μια απόπειρα επιστημονικής προσέγγισης της ανθρώπινης θρησκευτικότητας
an attempt for a scientific approach of human religiosity "Sedulo curavi humanas actiones non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere" —Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus 1:4
⏳ ⌛ First post: October 30, 2008 / Πρώτη ανάρτηση: 30 Οκτωβρίου 2008
.
Saturday, May 4, 2024
Joseph Priestley & Robert Garnham as Bible translators /
Ο Τζόζεφ Πρίστλι & ο Ρόμπερτ Γκάρναμ ως βιβλικοί μεταφραστές
The materials assembled here make plain that Joseph Priestley’s and Robert Garnham’s translation ambitions emerged at the intersection of dissenting theology, the afterlife of the Authorized Version, and the eighteenth century’s uneven reception of continental biblical criticism. Priestley’s exhortation to “Search the Scriptures” framed his enterprise as a return to philological and textual first principles, yet the execution oscillated between apologetic aim and critical method. Contemporary critics saw this tension immediately. Without the dense scaffolding of references that Lardner had normalized, Priestley’s harmonizations of recalcitrant texts to a Socinian hermeneutic could look like special pleading; Soame Jenyns’s charge that “rational Dissenters” trimmed Scripture to “their own reason” and Toplady’s dismissal of “the subtlety” of Priestley’s criticism point to a perceived circularity: doctrine set the agenda and the critical moves followed (pp. 101, nn. 185–86).
As a program, however, Priestley’s “Proposal for Correcting the English Translation of the Scriptures” was neither merely polemical nor naïvely iconoclastic. His seven “Rules of Translating,” the invitation to “learned friends of free enquiry,” and the commitment to a “Continually Improving Translation” articulated an iterative, collaborative model of revision that anticipated later practices of cumulative scholarly editions (p. 102, n. 192). The conservatism of the plan—“to keep to the phraseology of the present version” and to depart only for genuine improvement—deserves emphasis (p. 102, n. 193). That choice undercut the stock Anglican complaint that Dissenters wished to replace the Bible with a sectarian paraphrase; it also limited the project’s capacity to correct systemic features of the KJV that were not amenable to piecemeal emendation. A revision that begins by binding itself to the Authorized Version’s idiom risks enshrining its conceptual and syntactic horizons. It is telling that High Church patrons, once the drivers of textual collation through figures like Kennicott and Lowth, had grown wary by the 1780s of any enterprise that might re-open the settled authority of the Established Church’s Bible; Priestley’s proposal exploited precisely that institutional hesitancy while inheriting its tools (pp. 101–2, nn. 187–88).
Garnham’s intervention sharpened the political contour of the moment. His challenge to Bishop Bagot—demanding names while brandishing Anglican authorities who themselves had urged comprehensive revision—shows how, by the late 1780s, the demand for a new translation had become a proxy contest over ecclesial legitimacy. When a Dissenter marshalled Lowth and Joseph White against episcopal complacency, the landscape had shifted from a scholarly question of textual state to a public quarrel over the Church’s custodianship of Scripture (p. 102, n. 191). As a matter of optics, that move both liberated dissenting scholarship from Anglican patronage and guaranteed that any resulting translation would be received as a partisan gesture.
The Baskerville Bible proved catalytic. It linked Priestley’s practical experience of annotating a printed text with the broader collation tradition of Kennicott and de Rossi, and it suggested a pathway by which an English vernacular edition could register variant evidence without capitulating to a full-blown new version (p. 103, n. 194). Priestley’s letters to Lindsey map a credible division of scholarly labor—Lindsey on the New Testament, Priestley on the Old; then the recruitment of Michael Dodson, William Frend, Thomas Belsham, and even outreach to Gilbert Wakefield—indicative of real institutional capacity among English Unitarians to execute a multi-volume revision (pp. 103–4, nn. 198–210). The pace in 1789–90, from Psalms to Proverbs and on toward Daniel and Jeremiah, shows an editor-translator working with unusual energy and confidence.
It is tempting to make the Birmingham riots the decisive explanation for the failure of the enterprise, and certainly the destruction of Priestley’s house, laboratory, and manuscripts—“A New Translation of the Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes” among them—was a material catastrophe from which the project did not recover (p. 104, n. 211). Yet the political turn of the 1790s was equally fatal. The same anti-reform mood that chilled ecclesiastical experiments also cooled lay appetite for a Bible that wore dissenting sponsorship on its title page. In that sense, the riot’s symbolism mattered as much as the lost leaves.
