De svenska biblarna som aldrig blev av

Abstract

It has often been assumed that the late eighteenth century in Sweden never produced much of interest on the exegetical or theological plane. This was the period in which the Bible, a hotly debated text in Enlightenment Europe, was famously never translated in any accepted version and the philological, academic and theological work that was done during the Gustavian era has been underappreciated in later historiography. Picking up on the notion of a ‘religious Enlightenment,’ this article analyzes three biblical translation projects, the official Bible commission of 1773, the private translations of Bishop Johan Adam Tingstadius and the private Jewish translation of Genesis 49 by David Josephsson and Marcus Maure. Through a comparison of the translation work of Genesis 49 in these three projects this article argues for the usefulness of Bible reception in understanding the late eighteenth-century world. Philology, new historical knowledge and altered epistemic perspectives meant that the Bible, as the most central of classical and religious texts, could no longer be translated in the old 1541 tradition and that any translation of it would show the perspectives and ideologies of the translators and their intended audience, Jewish or Christian.