Abstract
This article has two aims. The first is to survey historical-critical biblical scholarship as a form of response to experiences of secularization. I argue that especially in Western academia, the historical-critical method became the scientific response par préference to the perception that secularization was somehow threatening the position of the Bible in the public space. The second aim is to investigate how the historical-critical method eventually became the object of serious contention, thereby losing its authority as an epistemic foundation of the Bible as public scripture. The two aims are achieved through a case study on the production of a Swedish Bible translation in the early 1970s onwards. While the translators held that the new Bible should be based on historical-critical scholarship, public debates initiated by 1) a group of conservative Christians and 2) feminist intellectuals showed that such scholarship was not an uncontested response to the possible consequences of secularization on the Bible as public scripture.
1 Introduction
In January 1961, a private motion was presented in the lower chamber of the Swedish Parliament. The motion was written by Manne Ståhl, member of parliament and representative of the Liberal Party, and it urged the Social Democratic Government to take measures toward the production of a new national Bible (for background, see Gustafsson 1990). A new national Bible was motivated by widespread discontent with the then-official version, the 1917 Church Bible. In his motion, Ståhl noted that the 1917 translation had received extensive critique already at the time of its publication, among other things because it did not rest on the latest findings of biblical scholarship and because its literary style was perceived as awkward and ecclesiastical. This had far-reaching consequences, according to Ståhl, since the flawed translation meant that people could not properly understand the message of the Bible (Ståhl 1961, 11). Ståhl asked whether there might even be a connection between the poor translation and the fact that “the secularization process according to many observers is progressing at a greater speed in Sweden than in most other Western countries” (Ståhl 1961, 12).1
Ståhl thus seemed to suggest that a poor translation enhanced secularization, because such a translation distorted the message of the Bible. A good translation, then, would be able to resist secularization, or at least to slow it down. Analogously with his critique of the outdated knowledge base of the 1917 translation, Ståhl furthermore suggested, if somewhat indirectly, that a new translation should be crafted on the basis of the most recent biblical scholarship. According to Ståhl, there was no reason to believe that contemporary research on the Bible would decrease its value for future generations (Ståhl 1961, 11). Quite the opposite: scholarship could lead to a renewal for the Bible and its message among the Swedish people. The task of producing the new Bible should accordingly be entrusted a “narrow circle of experts [sakkunniga]” (Ståhl 1961, 13), presumably a committee of biblical scholars appointed by the Government.2 In other words, while Ståhl held secularization to be an undeniable social fact, science could be mustered in order to neutralize some of the effects that secularization had or could have on the Bible and its message. In this way, Ståhl’s initiative can be understood as a response to secularization, and one where science was not apprehended as a main driver of secularization (cf. Harrison 2017).
With this short background, I have indicated the key themes of the present article: experiences of secularization, biblical translation, and biblical scholarship. These themes will be explored in relation to a temporally and spatially specific context: postwar Sweden. The aim of the article is twofold. First, it aims to survey historical-critical biblical scholarship as a form of response to experiences or perceptions of secularization. Second, it aims to investigate reactions to such responses, specifically in the way that scientific knowledge eventually became the object of serious contention in the public sphere of the late postwar era. The result was that the historical-critical approach lost some of its authority as an epistemic foundation of the Bible as public scripture. Especially the 1970s marked a decline in public trust in scientific expertise and scientific knowledge (Huisman 2015; Grundmann 2017). New and alternative knowledge claims were on the rise, and with these, the very epistemological foundation of the “scientific” Bible was being called into question by various societal actors. In the article, two loosely conjoined groups exemplify such contestations in the Swedish postwar context: conservative Christians and feminists.3 In their own distinct ways, both groups took issue with the knowledge base of the translation under production, and hence with scientific scholarship as a presumably self-evident response to secularization. A core argument in the article is therefore that secularization constituted an important (if at times tacit) framework also for these two groups, and not only for the translators or those who initiated and commissioned the translation. For conservative Christians, secularization posed a threat to the Bible since it undermined its societal importance. In the guise of biblical criticism, secularization furthermore risked stripping the Bible of its religious value. For the feminists, on the other hand, secularization was an opportunity, precisely since it removed the Bible from its traditionally religious sphere, thus opening it up to political responses and interrogations (on secularization as threat and opportunity, see Engelke 2009).
