| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. By Peter J. Thuesen. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xii, 238 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-19-512736-6.)

Peter J. Thuesen has written a carefully nuanced book about American Protestant controversies over new translations of the Bible from the 1870s to the end of the twentieth century. According to Thuesen, controversies between nineteeth-century conservatives and liberals emanated from a set of shared "modern" assumptions about the nature of biblical authority and interpretation, while controversies in the mid-twentieth century arose from the "tacit repudiation of some of the same assumptions by combatants on both sides." 1

Thuesen's study leans heavily on Hans Frei's The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), especially his distinction between "premodern" and "modern" approaches to the Bible. In the Middle Ages, premodern (precritical) Christians took for granted the historical truthfulness of the biblical narratives that were mediated to them through various images and made authoritative through the Church. After the Enlightenment, modern (critical) Christians became obsessed with the "truth-question" (the extent to which the biblical narratives corresponded to historical facts) and transferred authority to the Bible itself, rather than the Church. This more critical approach meant that Bible translators were profoundly concerned with grammatical and lexical exactness in estimating the original biblical text and with how their translation related to the question of historical truth. . . .

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