Resisting Wirkungsgeschichte: Bible Translators as Agents of Reception

1 Introduction

In contemporary studies on biblical reception, the biblical texts tend to take on a curious form of personification. The texts are said to have an “afterlife” (Seidman 2010; Sherwood 2000), a “career” (Gray 2016), or a “history” (Breed 2015). Such language implies that the biblical texts somehow lead a life on their own. With reference to Walter Benjamin, Hendel (2010: 6) thus argues that through “its incessant variety of transformation,” the biblical text “becomes a historical agent.” Cadwallader (2018: 136) similarly claims that biblical translations “become revealed as agents serving particular interests and confirming particular views.” Even with reference to the different human agents involved in the production and dissemination of versions of the biblical texts, Davies (1995: 69) cannot help but say that “Bibles have a history.”

In such parlance, the texts are turned into agents who themselves govern how they will be received and interpreted. In my view, this way of characterizing reception is highly problematic since it veils the different human agents involved in the reception of the biblical texts. This is not to say that studies on biblical reception have not included or focused on human agents – the recent volume The Nordic Bible (Bjelland Kartzow, Larsen, and Lehtipuu 2023) is an excellent example – but the above way of discussing reception still largely persists. As Malley (2009: 194) notes, however, if the Bible has been and continues to be an influential set of texts, culturally and theologically, it is due to “the people who read and interpret the Bible.” And the extent of this influence, in turn, depends on “the result of deliberate acts by translators” (Malley 2009: 194). At some point, someone – a translator or a team of translators – produced a version of the biblical texts and provided other people with this version. Such a version or translation is the only way in which the overwhelming majority of people will ever access ‘the Bible,’ out of the simple fact that only a highly restricted number of biblical scholars or experts in religious communities can access the biblical texts in their original languages. Therefore, if the Bible continues to be influential, it is primarily as a translated bible (Dube 2024).

In the present article, I will not focus on readers of translated bibles, but rather on those who produce these translated bibles, namely translators. More specifically, I will investigate the different ways in which translators function as what I term “agents of reception.” By this term I wish to point to the fact that translators are actively shaping the tangible textual forms whereby readers gain access to, and thereby receive, ‘the Bible.’ The specific choices that translators make result in specific textual representations of the biblical texts. Even before readers can engage with biblical texts and exercise their agency (see Bjelland Kartzow, Larsen, and Lehtipuu 2023: 10), their possibilities of doing this have therefore been circumscribed by the texts with which translators have provided them. In this way, translators have the power to alter old patterns of reception and create new ones (see Tahir Gürçağlar 2008: 153, 197). In exercising their agency, however, Bible translators inevitably find themselves confronted by the fact that the biblical texts have been the object of interpretation and translation for thousands of years. In the article, I therefore also discuss how biblical translators exercise their agency in relation to the previous effective history (Wirkungsgeschichte) of the biblical texts, and how this constrains the agency of translators – but also how translators employ different strategies in order to make resistance to certain interpretations connected with the effective history of the biblical texts.^[1]

The two translations I investigate in this article are biblical translations into Swedish, Bibel 2000 (published in 1999/2001) and Svenska Folkbibeln (1998/2015, hereafter: Folkbibeln). I will focus on the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) part of these translations.^[2] The first translation (Bibel 2000) was commissioned by the Swedish Government in 1972, being carried out by a number of researchers aligned with historical-critical biblical scholarship. The second translation was carried out as a ‘protest’ version, whose translators sought to resist the ‘secular’ foundations of the governmental Bible and the kind of historical-critical scholarship represented by its translators (Pleijel 2022b). In this, the two translations are part of a larger phenomenon: that of biblical translations yielding competing versions – either theologically conservative translations who refute ‘liberal’ and ‘secular’ versions, or the other way around – whereby translators as human agents compete about what version of the Bible the general public should gain access to.^[3] Therefore, the analysis in this article illustrates a more general, widespread phenomenon, beyond the specific case study of the two translations analyzed in the article.