Previous research has studied secularization from a number of different angles. What has been less studied, however, is how secularization “functions in people’s perceptions and in the social projects of organizations and institutions” (Engelke 2009, 40; see also Engelke 2013). In this sense, I am less interested in discussing secularization as an empirical fact in postwar Sweden than in understanding “how secularization is perceived and acted upon at the local level” (Engelke 2009, 40). In this way, it might be possible to uncover the particular ways in which “biblical readers and interpreters” have been “interacting with developing ideas of seculari[z]ation” (Strømmen 2024, 196). Moreover, while the history of biblical scholarship has also been extensively researched, most earlier contributions have focused on historical-critical scholarship as the business of a scholarly elite, a handful of “great men” (e.g., Rogerson 1984; O’Neill 1991; Smend 2007; Reventlow 2010). By contrast, this article investigates biblical scholarship as a knowledge form engaged and contested by various “non-elites” (Townsend 2025), exemplified by the two societal groups already mentioned. This, finally, has the potential of providing a more complex picture of the relationship between biblical scholarship and secularization, especially at various local levels and in relation to different historical and societal actors with important intellectual and emotional investments in the Bible.
2 The Swedish Bible Commission and the Production of a New National Bible
In 1972, the Social Democratic cabinet minister Alva Myrdal appointed a governmental committee to produce a new Swedish Bible.4 The committee was named Bibelkommissionen (“the Bible Commission”). Little over a decade had passed since the motion of Ståhl (see the introduction), and the matter had been carefully investigated during this time with several interim reports being published in 1968, 1971, and 1972. While the task of the committee appointed in 1972 only concerned a translation of the New Testament, in 1975 the task was expanded to also include the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible). In what follows, and in the rest of the article, the discussion mainly concerns the Old Testament part of the translation. The present section describes the work of the committee, but also provides a background to the intellectual context of postwar Swedish biblical scholarship.
The governmental committee included several biblical scholars who were supposed to function simultaneously as academic experts and as translators from the biblical source languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). With one exception, the scholars appointed to the committee were recruited from Swedish state universities.5 With their individual differences and different research interests, the biblical scholars all represented the historical-critical paradigm, which by this time – the early 1970s – was firmly established in both research and teaching in biblical studies in Sweden (see Pleijel 2025a, 2025b). This paradigm was constructed on the notion that biblical studies should be solely concerned with historical matters, assessing the meaning of the biblical texts in their original contexts. In the late 19th century onwards, a central epistemological assumption had been established in the humanities and social sciences more broadly, namely that only empirically observable, natural facts could be made the object of scientific inquiry, as opposed to values (how people should act in a given situation).6 This also became part of the professional ideology of biblical scholars (cf. Gieryn 1999).
The emergence of historical-critical biblical scholarship is intimately connected to the changing religious landscape in Europe in the transition between the early and late modern periods. Sheehan (2005) has argued that Enlightenment biblical scholarship, particularly in Germany and Britain, may be understood as a reaction to the gradual undermining of theology as the main authority of the Bible, and therefore as a response to the effects of secularization on the Bible. Secularization was therefore not a “merely destructive process” (Sheehan 2005: xii): it was a process that revitalized scholarship on the Bible, providing a base on which the Bible could remain a public scripture. These new scholarly efforts during the Enlightenment period eventually crystallized into what became known as historical-critical biblical scholarship. Indeed, biblical criticism was, as put by Levenson (1993, 118), “the realization of the Enlightenment project in the realm of biblical scholarship.” The historical-critical method established itself as a central part of the professional ideology of European biblical scholars in the late 19th century.
In the Swedish context, historical-critical biblical scholarship made its breakthrough in higher education in the late 19th and early 20th century, first at the level of research, and then, gradually, at the level of teaching. The interwar period saw many biblical scholars relating their research to the needs and concerns of the church (primarily the state Church of Sweden). One example was the “realistic biblical exegesis” put forward by New Testament Professor Anton Fridrichsen, where biblical exegesis was connected to homiletics (see Olsson 1999).
Using the spatial metaphor of Bodil Ejrnæs, one might say that the Bible during this time simultaneously inhabited the “room of the church” and the “room of science” (Ejrnæs 1994, 161). By contrast, the Swedish postwar period would be characterized by a more radical differentiation between “pure” biblical scholarship and ecclesiastically oriented problems. To some extent, the developments came from within the scientific community itself, and can also be connected to the research interests of the individual biblical scholars upholding positions at the universities in Lund and Uppsala. But the developments can also be understood as an outcome of the general intellectual climate and the “secular culture” of the time (see Thalén 1994; Girmalm 2006).
One representative of the intellectual climate was the philosopher Ingemar Hedenius (see Jansson 2018). In the late 1940s onwards, Hedenius critiqued theological research for being non-scientific since it dealt with value matters, something that according to Hedenius could never be made the object of properly scientific inquiry. Following his radically secular agenda, Hedenius held that the theological faculties should be abolished. Theology did not, according to him, have a place in the modern research university. Even while Hedenius had not aimed his critique at biblical scholars specifically, as “theologians,” they still felt targeted. The critique, therefore, led them to defend their own work, and biblical scholarship more broadly, by stressing its scientific character (Olsson 2007, 155). In this way, biblical scholars had to argue for why they and their primary research object – the Bible – should have a continuous presence at the secular university, and they had to argue by the standards set by the general intellectual climate of which Hedenius was a representative. In other words, while biblical scholarship in its Western, late 19th-century form can be understood as a response to the effects of secularization on the Bible, secularization also demarcated what kind of scholarly response was deemed acceptable by the scientific community, as well as by society at large. Secularization worked both as an enabler and as a constraint.
The above developments also set the scene for the production of the new national Swedish Bible, since the committee appointed by the Government was peopled by biblical scholars from the research universities of the country. The Bible Commission was appointed in 1972 and given its directives, which, among other things, stated that the translation should be based on the latest findings of biblical scholarship (e.g., 1974 års riksdagsberättelse, 336). The directives were therefore apprehended by the translators as a strong defense of the scientific base of the translation. This was, in turn, connected by the translators to the task of producing a national Bible, that is, a Bible for all of the Swedish population (e.g., Block 2000; Hansson 1999; Hidal 1999). The specific reason for this can be found in one of the most important attributes of historical-critical biblical scholarship: its alleged disinterestedness (see, e.g., Moore and Sherwood 2011). If it was indeed disinterested, then such scholarship could function as the base for a Bible which would be able to transcend the different interests of various groups in the Swedish society of the time, whether religious, political, or other (cf. Harding 2007, 359–360).
The notion of disinterestedness hence explains why scientific research was understood as the evident response to the potentially fragmenting and differentiating effects that secularization could have on the Bible, since science was supposedly not tied to the interests of any particular group in society. But if the translators held this to be the evident response to the changing religious and social status of the Bible, the reactions to this response from two distinct societal groups showed that there was no solid agreement on how such a change should be met.
3 Conservative Christians’ Response to the Bible Commission
The first instance of critique of the Bible Commission came from a group of conservative Christians connected to the Lutheran association Biblicum. It had been formed in 1968 to promote what was termed “biblical faith and research” (for background, see Hidal 1979; Olsson 2015). Its members staunchly and consistently criticized historical-critical biblical scholarship at universities as well as in the Church of Sweden (e.g., Erlandsson et al. 1971). For example, in the book Förutsättningslös bibelforskning? [‘Unbiased Bible research?’], Erlandsson (1972) called into question modern biblical scholarship. What he especially criticized was its epistemological assumptions; the methodological naturalism with its exclusion of “divine causality” (16) as a possible explanation for events depicted in the biblical texts. According to Erlandsson, the notion that only empirically verifiable phenomena could be the object of research, a cornerstone of the professional ideology of secular biblical scholars, entailed a “positivistic stricture of the concept of science” (12).
During the 1970s, the members of Biblicum persistently critiqued the work of the Bible Commission (Hidal 1979, 201). The commission’s Old Testament translation team published samples of the ongoing work in 1979 and in 1984. In this way, their work was recurrently publicized. When the New Testament translation of the Bible Commission was published in 1981, the Biblicum members attacked the translation and the way that “liberal theology” and “biblical criticism,” according to them, had played out in the translated texts (e.g., Furberg 1984). The translators were furthermore criticized for having worked from the assumptions of a “secular or naturalistic worldview” (Erlandsson 2014, 7).7 The resistance of the members of Biblicum was therefore not simply targeted at the Bible Commission translation per se, but at the kind of scientific knowledge produced and propagated by the translator-scholars of the Bible Commission. As I have already argued, such scientific knowledge might be understood as a response to the effects that secularization had on the Bible as a public scripture, and therefore as a direct successor to the German and British scholarship of the Enlightenment period described by Sheehan (2005). The members of Biblicum, however, seemed to claim that such scholarship was no mere response to secularization: it contributed to secularization. One of the Biblicum members accordingly claimed that “where the effects of biblical criticism are ignored, one can expect that secularization will increase” (Erlandsson 2014, 7). Such an assessment of biblical scholarship was the exact opposite to that of the politician Manne Ståhl, who had argued that contemporary scholarship could lead to a new appreciation of the Bible among the Swedish people and form the basis of a new Bible that could resist the effects of secularization in a better way than the previous version, the 1917 Church Bible (see the introduction).
In 1983, two years after the launch of the Bible Commission New Testament translation, Biblicum, together with several persons associated with evangelical denominations, formed an association to produce a biblical translation of their own. The translation, named Svenska Folkbibeln but often referred to simply as Folkbibeln (“The People’s Bible”), was published in 1998.8 With the Bible Commission translation being apprehended as an infrastructure for circulating “secular” biblical criticism, the alternative translation would then function as a means for counter-circulating a different kind of knowledge about the interpretation and translation of the biblical texts. In many instances, representatives of the Folkbibeln association described the method that their translation was based on as “historico-grammatical” (e.g., Furberg in Erlandsson 2019, 52). This method, popular among conservative Lutheran and evangelical scholars, assumes a dual authorship of the biblical texts: divine and human (Bergling 2019, 3; see Waltke 1984). If God had been an active factor in the genesis of the biblical texts, this needed, then, to be considered also in the production of a biblical translation.
What follows are three examples from the translation that illustrate how the “alternative” knowledge base played out in the Folkbibeln translation. The three pericopes are taken from the Book of Genesis. First, in Gen. 1:2b, the Folkbibeln translators retained the rendering associated with Christian effective history, “And the Spirit of God hovered over the water,” whereas the Bible Commission translation read, “and a wind from God swept over the water.” To retain the Christian interpretation functions as a way to resist the secularizing effects of biblical scholarship. In the particular context of Genesis 1, such scholarship emphasized interpreting the biblical texts based on comparative religion and Semitic philology, rather than on the notion that the trinitarian God was present as an active factor when the world was created. The second example is taken from Gen. 3:15. Discussing the woman and her offspring, the second half of the verse reads in the Folkbibeln translation, “He shall crush your head, and you will snatch his heel.” Here, the Hebrew pronoun hû has been rendered in the singular, which makes it possible to understand “He” as a reference to Christ, in line with the Christian effective history of the Book of Genesis. The Bible Commission translators, on the other hand, refused to acknowledge such a typological understanding, thereby resisting the harmonizing tendencies of Christian interpretation (reading the Old Testament in light of the New Testament). In this particular instance, scientific knowledge would, in the eyes of the Folkbibeln representatives, bring about a de-Christianization of the Old Testament, stripping it of its religious value and turning it into one set of antique texts among many others.
The third and final example concerns the translation of the verb *brk in Gen. 12:3 (Abraham’s blessing), where the Folkbibeln translators again displayed a willingness to let their understanding of an Old Testament pericope be influenced by the New Testament. Accordingly, they adopted Paul’s argument in Galatians 3, where he bases his interpretation of the Old Testament passage on the passive meaning of the verb (“shall be blessed”). In this way, a traditional Christian understanding of Abraham’s blessing was retained. Thereby, the biblical text was better attuned to the expectations of a certain type of Christian readership, but it could also be made to function as a weapon against the modernist epistemological assumptions of secular biblical scholarship.
4 Feminist Response to the Bible Commission
Two debates directed at the work of the Bible Commission in the 1980s and 90s were informed by feminist critique: 1) the demands of inclusive language in the translation, and 2) the demands of a preface to the new translation, informing readers of the allegedly misogynist tendencies in some Old Testament texts.9
As I will argue, these critiques implicitly or explicitly problematized the conception of science in the historical-critical scholarship that functioned as the epistemic foundation of the work of the Bible Commission. Secularization had forced a response from biblical scholars, which led to the emergence of various late modern forms of historical-critical scholarship, focusing solely on historical questions. However, as we will see, these assumptions were apprehended as a problem in light of the epistemological pluralism, the “emergence of a multiplicity of knowledge sources” (Grundmann 2017, 29), that surfaced in the 1970s onwards. Biblical scholarship was seen as unable to cope with the consequences that the biblical texts had (or could have) for real-life people in contemporary societies. While historical-critical scholarship had made positivist observation of natural facts the sole source of knowledge of the biblical texts, feminist scholarship gradually started to emphasize the experiences of women as an alternative source of knowledge. And if historical-critical scholars were not able to produce knowledge that could do justice to the experiences and expectations of women, then a Bible based on historical-critical scholarly knowledge would not be able to function as a Bible for all of the Swedish people.
The demands of inclusive language first emerged as a theological concern in different Christian denominations in the US and Canada in the 1970s (Ivarsson 1999). The first major inclusive translation was the New Revised Standard Version (1989). Inclusive biblical translation seeks to neutralize what is understood to be an inappropriately gendered language in the biblical source texts (see Bird 1988), and hence to “remove” this specific form of cultural bias from the texts (Von Flotow 1997, 52–53; Simon 1996). Joanna Dewey has contended that inclusive language is necessary because it matters what the Bible says: the Bible is ascribed authority and is used as an authoritative text (Dewey et al. 1990, 63). It seemed clear to many feminist scholars that throughout history, the Bible had been used as an authoritative text with strongly negative consequences for women, and this is why these scholars in the 1970s turned against different traditional interpretations of the biblical texts (e.g., Trible 1975). Such a critique also entailed a discussion of the epistemic authority, whether academic or religious, that had worked as the foundation of these traditional interpretations.
In the Swedish context, the question of inclusive language was raised after the New Testament translation of the Bible Commission was published in 1981. The debate centered on Matt. 5:9 (in the Beatitudes) with the translation “Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called the sons of God” (see Ivarsson 1999, 51). By some debaters, the rendering “sons of God” (Guds söner) was perceived as a “change” in the wrong direction, as the previous 1917 Church Bible had featured the term “the children of God” (Guds barn) in this particular instance. It was called into question whether women readers of the Bible would feel included by the new rendering “sons of God” (Rehnberg 1982). One of the translators of the commission, Harald Riesenfeld, replied condescendingly that it was “only in little Sweden” that “a few women and friends of women care to react against the source text true differentiation between ‘sons of God’ and ‘children of God’” (Riesenfeld 1982, 17).10 In other words, the only thing that mattered for the translators was to be true to the source text— the reception of the translation once finalized and published was completely irrelevant.
A more theoretically sustained discussion on inclusive Bible translation was initiated in the early 1990s. In 1993, the General Synod of the Church of Sweden passed a statement asking that the parts of the translation already finalized as well as the ones under production should employ a principle of inclusive language (Ivarsson 1999, 19). In 1994, the secretary of the Bible Commission, Christer Åsberg, participated in a seminar in Uppsala devoted to inclusive translation. Three years later (1997), he participated in a public hearing arranged by the Theological Committee of the Church of Sweden (see Åsberg et al. 1998). In this hearing, the question of inclusive language in the translation was discussed, and Åsberg stated that from case to case the commission had employed inclusive language, when the source texts and the target language permitted. However, Åsberg stated that he found what he called a more ideologically informed “rewriting” (omskrivning) impossible—simply because such a translation was not the task according to the governmental directives (Åsberg et al. 1998, 205–206).
Feminist critique also informed a second debate concerning a demand for a preface to be added to the translation of the Bible Commission. The commission’s Old Testament translation team had been working for slightly more than a decade when the author and teacher Birgitta Onsell, in 1987, wrote a much-noted piece in Sweden’s largest newspaper, Dagens Nyheter. Onsell argued that the Old Testament translation, once published, should contain a preface alerting the reader to the misogyny and androcentrism of some of the Old Testament texts (Liljefors 2022, 2023). As Onsell saw it, a new translation would put the misogynist ideas represented by these texts into renewed circulation. A preface informing the reader of the historical background to the androcentric world of the Old Testament would be one way to problematize these ideas and to soften their potential impact and consequences for women in society. In other words, a preface was a way for the translators—and ultimately for the Government which had commissioned the translation—to take responsibility for the translation and the effects it might have on future readers. Such a notion was indicative of what was happening also in the landscape of Swedish biblical scholarship in the 1980s. Responsibility became an important concept for several exegetes, who argued that scholars needed to be responsible for the moral and ethical implications of their interpretations of the biblical texts (e.g., Ljung 1989; see also Sjöberg 2007).
It was in connection with certain specific biblical texts or passages that responsibility was particularly crucial. Hence, there was a restricted number of Old Testament pericopes that Onsell recurrently quoted or referred to (see Liljefors 2022, 79 fn. 288). Two of these were Genesis 2–3 and Eccl. 7:26/27.11 Onsell (1987) for example noted that Genesis 2–3 had been the foundation for interpretations that stressed women as inferior to men (for example, because Eve had supposedly been created from Adam’s rib), but also for interpretations that accused women of having introduced sin into the world. A number of times, Onsell referred specifically to Gen. 3:16, where the Lord God, according to the narrative, turned directly to Eve and stated that, as a consequence of her disobedience, “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (NRSVUE). Onsell noted that this particular verse had been used throughout history, not least in the Christian tradition, as an argument for men’s control over women. This fact had to be acknowledged and, if possible, reversed. Otherwise, texts such as Gen. 3:16 would continue to form the basis for interpretations that were used in the service of male oppression of women. Second, Onsell returned a number of times to Eccl. 7:26/27: “I found more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, whose heart is nets, whose hands are fetters; one who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her” (NRSVUE). Such a thoroughly negative understanding of women could not go uncommented, according to Onsell.
In 1990, 1993, and 1995, respectively, private motions were placed by members of the Swedish Parliament, urging the Government to demand the kind of preface Onsell had suggested. The first of these motions suggested a preface informing the reader of “the historical background to the Old Testament’s largely condescending view of women” (see Pleijel 2018, 175). The MPs placing these motions represented all of the political parties of the Parliament (Riksdag) at the time. This indicates that the Bible was conceived broadly as a political problem and a political interest. Just as the Parliament had been considered the natural place for initiating the translation in the first place in 1961 (see introduction), the Parliament was apparently also considered the natural place for dealing with the future reception of the new Bible as the translation was nearing its completion (the finalized translation was published in 1999). The Bible was thus brought to inhabit not only the “room of science” (Ejrnæs 1994, 161), which is where the translators of the Bible Commission wished to keep it, but also the room of politics, and one of the most emblematic political rooms at that: the Parliament (on the Bible in parliamentary debates, cf. Løland 2023 and Liljefors and Jensdotter in this Special Issue).
5 The Translators Respond to the Critique: Defending the Epistemic Authority of Science in a Secular Landscape
The critique of both feminists and conservative Christians was recurrently addressed by the translators of the Bible Commission, surely because they wanted their translation to be received favorably, but also because they wanted to defend their work and its epistemic foundation. Precisely since it was, to use Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s (1988) somewhat pejorative term, the “scientist epistemologies” that enabled the Bible to survive as a public scripture in late postwar Sweden, they had to be defended. Alternative epistemologies would not ensure the Bible’s survival as a genuinely public scripture, as they would rather fragmentize the Bible by relegating it to various partial spheres of the public space.12 In the present section, the response of the translators to their critics will be briefly discussed.
Notably, the scholar-translators in their counter-critique also promoted responsibility in biblical interpretation. But whereas the feminist critics had emphasized responsibility for the outcome of interpretation, responsibility in traditional scholarship entailed employing those methods that were considered philologically correct. In the traditional conception of scientific work, this was the true ethics of interpretation, with scholarly work being considered epistemically authoritative when it followed “methodologically proper scientific procedures” (Gieryn 1999, 2). In this scheme, “methods” came close to being synonymous with scholarly “virtues” (Paul 2019, 11). It is therefore interesting to note a statement by the chair of the Bible Commission, Hansson (1999), regarding different kinds of leverages from churches, denominations, and other groups on the translators and their work. Such leverages must be dismissed, according to Hansson, in light of “an ethics of translation” (4). This ethics was strongly connected to the integrity of the work of the translators, which was itself guaranteed by a “consistently scientific approach” (6). The scientific approach and the ethics of translation were hence seen as closely connected.
