Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 44:1 (Mar 2001)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Anonymous

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JETS 44:1 (March 2001) p. 125

Book Reviews

In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. By Peter J. Thuesen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 238 pp., $27.50.

This book came to birth as a doctoral dissertation at Princeton University. After an extended introduction that lays out the flow of his entire argument, Thuesen proceeds in five chapters. The first is devoted to the Reformation. Here Thuesen relies heavily on the analysis of Hans Frei. In some ways, the “pre-critical” Middle Ages have rightly been labeled a “culture of the Book.” Yet most people who at the time “read” the Scriptures did so through images and reenactments (not least the Mass). Even the intellectual elite, who could read the Bible privately in Latin, rarely did so apart from the broader context of the corporate ecclesiastical rule. More importantly, during this precritical period, “magnificent in its homogeneity” (the phrase is from Erich Auerbach), “the truth of the biblical stories was an assumed quality” (p. 6). Historical reality, present reality, and Scriptural reality combined to constitute one providential universe. Exegetically, this unitary view of history and the Bible fostered some form or other of typological interpretation. In some ways, this typological approach was encouraged by the Reformation, which to that extent made it a premodern movement. In one respect, however, the Reformation constituted a partial transition to the modern world, namely, the domain of authority. Here there was an overturning of the ecclesiastical and iconographic authority of the medieval church. The emphasis on the Bible substituted an authority that was iconoclastic and Biblicistic. Nowhere, argues Thuesen, was this more strenuously the case than in the Anglo-Saxon world—more so, in particular, than in the world of Lutheranism.

The second chapter is devoted to the ideal of Bible revision in the late 19th century. The emphasis on truth, so characteristic of modernity, focused enormous energy on precisionism in lexicography. Newly discovered texts refashioned textual criticism. Increasingly there was a hunger to retrace what were later called the trajectories of the witnesses, in an effort to reconstruct the real history behind the Biblical stories. Out of this historical-critical world emerged the Revised Version (1881–85) and its American cousin, the American Standard Version (1901). Thuesen analyzes Protestant reactions to the new Bible, hailed in the press as “King Truth” (successor to King James). Most conservatives joined in the acclaim, but here and there some raised questions about the RV’s (and ASV’s) textual conclusions—harbingers of more fundamental controversies just over the horizon.

The third chapter treats the making of the Revi...

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