Religious Translation and Cross-Cultural Revisionings in Early America, 1693–1750

Protestant immigrants who carried Bible movements across the early modern Atlantic to the New World brought with them deep-seated aspirations for new translations and spiritual understandings of Scripture. This paper will briefly analyze transatlantic intellectual influences and points of cross-cultural convergence found in English Puritan minister Cotton Mather’s “Biblia Americana” and revisionings of the Bible and particular Bible-based religious practices that radical German Pietist groups — including the Schwarzenau Brethren, the Ephrata Cloister, and the Moravians — brought to or originated in British North America. How these different revisionist projects can be viewed as instances of cultural transfer and dialogue is a question that has not even begun to be explored for British North America. Amending the King James Version of the Bible in light of the new Enlightenment scholarship was a top priority for Mather. For German Pietists, a personal orientation toward the Bible played a decisive role in their departure from the Protestantism of the Confessional Age in Europe. As a case study, this paper will compare the Philadelphianism and restorationism of the German radical Pietists with Mather’s biblical primitivism and expectations for the church in the final age. Here special attention will be given to the development of Zinzendorf’s Tropenlehre and its attempted implementation in the New World. Mather, by way of contrast, was not a Philadelphian, but he did espouse a non-confessional biblical primitivism by assuming that the true church of Christ was purely scriptural and transcended denominational and historical boundaries. Beyond the narrow realms of biblical philology and high-brow theology, English- and German Protestant Bible translations and commentaries will, thus, demonstrate the early influence of European Enlightenment thought in America and yield new insight into the rise of transatlantic Protestant awakenings in the early modern period.