In one context, Åsberg discussed the conflicting renderings “sons of God” and “children of God,” stating that one could discuss the fact that the New Testament Greek source texts differentiate between the two expressions. Whereas this was “an exegetical discussion,” another aspect of the translation was “whether it will be a negative experience for women to read this [‘sons of God’]” (Åsberg et al. 1998, 207). This shows on the one hand that Åsberg was aware of the possible consequences of a certain linguistic rendering, and on the other that he considered this problem to be essentially separated from the “exegetical discussion.” Thus, the possible consequences of the translation-interpretation had nothing to do with exegesis proper. We find another interesting example in an essay by Åsberg (1995/1996), where he suggested that translators, in the face of demands made by public opinion, can be requested to abandon their “scientific principles” (27). He stated that he himself had been confronted with the demands of different critical groups, for example feminists. In this way, feminists and feminist criticism were set against the scientific principles of the translators; if feminist critique had been allowed to influence the work of the translators, this would have meant the abandonment of scientific principles and the introduction of an alternative epistemology as the basis for the translation.
As already noted, secularization sparked new scholarship on the Bible during the Enlightenment period (Sheehan 2005). However, it also restricted and demarcated what kind of scholarship could be deemed acceptable by the scientific community, especially in the late 19th century when the historical-critical method became broadly accepted among biblical scholars and part of their professional ideology. The critical method was deemed scientific, while religious harmonization was deemed non-scientific. Political interests connected to the biblical texts were also placed outside the boundaries of what properly scientific inquiry could encompass, among other things because politics dealt with values and made statements on how people should act in a given situation (on science as “boundary-making”, see Gieryn 1999). In the discourse of the Bible Commission translators, one therefore finds a recurrent discursive construction of both political and religious phenomena as “faith.” Discussing the demands for inclusive language in the translation, Albrektson (2007, 28) for example said that “modern politically correct convictions can serve as temptations to distort the original,” and that such convictions were ultimately the outcome of “faith” (tro) (Albrektson 2007, 30). It did not really matter whether the faith was feminist (political) or Christian (religious), as both instances of faith were equally opposed to the kind of scientific translation that the Bible Commission sought to produce.
These discussions, to a large extent, revolved around the notion of interpretation. The translators were of course well aware that any translation entails interpretation, but this could, according to them, only encompass the text-critical interpretation of textual evidence and the semantic interpretation of the source texts once established; interpretation in terms of applying the biblical message to a present-day context was not the task of the translator (Hidal 1999, 28). This was not only the case with the linguistic rendering of the main text of the translation but also of its paratextual framing; as a response to the demands on a preface or commentary of the kind Birgitta Onsell had suggested, Åsberg (1990, 22) said that “[t]here are those who feel that the position of women in the Bible […] should be elucidated in the notes or in some other manner,” but for both “practical reasons and as a matter of principle,” the footnotes of the new translation under production must be confined to information that “helps the reader to understand the original meaning of the text.” In relation to the finalized translation, Block (2000) similarly observed that the footnotes did not contain “suggestions on how the contents [of the biblical texts] should be applied” (20). In sum, the scholar-translators held tight to a distinction between “pure” and “applied” science (see Gieryn 1999, 54), where the latter was not only considered a problematic or inferior form of science; it was essentially non-science. It should be pointed out that this was far from only a matter of purely scientific principles; it concerned the very basis on which the Bible could be and remain a societally relevant work, a public scripture in a secular culture.
6 Final Reflection
The article set out by describing the contention of politician Manne Ståhl in 1961 that the Swedish Government should take responsibility for a new national Bible, which would be a way to resist the potentially devastating effects of secularization. I have argued that different actors relating to the project of producing a new national Bible experienced secularization as a pivotal factor for the production of the translation. Secularization threatened the position of the Bible as a public scripture, a bible for all of the Swedish people. At the same time, secularization had prompted the kind of research (historical-critical scholarship) that enabled the Bible to remain a public scripture in late postwar Sweden and beyond.
