Originally published: 2005.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Vernacular Bible : reformation and baroque -- The birth of the E nlightenment Bible. Scholarship, the New Testament, and the English def ense of the Bible ; Religion, the New Testament, and the German reinven tion of the Bible -- The forms of the Enlightenment Bible. Philology : the Bible from text to document ; Pedagogy : the politics and morals of the Enlightenment Bible ; Poetry : national literature, history, and t he Hebrew Bible ; History : the archival and alien Old Testament -- The cultural Bible. Culture, religion, and the Bible in Germany, 1790-1830 ; "Regeneration from Germany" : culture and the Bible in England, 1780 -1870.

"How did the Bible survive the Enlightenment? In this book, Jonathan Sheehan shows how Protestant translators and scholars in the eighteent h century transformed the Bible from a book justified by theology to on e justified by culture. In doing so, the Bible was made into the corner stone of Western heritage and invested with meaning, authority, and sig nificance even for a secular age. The Enlightenment Bible offers a new history of the Bible in the century of its greatest crisis and, in turn , a new vision of this century and its effects on religion. Although th e Enlightenment has long symbolized the corrosive effects of modernity on religion, Sheehan shows how the Bible survived, and even thrived in this cradle of ostensible secularization. Indeed, in eighteenth-century Protestant Europe, biblical scholarship and translation became more vi gorous and culturally significant than at any time since the Reformatio n. From across the theological spectrum, European scholars - especially German and English - exerted tremendous energies to rejuvenate the Bib le, reinterpret its meaning, and reinvest it with new authority. Poets, pedagogues, philosophers, literary critics, philologists, and historia ns together built a post-theological Bible, a monument for a new religi ous era. These literati forged the Bible into a cultural text, transfor ming the theological core of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the end, the Enlightenment gave the Bible the power to endure the corrosive eff ects of modernity, not as a theological text but as the foundation of W estern culture." -- Publisher's description.

Electronic text and image data. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan, Michigan Publishing, 2012. Includes both TIFF files and keyword searchable text. ([ACLS Fellows’ Publications]) ([A CLS Humanities E-Book]) Mode of access: Intranet.