divergent ecclesiological and missionary projects in the New World. By scrutinizing these re-translations of the Bible and comparing them to Mather’s, this project will throw into relief the unique response of German Pietists to the religious awakenings that swept the Atlantic world in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Together, these two projects will produce a detailed and wide-ranging portrait of what connected New England Puritanism and (radical) Pietism as Bible movements.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants