Mobilizing Biblical Philology

Chapter 3 further develops the argument that philology was not the prerogative of latitudinarian factions of Calvinism and shows that it need not be marginal to theology. In fact, philology proved to be a powerful tool in the hands of the card-carrying orthodox translators and revisers of the Dutch Authorized Version: the States’ Translation. This chapter reveals the philological nature of the discussions that were conducted between the dozen members of the two teams of translators and editors who worked on the translation for over a decade. An analysis of manual annotations in the unique typeset draft of the translation, shows that the revisers often covered up the textual problems and linguistic ambiguities, but sometimes also plainly admitted that the text could be translated in other ways as well. The teams relied on a corpus of philological handbooks, which stood in a humanist biblical philological tradition.