In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Bible Translation, 1881-1965

Team Members/Contributors

Peter J. Thuesen Princeton University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

“In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Bible Translation, 1881-1965,” argues that translation of scripture into the vernacular, the founding activity of Protestantism, gave rise to still-unresolved tensions about the nature of language, divine revelation, and biblical authority. Translation controversies, often concerned only incidentally with technical linguistics, helped define the division in twentieth-century America between fundamentalists and liberals, both of whom were heirs of the Tyndale translation tradition privileging “word” over “image” in religion. The Protestant preoccupation with the word reified into theological empiricism in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when a British-American committee began work on the Revised Version (1881-85). The new Bible excited an undercurrent of opposition to the liberal scholarly establishment among American religious conservatives, whose frustrations came to a head with the appearance of the Revised Standard Version (1946-52): pamphleteers denounced it as “modernist”; preachers burned it before cheering congregations; even the U.S. Air Force urged recruits to steer clear of the “subversive” RSV. Drawing on a wealth of unmined archival sources, I examine the underlying issues at stake in the RSV controversy and explore its legacies, particularly the proliferation of conservative Bible translations.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Bible Translation, 1881-1965 1999 Dissertation Peter J. Thuesen
  In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Bible Translation, 1881-1965 1999 Dissertation Book Peter J. Thuesen