The translations are presented more closely in Section 3 (below). In what follows (Section 2), I will introduce the rationale for the article, which rests on a discussion of the agency of Bible translators in relation to the connection between the effective history of the biblical texts and contemporary reception of ‘the Bible.’ Having presented the translations, Section 4 features an investigation of a select number of passages in Genesis and how the translators of the two respective translators have rendered these passages and framed them paratextually. A general discussion, where I point out the differences but also some surprising similarities between the translations, concludes the article.

2 Translations, Translators, and Effective History (Wirkungsgeschichte)

In the academic endeavor of biblical reception studies, translation continues to this day to be an understudied subject (Bjelland Kartzow and Neutel 2023: 163). Whereas it has been acknowledged that specific biblical translations can have an impact on the reception of biblical motifs and characters (Gray 2016: 412–14), or that diverging interpretations of the same biblical passage depend on different translations (Kessler 2004: 9), the issue has not been the object of more systematic reflection. However, the fact that most people do not encounter the biblical texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek, but precisely as translated texts, should indicate the central role that biblical translation does have in actual reception of ‘the Bible’ – if not in biblical reception studies. Furthermore, as Rogerson has contended, readers will be “at the mercy, so to speak, of whatever theology or translation principle has driven the one version that they have” (2002: 30). To my mind, even more accurate would have been to speak of whatever theology or translation principle has driven the translators that have produced a particular version, which readers then access. Pursuing this line of thought, in what follows I will turn the attention to translators specifically. I start more broadly within the Translation Studies subdiscipline of Translation Sociology in order to suggest some perspectives on how to understand agency among Bible translators, and specifically how translators exercise their agency in relation to the effective history of the biblical texts.

Translation Sociology developed as a branch of Translation Studies in the wake of the cultural turn in the 1990s and the subsequent social turn in the early 2000s (see Snell-Hornby 2006). As an outcome of these turns, scholarly interest moved beyond seeing translation as something purely textual, as a search for linguistic ‘equivalence,’ to seeing translation as a social practice performed by agents embedded in various cultural and political contexts. A key concept of exploration in Translation Sociology has consequently been that of agency. As put by Paloposki (2010: 88), researchers interested in the agency of translators focus “on the significance of the people behind the texts.” By Koskinen and Kinnunen (2010: 6), agency has been defined as the “willingness and ability to act.” To use one’s agency as a translator is to take an active stance, which sometimes includes making resistance (Ramakrishnan 2009). Arguing for resistance as primarily a political act, Venuti (1995) suggests that translators can exercise resistance by choosing translation strategies which do not comply with the dominant literary or linguistic norms of a particular cultural system. The notion of resistance implies that the translator confronts “a specific powerful opponent that exerts force in particular ways” (Tymoczko 2007: 210). Such an opponent can be another human agent, but also a system or – as in the present article – an informal institution, a set of religious or scholarly beliefs. Agency is always to some extent collective, in the sense that it is exercised in a societal context (Koskinen and Kinnunen 2010: 7). However, it can also be more readily collective, as is arguably the case with the translators I study in the present article: Both translations – Bibel 2000 and Folkbibeln – were produced not by one individual translator but by translator teams, where a kind of “we-mode translating” was taking place (Pleijel 2021: 324).

The societal context of agency mentioned by Kinnunen and Koskinen can comprise multiple factors. For Bible translators, one important factor consists of previous translations of the biblical texts, with the interpretations that have informed them and which are hence also put forward by them. Translators inevitably need to choose how to relate to this fact. Simon (1996: 106) therefore contends that “[e]ach new translation is necessarily a confirmation of, or a confrontation with, a pre-existing version.” In other words, translators may affirm or denounce the interpretations of previous translations, but they cannot overlook them (see Porter 1999). In the context of producing specifically Christian bibles, many translators display a reverence towards interpretations associated with Christian tradition and thus with previous Christian translations. Overtly Christian translations should certainly be acknowledged as a consequence or outcome of translators’ agency – especially after historical-critical scholarship began to challenge the formerly dominant religious mode of interpretation and influence biblical translation (see Thuesen 1999). Put differently, when ‘secular’ scholarship started to impact biblical translation more extensively, certain translators – with the institutions or patrons that supported them – experienced the emergence of a ‘powerful opponent’ which needed to be resisted.

