To someone unfamiliar with recent scholarship on the Enlightenment, the title may seem odd. Was not the Enlightenment the beginning of Western secularization, with the anti-Christian campaign of the French philosophes as its defining core? This book reflects the extent to which works on the French philosophes now sit on shelves crowded with studies of various regional and national Enlightenments, the expansion of print culture, the development of sociability, and discussions of various Christian manifestations of enlightened thought, such as English Unitarianism. Jonathan Sheehan's focus is biblical scholarship in England and the German states from the late seventeenth century through to the creation of the nineteenth-century “cultural Bible.” Catholic France (absent from the index) is ignored because “clericalism and church authority were the hot-button issues there” rather than the nature and status of the Bible (89).

This is a book that needed to be written, and it has been written very well. Nineteenth-century Germany has long been seen as the fountainhead of modern biblical research, whereby the scriptures are treated as historical and literary documents. In recent years, however, with attention turned to “Enlightenment in England,” the innovations of early eighteenth-century English biblical scholars have been increasingly recognized. As Peter Harrison has argued, it was in England circa 1700 that the comparative study of religions was pioneered and religion first “cut to fit the much vaunted scientific method” (“Religion” and the Religions in Enlightenment England [Cambridge, 1990], 2—an important text that is oddly absent from Sheehan's footnotes). The Enlightenment Bible is an impressive synthesis that performs the valuable task of analyzing the mutual influences and evolution of biblical scholarship in England and Germany over two centuries. Sheehan has read widely in the primary sources and has engaged thoughtfully with the most important and recent historiography in both languages. Indeed, this book provides an excellent introduction to the vibrant state of scholarship on religion during the Enlightenment.

The first chapter discusses the creation of vernacular Bibles during the Reformation. From Luther to the King James Bible, influential translations were enshrined at the heart of the major Protestant denominations. Translation largely ceased during the seventeenth century, however, as the established Bibles were eloquent and new translations could only fuel sectarianism. Concordances, dictionaries, and commentaries became the order of the day. Circa 1700, the Bible was reopened to philological study in England as clergy sought to fend off doubts raised by skeptics and Deists. In 1685, John Locke pointed to the essential problem: if scholars considered “everything in holy writ … as equally inspired by God,” they left themselves open to ridicule by those who pointed to textual inconsistencies, contradictions, and exclusions. By contrast, if they admitted that “certain parts are to be considered as purely human writings, then where in the Scriptures will there be found the certainty of divine authority?” (43). Clergymen turned to meticulous philological research of the various extant manuscript copies of scripture in order to resurrect the “real” Bible as a defense against criticism by Deist dilettantes. The result was “scholarly advance and vernacular stagnation,” as densely annotated editions of the Greek New Testament were produced with an eye to preservation rather than religious regeneration (53). The King James Bible was considered more than adequate for mass consumption. Sheehan is probably too harsh in judging the English as limited to “sterile preservation of the Bible from harm” (89). The great burst of translation in the 1780s, as he notes, was produced by clergy inspired by the scholarship of the early century—many of them Unitarians seeking to foster a “Second Reformation.”

With a negligible Deist threat in the patchwork of German states, Pietists seized on English techniques as a means to break the dominance of orthodox Lutheranism, reopening the biblical texts to translation and discussion with an eye to regenerating Christianity. The “Enlightenment Bible” is Sheehan's label for the proliferation of vernacular versions of scripture in eighteenth-century Germany. He discerns four forms of Enlightenment Bible: philology created a separation between God's word and the biblical text—a transformation of scripture from text to document. Pedagogy saw the creation of radical “rational” translations that polished ancient “barbarisms” in order to highlight rationalist universal moral values in the New Testament. Poetic Bibles were inspired by Robert Lowth's realization that a truly poetic translation could only be done by casting aside the dictates of verse and rhyme. In this vein, German scholars sought to create versions of the Old Testament as sublime literature that “recaptured Hebrew passions in the German tongue” (176). Finally, some began to treat the Bible as humanity's oldest archive, over which Christians could bond in endless and fascinating historical research into the alien folk culture of the ancient Jews. By the late eighteenth century the Bible was increasingly treated as a cultural rather than theological text. This, ironically, led scholars to drop the task of translation and re-embrace Luther's folksy Reformation Bible as a pillar of German culture, with, in Goethe's words, its “poetic, historical, devout, educating tone” (224). It became a text that could be depicted in a nationalistic age as superior to “primitive” Jewish writings. In Britain, the flowering of biblical translation in the 1780s was soon stifled in the reactionary climate created by the French Revolution. Only in the mid-nineteenth century, under the influence of German scholarship, did the Bible come to be seen as central to a humanist “culture” championed as superior to the values of capitalism and mass consumerism.

I think Sheehan is right to create the concept of an “Enlightenment Bible” as it reflects the way that we now see Enlightenment. The Enlightenment Bible was a project rather than a specific object, a sprawling mass of texts generated by criticism, debate, and experiment. While Sheehan has evidently waded through some fairly dense and dry texts, this has not affected his own clear and lively prose. He has written a very important, stimulating, and accessible book.