Almost four decades after the initiative of Manne Ståhl, as the new national Bible was nearing its completion, one of its translators reflected on the work in an article titled “New Bible Translation in Secularized Society” (Block 2000). The translator, Per Block, explicitly positioned the work of the Bible Commission in relation to secularization, which he described as “one of the most glaring trends of the 20th century” (Block 2000, 11). But in contrast to Ståhl, Block did not see the new translation as a tool for decelerating secularization. He merely pointed it out as a fact and contended that the task of translating the Bible had changed because of it. The Bible necessarily had to be translated differently, and on different grounds, than in previous generations, not simply because of the sheer passing of time, but because of secularization as a social fact. The societal context of the Bible was changing, and therefore, the Bible needed to change, too.
More specifically, a new translation of the Bible needed to rest on a consistently scientific knowledge base. For the translators, this equaled historical-critical scholarship. The translators, however, found themselves in a liminal space, in a time between rock-solid trust in scientific expert knowledge and a gradual undermining of such knowledge. The early postwar era has been characterized as a “dream of reason,” a dream of “the abolition of politics – of putting an end to the strife and confusion of human society in favor of an orderly administration of things based upon objective knowledge” (Torgerson 1986, 34). This could also stand as a characterization of the intellectual climate in early postwar Sweden. But in the late 1960s and the 1970s, something started to change, in Sweden and in the Western world at large. Along with a growing leftist critique of scientific “objectivity” and “impartiality,” a number of sociopolitical crises (technological, environmental, and economic) significantly undermined public trust in scientific expertise and therefore also in scientific knowledge (Huisman 2015; Grundmann 2017). If the positivism of the early postwar era had seemed to enable the “abolition of politics,” the emergence of a multiplicity of knowledge sources (Grundmann 2017, 29) was precisely what undermined this quest and reintroduced “strife” and “confusion” (cf. above) as components or aspects of the Bible in the public sphere.
The Bible Commission translators had sought to place the Bible firmly in the room of science. The feminist critics, however, relocated it to the room of politics, while the conservative Christians sought to return it to the room of the church. The public negotiations of the knowledge base of the new national Bible, themselves an indication of the growing epistemological pluralism of the time, are therefore a clear illustration of how vulnerable historical-critical scholarship was—not as a research tradition, but as an answer to the effects of secularization on the Bible as public scripture. Feminists and conservative Christians alike not only criticized but also exposed historical-critical scholarship precisely as an interest—and one of many different interests at that (cf. Vander Stichele and Penner 2005, 13–14). And if it indeed constituted a specific interest, it would not be able to function as the basis for a translation that could transcend the various interests of different groups in the Swedish society of the time.
Funding
This research was funded by the Swedish Research Council under Grant 2021-02108.
Translations of Swedish quotes, here and throughout the article, are my own.
Ståhl did not offer any explicit argument on how such a committee would be organized, but his motion should be understood in relation to the fact that all major political and social reforms of the time were carried out in the context of governmental commissions of inquiry (Statens Offentliga Utredningar), a central political institution in Sweden since the interwar era (see Petersson 2016).
While clear differences existed between these two groups, the distinction is to some extent analytical. I do not wish to suggest that there were clear or permanent boundaries between the groups, nor that (conservative) Christians could not be feminists, or vice versa.
This section is largely based on Gustafsson (1990) and Pleijel (2018).
One of the Old Testament translators, Bertil Albrektson, was handpicked from his professorship at the Swedish-speaking Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland.
The distinction was most famously articulated by the sociologist Max Weber.
In this section, I quote extensively from articles and chapters published more recently but where the representatives of Biblicum, and members of the association that produced the Folkbibeln translation, look retrospectively on their work and the incentives behind it.
A revised version was published in 2015.
In the latter case, I draw extensively on Liljefors (2022; 2023) who has covered the debate on a preface to the Hebrew Bible translation.
As pointed out by Riesenfeld (1982), the New Testament authors oscillate between ‘sons of God’ (hyiou theou) and ‘children of God’ (tekna theou).
V. 27 in the Swedish editions referred to by Onsell corresponds to v. 26 in most English translations (KJV, ESV, NIV, NRSVUE).
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