That many contemporary biblical translations continue to be marked by Christian theology should come as no surprise and has been well studied (Beckmann 2020; Orlinsky 1990; Porter 1999), but their counterparts, the many ‘secular’ translations in existence today, have not been the object of much study. Such translations should equally be understood as an outcome of the work of translators exercising agency, for example by making resistance to certain interpretations connected with the religious – Christian or Jewish – effective history of the biblical texts. That these scholarly, ‘secular’ translations have not been the object of much attention possibly stems from the fact that explicitly Christian translations seem to be such flagrant examples of ideological intervention into the biblical texts, while the still lingering notion of historical-critical scholarship as detached and disinterested (see Moore and Sherwood 2011) means that translations aligned with these perspectives are understood as somehow less ideological. This may also be an outcome of the fact that historical-critical scholarship is often defined not by a common vision of what it strives after, but by a vision of what it at one point in time – in most accounts the Enlightenment – left behind, namely Christian and Jewish interpretive tradition (e.g., Spieckermann 2012). Ronald Hendel thus representatively says that modern biblical criticism “disrupts the unquestioned habits of Christian faith” (quoted in Breed 2020: 220). As I will show, this was clearly a vision that one of the two translator teams (Bibel 2000) sided with, and which led them to resist the traditional Christian effective history of the biblical texts, whereas the other team of translators (Folkbibeln) was indeed compelled by an urge to let Christian faith define their translation project, and thus to resist secular scholarship. The comparative perspective, where these two translations are understood and studied in relation to each other, makes it possible to investigate the particular interests at play in both of them – the conservative Christian as well as the ‘secular’ one. It will thereby be possible to uncover the interestedness of disinterestedness.

3 Two Translations: Outlining the Case Study

In what follows, I present more closely the two translations studied in this article. Thereafter, I outline the comparative study of the translations in the article. I then outline the rationale for studying both main text and paratext of the respective translations with respect to a select number of biblical texts from the book of Genesis.

4 Translating Genesis

In the following, I will survey how the four select Genesis pericopes have been translated in Bibel 2000 and Folkbibeln, including how they have been paratextually framed. All translations of text from Folkbibeln and Bibel 2000 into English are mine. The Swedish text is placed in italics below my English translations. I employ a simplified transliteration of Greek and Hebrew text according to the SBL Handbook of Style (2014).

5 Concluding Discussion: Agency, Resistance, and Wirkungsgeschichte

In the final section, I will discuss the results from the previous section on the four passages from Genesis. I will outline the most important differences between the translators, with a view to how the translators have used different textual and paratextual strategies in order to construct these differences. As the discussion unfolds, I will also note some surprising similarities between the two translations, similarities which, however, lie on different levels.

Through the discussion in the above section (4), it should have become apparent that the two translator teams take very different stances when it comes to traditional interpretations of the biblical texts. This seems to be confirmed by each of the pericopes discussed above, but even more so when they are taken together. It is thereby possible to observe how two distinctive positions are “progressively constructed through different textual and paratextual strategies” (Villanueva-Jordán and Martínez-Carrasco 2023: 236). By consistently and actively employing different strategies, the translators use their agency in order to construct two vastly different bibles: one non-confessional, historical-critical (Bibel 2000), and one Christian, effective-historical (Folkbibeln).