Against the broader currents of eighteenth-century biblical scholarship, Priestley’s project appears more symptomatic than pioneering. Jonathan Sheehan’s account of the Anglo-German exchange highlights the transfer of technical textual scholarship from early Anglican circles to German Kritik and its return to Britain as a reimagined “cultural Bible”; Unitarians figure only faintly in that story (pp. 104–5, nn. 214–15). Priestley’s own admission in 1791 that “We know too little of German literature” registers both a linguistic gap and a methodological one (p. 105, n. 215). Where German scholars such as Semler, Michaelis, and Eichhorn pressed toward source- and form-critical questions and a historicization of canon, Priestley tended to treat Pentateuchal narrative as “historical facts,” conceding only marginally, for Adam in Paradise, an “air of fable” (p. 105, n. 219). The contrast with Alexander Geddes is instructive. Geddes served as an English vector for German advances and was prepared to countenance mythic or philosophical constructions in the Old Testament and to challenge Mosaic authorship; Priestley, by comparison, used textual collation and vernacular lucidity to defend a broadly literal history compatible with Socinian theology (p. 105, nn. 217–20). The result is a hybrid: a revisionist KJV underwritten by select critical resources but ultimately ordered by an apologetic horizon.
Two methodological liabilities follow from that hybridity. First, the declared minimization of departures from KJV diction coupled with the absence of a sustained critical apparatus made it difficult to persuade skeptics that the enterprise was more than a doctrinally motivated tidy-up. Lardner’s footnoted density had functioned as a currency of credibility; Priestley’s lighter annotation traded clarity for authority. Second, the reliance on collation traditions without a deeper engagement with emergent German philology curtailed the project’s capacity to intervene where the KJV reflected not merely infelicities of English but inherited text-critical judgments that a more eclectic Hebrew or Greek base might overturn. Priestley’s openness to communal correction could, in principle, have mitigated both problems by allowing successive editions to incorporate heavier documentation and bolder textual decisions. In practice, the political climate, the loss of manuscripts, and the shrinking constituency for a dissenting-led revision foreclosed that gradualist path.
Garnham’s role is best read as strategic amplification rather than scholarly leadership. His taunting of episcopal defenders of the Authorized Version dramatized an already hardening divide and helped reposition Bible translation as a theater of confessional politics. That move served a polemical purpose but could only complicate the reception of any “continually improving” Bible as a common national text.
If Priestley and Garnham failed to deliver a finished translation, they nevertheless clarified the terms on which an English Bible might be revised outside ecclesiastical patronage: iterative rather than definitive; collaborative rather than episcopally controlled; conservative in diction yet selectively critical in notes; and explicitly tethered to a theological vision. The strengths of that model—accessibility, mobilization of a dissenting learned network, responsiveness to new evidence—were also its vulnerabilities in a culture that was coming to prize either the philological radicalism of German Kritik or the symbolic stability of the Authorized Version. In that light, Priestley’s project reads less as a missed revolution than as a revealing experiment at the hinge between confessional apologetics and historical-critical scholarship.
3 comments:
The materials assembled here make plain that Joseph Priestley’s and Robert Garnham’s translation ambitions emerged at the intersection of dissenting theology, the afterlife of the Authorized Version, and the eighteenth century’s uneven reception of continental biblical criticism. Priestley’s exhortation to “Search the Scriptures” framed his enterprise as a return to philological and textual first principles, yet the execution oscillated between apologetic aim and critical method. Contemporary critics saw this tension immediately. Without the dense scaffolding of references that Lardner had normalized, Priestley’s harmonizations of recalcitrant texts to a Socinian hermeneutic could look like special pleading; Soame Jenyns’s charge that “rational Dissenters” trimmed Scripture to “their own reason” and Toplady’s dismissal of “the subtlety” of Priestley’s criticism point to a perceived circularity: doctrine set the agenda and the critical moves followed (pp. 101, nn. 185–86).
As a program, however, Priestley’s “Proposal for Correcting the English Translation of the Scriptures” was neither merely polemical nor naïvely iconoclastic. His seven “Rules of Translating,” the invitation to “learned friends of free enquiry,” and the commitment to a “Continually Improving Translation” articulated an iterative, collaborative model of revision that anticipated later practices of cumulative scholarly editions (p. 102, n. 192). The conservatism of the plan—“to keep to the phraseology of the present version” and to depart only for genuine improvement—deserves emphasis (p. 102, n. 193). That choice undercut the stock Anglican complaint that Dissenters wished to replace the Bible with a sectarian paraphrase; it also limited the project’s capacity to correct systemic features of the KJV that were not amenable to piecemeal emendation. A revision that begins by binding itself to the Authorized Version’s idiom risks enshrining its conceptual and syntactic horizons. It is telling that High Church patrons, once the drivers of textual collation through figures like Kennicott and Lowth, had grown wary by the 1780s of any enterprise that might re-open the settled authority of the Established Church’s Bible; Priestley’s proposal exploited precisely that institutional hesitancy while inheriting its tools (pp. 101–2, nn. 187–88).
