(Re-)Translating Scripture in Early American Protestantism: A Comparative Study of Cotton Mather’s “Biblia Americana” and Radical Pietist Revisionings of the Bible
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Early Modern History
Final Report Abstract
This project has examined revisionary Bible translations undertaken by various individual Protestant exegetes and religious groups in British North America during the first half of the eighteenth century. Most importantly, the massive Biblia Americana (1693-1728) by New England theologian Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was compared to the scriptural interpretations of radical German Pietist groups that settled in Pennsylvania and brought with them a number of “heterodox” Bible translations and commentaries such as the Berleburger Bibel (1726-1742). Throughout, we have explored two basic dimensions involved in translating the Bible. The first dimension involves translation in the narrower, philological, sense of the term. The colonization of the New World coincided with the division of European Christendom and the rise and pluralization of vernacular Bibles in the Old World. Transplanting European Christianities to the Americas thus entailed contestations over scriptural translations, as colonists brought competing versions of the Bible with them and battled over the true meaning of the Word of God. While the King James Version (KJV) soon dominated the New England colonies, the Luther Bible became most widespread among the German-speaking settlers of the mid-Atlantic colonies. However, neither translation remained uncontested. As more independent church communities and centers of learning developed, debates arose over scriptural translations. In New England, the Biblia Americana was the first extensive colonial effort to revise the KJV, offering “improved” translations in hundreds of places based on the best current scholarship. While these debates over translation usually originated in the Old World, they would take on a life of their own on the colonial peripheries. In the context of new intellectual and religious movements, American exegetes challenged dominant versions of the Bible as the engaged with and re-deployed the interpretive scholarship produced by their European peers. In our project we have tracked the specific reasons why New England theologians like Mather or radical Pietists such as the Ephrata group undertook specific re-translations of the Bible into English or German, what resources (both scholarly works as well as mystical and “esoteric” traditions) they drew on, and what particular theologies these readings supported. The other, much broader, dimension in the early American history of Bible translations is tied into the complex dynamics of transplanting different versions of Christianity to the New World and how these Christian groups “Americanized” under specific local circumstances. From the beginning, these processes involved various forms of “cultural translation,” by which the Bible was indigenized in America, at the same time that America and life in the colonies was interpreted by recourse to Scripture. We were particularly interested in how such appropriations of the Bible to New World circumstances were bound up with the intellectual and cultural challenges posed by the Enlightenment on the one hand, and the complementary and countervailing forces of the Atlantic religious awakenings, on the other. We found that both in New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies, European-derived churches and religious communities often produced original translations of specific aspects of Scripture as they gave meaning to their own American experiences through the framework of the Bible. Church polities, new religious practices, but also missionary projects were justified on the grounds of diverging translations. New World peoples and unfamiliar environments were viewed through the lens of Scripture and understood in biblical categories. Colonials also felt an urgent need to incorporate the growing knowledge about the New World and its inhabitants into existing translations and interpretations of Scripture, especially since the Bible never explicitly mentions the newly discovered continent and what role it might have in God’s plan of salvific history and the end times. Here we found competing revisionary readings of the Bible’s eschatological prophecies, especially the Book of Revelation, to be a particularly illuminating source that show how some groups ascribed apocalyptic significance to America while others didn’t. Overall, the project has contributed to filling a significant scholarly lacuna by exploring how Scripture was appropriated outside of Europe and how the Bible organized transatlantic and transcultural knowledge formations in the early modern world.
Publications
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Bodies in Early Modern Religious Dissent. Routledge.
Fischer, Elisabeth & Tippelskirch, Xenia von
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Bringing the New World Home: Moravian Gemeintag Meetings and Protestant Pastoral Authority, 1738–1746. Journal of Early Modern History, 26(6), 544-568.
Pietrenka, Benjamin M.
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German Pietism. The Oxford Handbook of Early Evangelicalism, 95-116. Oxford University Press.
Stievermann, Jan
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Reading Revelation and Revelatory Readings in Early Awakened Protestantism: A Transatlantic Comparison. The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism, 200–220.
Stievermann, Jan
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Spirit of the Word: Scripture in the Lives of Evangelical and Moravian Women in the New World, 1730–1830. The Bible in Early Transatlantic Pietism and Evangelicalism, 242–260.
Pietrenka, Benjamin M. & Westerkamp, Marilyn J.
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The Pluralization of Scripture in Early American Protestantism: Competing Bible Translations and the Debate over Universal Salvation, ca. 1700–1780. Religion and American Culture, 33(1), 35-74.
Stievermann, Jan & Pietrenka, Benjamin
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“Editor’s Introduction.” In Cotton Mathers Biblia Americana. Vol. 10: Hebrews-Revelation. Ed Jan Stievermann, 1–224. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Stievermann, Jan
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Cotton Mather’s Biblical Enlightenment: Critical Interrogations of the Canon and Revisions of the Common Translation in the Biblia Americana (1693–1728). Journal of the Bible and its Reception, 11(1), 53-87.
Stievermann, Jan
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Religion on the Margins. Penn State University Press.
Pietrenka, Benjamin M.
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“Johannes Kelpius, Johann Jacob Zimmermann und die Württemberg-Verbindungen der ersten radikalpietistischen Auswanderer nach Pennsylvania.“ In Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte 123: 235–61.
Stievermann, Jan