The Bibel 2000 translators clearly opt for renderings which are taken to reflect the original historical context of the biblical texts (in this case, the book of Genesis). This is done in clear affinity with academic biblical scholarship, which entails disregarding later understandings of the biblical texts. Traditional religious interpretations are either silently negated by not being included in the footnotes or categorized as later in relation to the original historical contexts of the biblical texts. In this way, the translators seek to “rescue” the Bible from the religious domestication of both church and synagogue (see Boer 2007, 2014). The translators put forward interpretations of the biblical texts which are aligned with a historical-critical understanding of the Bible, thereby resisting the Wirkungeschichte associated with religious traditions and systems of belief. The footnotes are not simply a place for conveying information to the reader, but something which the translators take advantage of to resist certain specific interpretations and construe other, more desirable interpretations of a given text. The translated text is hereby accorded with a “socially acceptable meaning” (Toledano Buendía 2013: 159) and can be aligned with the expectations of the scholarly community. Delimiting the biblical texts from later interpretations stands out as a key factor in producing a translation that can be acceptable in this sense. This must be done in active resistance to the religious Wirkungsgeschichte of the biblical texts, which despite the rise of historical criticism has continued to be a “powerful opponent that exerts force in particular ways” (Tymoczko 2007: 210). It is powerful precisely as Wirkungsgeschichte in the Gadamerian sense (see Knight 2010), continuing to shape the way readers – including translators and scholars – apprehend and interact with the biblical texts. Otherwise, there would have been no need for resistance in the first place. The paratextual strategies therefore constitute a subtle but forceful way for the Bibel 2000 translators to resist this powerful opponent.

The Folkbibeln translators, on the other hand, comply with the traditional Christian Wirkungsgeschichte of the biblical texts. At first glance, this seems perhaps to indicate that the translators do not exercise their agency to the same extent as the translators of Bibel 2000 translators – at least not if agency is connected to resistance. But in complying with the Wirkungsgeschichte, they are certainly making resistance to its perceived antipode: historical-critical, ‘secular’ biblical scholarship. This kind of resistance was, after all, one of the most important driving forces behind the initiatives toward the Folkbibeln translation in the early 1980s (see above, Section 3.1). An interesting detail in the Folkbibeln footnote to Gen 22:9 however suggests that the translators of this version to a certain extent did resist the traditional Wirkungsgeschichte, albeit in a different sense compared to the Bibel 2000 translators. In the Gen 22:9 footnote in Folkbibeln, it is stated that “Jewish tradition has emphasized that Isaac freely let himself be bound as a sacrifice to God” (my emphasis). Here, Jewish interpretation is explicitly referred to as tradition. Such language, on the other hand, is not employed when the translators refer to interpretations associated with Christian tradition. Consequently, one rarely finds terms such as “interpretation,” “exegesis” or “hermeneutics” in the paratextual material of Folkbibeln, or in the writings of its translators. At the very most, Old Testament passages in the New Testament are referred to as “quotations” (see the footnotes to Gen 12:3 and 22:18). In other words, meanings that most scholars would associate with, for example, the allegorical and typological interpretive tradition of Patristic exegesis are discursively constructed as being inherent in the biblical texts themselves. In this particular way, the Folkbibeln translators are indeed making resistance to the traditional Wirkungsgeschichte – if at an exclusively discursive level. For example, the interpretation of the verb *brk in Gen 12:3 in Folkbibeln clearly rests on the Septuagint and Pauline understanding, and not primarily on the meaning of the Hebrew text. And yet, the translators understand the Septuagint and Pauline interpretation (“shall be blessed”) to be identical with the original meaning of the Hebrew word in Gen 12:3. Hereby, a notion is constructed that this specific meaning has not come about on a historically later stage, as a consequence of how people interpreted the text, but rather constitutes an intrinsic part of the Old Testament text itself.

Finally, the fact that both translator teams oppose the effective history of the biblical texts, whether on a discursive or a practical level, does not mean that their work is taking place independently of it. Quite the opposite: it shows that their work is indeed conditioned by it (see Harding 2015: 41), and thus that their agency is circumscribed by the effective history of the biblical texts. In other words, effective history constitutes a tradition which the translators can “revise but not leave behind” (see Knight 2010: 144). Still, it is precisely through their possibilities of revising effective history that translators are indeed “agents of reception.” They are agents since they choose actively to relate to previous reception of the biblical texts, whether by affirming or denouncing it. They are agents because they govern the production of vernacular biblical texts and hence the way readers ‘receive’ the biblical texts. Translators hereby decide what kind of a Bible a given readership will ultimately receive. By exercising their agency – incessantly in relation to previous translations and interpretations – translators therefore have a potentially large impact on the very influence of the biblical texts on people and societies.