Garnham’s intervention sharpened the political contour of the moment. His challenge to Bishop Bagot—demanding names while brandishing Anglican authorities who themselves had urged comprehensive revision—shows how, by the late 1780s, the demand for a new translation had become a proxy contest over ecclesial legitimacy. When a Dissenter marshalled Lowth and Joseph White against episcopal complacency, the landscape had shifted from a scholarly question of textual state to a public quarrel over the Church’s custodianship of Scripture (p. 102, n. 191). As a matter of optics, that move both liberated dissenting scholarship from Anglican patronage and guaranteed that any resulting translation would be received as a partisan gesture.
The Baskerville Bible proved catalytic. It linked Priestley’s practical experience of annotating a printed text with the broader collation tradition of Kennicott and de Rossi, and it suggested a pathway by which an English vernacular edition could register variant evidence without capitulating to a full-blown new version (p. 103, n. 194). Priestley’s letters to Lindsey map a credible division of scholarly labor—Lindsey on the New Testament, Priestley on the Old; then the recruitment of Michael Dodson, William Frend, Thomas Belsham, and even outreach to Gilbert Wakefield—indicative of real institutional capacity among English Unitarians to execute a multi-volume revision (pp. 103–4, nn. 198–210). The pace in 1789–90, from Psalms to Proverbs and on toward Daniel and Jeremiah, shows an editor-translator working with unusual energy and confidence.
It is tempting to make the Birmingham riots the decisive explanation for the failure of the enterprise, and certainly the destruction of Priestley’s house, laboratory, and manuscripts—“A New Translation of the Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes” among them—was a material catastrophe from which the project did not recover (p. 104, n. 211). Yet the political turn of the 1790s was equally fatal. The same anti-reform mood that chilled ecclesiastical experiments also cooled lay appetite for a Bible that wore dissenting sponsorship on its title page. In that sense, the riot’s symbolism mattered as much as the lost leaves.
Against the broader currents of eighteenth-century biblical scholarship, Priestley’s project appears more symptomatic than pioneering. Jonathan Sheehan’s account of the Anglo-German exchange highlights the transfer of technical textual scholarship from early Anglican circles to German Kritik and its return to Britain as a reimagined “cultural Bible”; Unitarians figure only faintly in that story (pp. 104–5, nn. 214–15). Priestley’s own admission in 1791 that “We know too little of German literature” registers both a linguistic gap and a methodological one (p. 105, n. 215). Where German scholars such as Semler, Michaelis, and Eichhorn pressed toward source- and form-critical questions and a historicization of canon, Priestley tended to treat Pentateuchal narrative as “historical facts,” conceding only marginally, for Adam in Paradise, an “air of fable” (p. 105, n. 219). The contrast with Alexander Geddes is instructive. Geddes served as an English vector for German advances and was prepared to countenance mythic or philosophical constructions in the Old Testament and to challenge Mosaic authorship; Priestley, by comparison, used textual collation and vernacular lucidity to defend a broadly literal history compatible with Socinian theology (p. 105, nn. 217–20). The result is a hybrid: a revisionist KJV underwritten by select critical resources but ultimately ordered by an apologetic horizon.
Two methodological liabilities follow from that hybridity. First, the declared minimization of departures from KJV diction coupled with the absence of a sustained critical apparatus made it difficult to persuade skeptics that the enterprise was more than a doctrinally motivated tidy-up. Lardner’s footnoted density had functioned as a currency of credibility; Priestley’s lighter annotation traded clarity for authority. Second, the reliance on collation traditions without a deeper engagement with emergent German philology curtailed the project’s capacity to intervene where the KJV reflected not merely infelicities of English but inherited text-critical judgments that a more eclectic Hebrew or Greek base might overturn. Priestley’s openness to communal correction could, in principle, have mitigated both problems by allowing successive editions to incorporate heavier documentation and bolder textual decisions. In practice, the political climate, the loss of manuscripts, and the shrinking constituency for a dissenting-led revision foreclosed that gradualist path.
Garnham’s role is best read as strategic amplification rather than scholarly leadership. His taunting of episcopal defenders of the Authorized Version dramatized an already hardening divide and helped reposition Bible translation as a theater of confessional politics. That move served a polemical purpose but could only complicate the reception of any “continually improving” Bible as a common national text.
If Priestley and Garnham failed to deliver a finished translation, they nevertheless clarified the terms on which an English Bible might be revised outside ecclesiastical patronage: iterative rather than definitive; collaborative rather than episcopally controlled; conservative in diction yet selectively critical in notes; and explicitly tethered to a theological vision. The strengths of that model—accessibility, mobilization of a dissenting learned network, responsiveness to new evidence—were also its vulnerabilities in a culture that was coming to prize either the philological radicalism of German Kritik or the symbolic stability of the Authorized Version. In that light, Priestley’s project reads less as a missed revolution than as a revealing experiment at the hinge between confessional apologetics and historical-critical scholarship.
Post a Comment