Bible translation and the centrality of the synagogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 161-226
Author(s):  
Michah Gottlieb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Moses Mendelssohn ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Jewish Youth ◽  
Blind Faith

This chapter analyzes Zunz’s Bible translation, situating it within the context of Zunz’s critique of the traditional Ashkenazic system of Jewish education that he experienced personally. Zunz’s assessment of Moses Mendelssohn and his vision for Jewish education that steers a middle path between the “sham Enlightenment“ of Jewish youth and the “blind faith” of older Jewish traditionalists are presented. The role of gender in Jewish education and the centrality of the synagogue in Zunz’s Bible translation project are explored. Zunz’s Bible translation is set in relation to that of his teacher, the Bible critic Wilhelm De Wette as a way of comparing liberal German Protestantism and liberal German Judaism in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It is shown how Zunz uses Protestantism and Catholicism as exemplary categories aligning his vision of Judaism with Protestantism while rejecting forms of Judaism that he deems “Catholic.”

Biblical Education and the Power of Conversation

2021 ◽  
pp. 76-124
Author(s):  
Michah Gottlieb
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Childhood Education ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Jewish Society ◽  
Reform Jewish ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Biblical Education

This chapter covers the role of Bible translation in Mendelssohn’s endeavor to effect a reformation Jewish society by reimagining Jewish education. It explores Mendelssohn’s childhood education and his critique of the prevailing system of German Jewish education for males. Mendelssohn’s conception of the goal of education, his view of Yiddish, his understanding of biblical aesthetics, and his account of the roles of the Bible and rabbinic teachings in Jewish education is analyzed. The place of gender and class in Mendelssohn’s approach to Jewish education is investigated. The connection between Mendelssohn’s efforts to reform Jewish education, his attempt to restructure the hierarchy of German Jewish society and his argument for Jewish civil rights are explored. It is argued that Mendelssohn uses Protestantism and Catholicism as conceptual categories to elaborate his enlightened, bourgeois concept of Judaism.

scholarly journals History and theory of Scripture translations

2008 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Claude Loba-Mkole
Keyword(s):  
Frames Of Reference ◽  
Functional Equivalence ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
Bible Translations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History And Theory

This article argues for the importance of Bible translations through its historical achievements and theoretical frames of reference. The missionary expansion of Christianity owes its very being to translations. The early Christian communities knew the Bible through the LXX translations while churches today still continue to use various translations. Translations shape Scripture interpretations, especially when a given interpretation depends on a particular translation. A particular interpretation can also influence a given translation. The article shows how translation theories have been developed to clarify and how the transaction source-target is culturally handled. The articles discuss some of these “theoretical frames”, namely the functional equivalence, relevance, literary functional equivalence and intercultural mediation. By means of a historical overview and a reflection on Bible translation theories the article aims to focus on the role of Africa in translation history.

Myth

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George S. Williamson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
World War ◽  
Friedrich Schelling ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the nineteenth-century discourse on myth and its influence on Christian theological and cultural debate from the 1790s to the eve of the First World War. After preliminary comments on the eighteenth century, it examines five ‘key’ moments in this history: the Romantic idea of a ‘new mythology’ (focusing on Friedrich Schelling); the ‘religious’ turn in myth scholarship c.1810 (Friedrich Creuzer); debates over the role of myth in the gospels (focusing on David Strauss and Christian Weisse); theories of language and race and their impact on myth scholarship; and Arthur Drews’ The Christ Myth and the debate over the historicity of Jesus. This chapter argues that the discourse on myth (in Germany and elsewhere) was closely bound to the categories and assumptions of Christian theology, reproducing them even as it undermined the authority of the Bible, the clergy, and the churches.

Marxism, Religion and the Taiping Revolution

2016 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Boer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The World ◽  
Specific Interpretation ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Revolution

This study offers a specific interpretation of the Taiping Revolution in China in the mid-nineteenth century. It was not only the largest revolutionary movement in the world at the time, but also one that was inspired by Christianity. Indeed, it marks the moment when the revolutionary religious tradition arrived in China. My account of the revolution stresses the role of the Bible, its radical reinterpretation by the Taiping revolutionaries, and the role it played in their revolutionary acts and reconstruction of economic and social relations. After providing this account, I raise a number of implications for Marxist approaches to religion. These involve the revolutionary religious tradition, first identified by Engels and established by Karl Kautsky, the question of political ambivalence of a religion like Christianity, and the distinction between ontological and temporal transcendence.

The Aramaic Bible in the East

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-66
Author(s):  
Philip S. Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Study ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
The West ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ready Access

Abstract This article challenges the assumption that insofar as the Jewish communities of Babylonia were a ‘people of the book’, their book was a Hebrew Bible. Functionally the Bible that most people would have known was the Aramaic Targum of Onqelos and Jonathan. The Bible’s content—its law, narrative, and prophecy—was culturally mediated through Aramaic. Even in Rabbinic communities, where some had competence in Hebrew that gave them ready access to the original, the lack of formal and systematic study of Miqra may have made the Targum the tradition of first resort for understanding the Hebrew. The situation in the Aramaic-speaking east may not, then, have been all that different from the west, where a Greek Bible shaped the religious identity of the Greek-speaking Jewish communities. This essay is offered as a contribution to the neglected study of the role of Bible translation in the history of Judaism.

The Role of “Common Sense” In the Hermeneutics of Moses Stuart

1990 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Granquist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Unique Feature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
Far Eastern

The first decades of the nineteenth century saw a resurgence of interest in critical biblical studies in the United States. Though many colonial religious leaders were well trained in the area of biblical studies because of their European educations, this field of study declined to a very low state in America in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth-century revival of biblical studies in America, led by scholars such as Edward Robinson, William E. Channing, Andrews Norton, and Moses Stuart, was a homegrown, broad-based movement that ran the gamut of theological positions from conservative Calvinist to Unitarian. One unique feature of this movement was its interest in the biblical criticism of German writers; indeed, many works of German scholarship were translated into English by these American writers long before they achieved circulation in England. The resulting American biblical scholarship flourished not only at seminaries and divinity schools, but also on more practical levels. Edward Robinson, for example, led an expedition to the Middle East to study the geography and antiquities of the Holy Land. This scholarship was also tied to the prevalent missionary impulse, resulting in the translation of the Bible into many additional languages, especially those of the Middle and Far Eastern missionary fields.

A Nineteenth-Century New England Exegete Abroad: Adoniram Judson and the Burmese Bible

2019 ◽  
Vol 112 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-339
Author(s):  
John deJong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Biblical Studies ◽  
Theological Seminary ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Subject

AbstractAdoniram Judson’s life and work have long been the subject of popular and scholarly interest, but the intellectual and exegetical background for his Burmese Bible translation has not been closely studied. This background was the biblical studies movement in New England, which began in the early nineteenth century and flourished before declining and eventually disappearing by about 1870. The opposing New England orthodox Calvinist and liberal Unitarian schools were equally involved in the movement. Judson was an early product of Andover Theological Seminary, the center for orthodox Calvinism in New England. From 1816 to 1840 Judson translated the Bible into Burmese and his references to the scholarly works he used, along with the text-critical and interpretive decisions in his Bible translation, identify him as an ongoing participant in the New England biblical studies movement. This scholarly background helps us understand interpretive decisions in the Judson Bible, which is still the main Burmese version used by Protestants in Myanmar.

scholarly journals The African agent discovered: The recognition and involvement of the African biblical interpreter in Bible translation

2008 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
S V Coertze
Keyword(s):  
African Languages ◽  
Bible Translation ◽  
The Bible

This article explores the extent to which the role of the African biblical interpreter is acknowledged in the process of Bible translation, as the Bible and Bible translation form an important part of the establishment of the African church on the continent of Africa. It points out that even though foreign discovery of African agency in Bible translation is evident, indigenous discovery of the same is largely absent. Part of the relevance of this article is for the African church to own and be actively involved in the translation of the Bible into the remaining African languages that are in need of a translation of the Bible.

Gender Differentiation and the Education of Jewish Women

2010 ◽  
pp. 167-189
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Elementary Education ◽  
General Education ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Jewish Education ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
East European ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Amount Of Knowledge

This chapter addresses the role, function, and extent of women's education in nineteenth-century east European Jewry, the way this education was integrated into broader gender classifications, and the implications and consequences of women's education. There is a widely held misconception that, in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, almost all Jewish women had a poor Jewish education whereas many received a good general education. Although males and females were provided with very different frameworks for acquiring literacy education, women were not necessarily inferior to men in Jewish knowledge. Women not only knew how to read but read often. It is quite possible that of all the books sold in eastern Europe, the two bestsellers were books specifically intended for a female audience and read only by women: Tsenah urenah and tekhines. The Tsenah urenah is a Yiddish text consisting of a free retelling of aggadic material on the Bible. It is clear, therefore, that in traditional Jewish society, the differences between the educational achievements of boys and girls on the level of elementary education were more perceived than real. The amount of knowledge a boy acquired in a full day of non-intensive study in a ḥeder was not necessarily much more than those of tutored girls who may have studied for an hour or two a day.

Written On Our Hearts: Tswana Christians and the 'Word of God' in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Volz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Scholarly Inquiry

AbstractThe adoption of Christianity by Tswana people in southern Africa during the nineteenth century generally involved being inspired in some way by stories and ideas presented in the Bible, but the role of Christian scripture varied according to local and personal circumstances. Although European missionaries introduced Christianity to the Tswana, they had little control over the different ways that early Tswana converts perceived, adapted and proclaimed the new teaching. This was particularly true among western and northern Tswana in the mid-nineteenth century before the extension of colonial rule into the interior, as many Tswana communities remained largely intact and were able to accommodate Christianity on their own terms. Rather than being simply a European-made tool, the 'lefoko la Modimo' (word of God) was also an expression of Tswana beliefs and aspirations, composed not on passive objects of missionary evangelism, colonial rule or scholarly inquiry 'but on tablets of human hearts'.

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