Zurich Bible

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Title page of the Zurich Bible from 1531. This version printed by Froschauer was for a long time the most important edition of the Zurich Bible in terms of text and design.

The Zurich Bible is a German translation of the Bible published by the Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich , which values ​​the greatest possible philological correctness.

The Zurich Bible translation is the common translation of the Bible by the German-speaking Reformed churches in Switzerland and is therefore, like the Luther Bible and the standard translation, a translation of church official status. It is also very popular among scientific experts. The Zurich Bible translation is less widespread in Germany .

The Froschauer Bible

Froschauer Bible 1580
Title page Froschauer Bible from 1580

The origins of the Zurich Bible go back to the Reformation in Zurich under Ulrich Zwingli . Between 1524 and 1529, the Zurich book printer Christoph Froschauer first published the New Testament and then the individual parts of the Old Testament together with the Apocrypha . The German text initially followed Martin Luther's translation , but was completed three years before the Luther Bible was completed. In addition to Zwingli, his friend Leo Jud , at that time pastor at St. Peter's Church (Zurich) , was involved in the translation .

The Froschauer Bible from 1531 contained a preface by Zwingli and summaries of the individual chapters. The Old Testament was revised with the edition of 1540. In 1574 the New Testament was revised, and in 1589 the division into verses was added.

Revisions

The translation, known from 1545 on as the Biblical Teutsch , was close to the Alemannic- based federal chancellery language until the middle of the 17th century . The language system of the Electoral Saxon law firm was adopted with the revision of 1665.

Johann Caspar Ulrich (1705–1768), pastor at Fraumünster and an important exponent of Pietism , provided the Biblia of 1755/1756, which was later named Ulrichbibel after him , with prefaces, many interpretations and useful applications ... and necessary concordances .

The last private edition of the Bible took place in 1772 and was offended by a real dictionary of most of the biblical words that preceded the text and was written in the spirit of the Enlightenment . The Zurich Bible from 1817 was then published for the first time by the Zurich Biblical and Mission Society.

The revision from 1907 to 1931

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After a last revision in 1868 and a reprint of it in 1892, the Zurich Church Synod decided in 1907 to revise the Zurich Bible again and set up an eleven-person commission for this purpose. According to the guidelines, in addition to the original text of the Bible, which had been determined as precisely as possible by scientific research, “the new translation was primarily based on the wording of the Zurich edition of 1892. Everywhere, however, it must be carefully checked for its correctness, and where it contradicts the real meaning or the correctly created basic text, or where it is otherwise imprecise, unclear, unpleasant, it should be improved. The best available translations are to be used primarily; only where these are insufficient is a new term to be sought. ”The revision was completed in 1931 and was more or less a new translation.

The 1931 Zurich Bible is one of the structurally accurate translations and places great emphasis on philological accuracy. In the Reformed regional churches of Switzerland, but also in the Protestant theological faculties and universities in Germany, it is valued as a reliable German translation of the Bible. With regard to text fidelity, when comparing Bible translations, it is usually seen as close to the Elberfeld Bible and is often described as somewhat more readable than this. Because of its emphatically linguistic and theologically neutral orientation and its emergence in the context of the liberal theology of the Reformed regional church in Zurich, it is viewed rather suspiciously in free church circles in contrast to the Elberfeld Bible.

The new Zurich Bible

In 1984 the Synod of the Evangelical Reformed Church in Zurich decided on a new translation, on the one hand because of the progress made in biblical studies and philology , on the other hand because of the changes in the German language. The aim was to create “a scientifically reliable and linguistically accurate translation for the present, usable in worship and teaching”.

The Old Testament was mainly translated by three people: a Hebraist , an exegete and the Germanist Johannes Anderegg . This core team was joined by counter-reading groups who checked certain aspects of the text, for example a Jewish team with a rabbi who checked for any hidden anti-Semitic statements, or a women's reading group that was supposed to draw attention to any discrimination caused by the translation.

Expressions were newly translated that would be misleading today or out of date. The “dishonored woman” became a “raped woman”; in Romans ( Rom 1.32  EU ) “they take pleasure in those who do it” to “they also applaud those who do it”. On the other hand, one avoided interpreting the text as much as possible - where in the original text the interpretation is open, it was left that way.

The four Gospels and the Psalms (1996) as well as Job , Kohelet and the Song of Songs (1998) were published in advance .

On June 24, 2007, the new Bible was presented to the public in a solemn act in the Grossmünster . The work appeared at the same time in different sizes and configurations, partly with attached pictures; the typographic design comes from the Dutch graphic artist Christoph Noordzij. The new Zurich Bible unexpectedly became a bestseller : 11,000 Bibles were sold in the first ten days, and 40,000 copies by the end of the year. In 2019, the new Zurich Bible was supplemented by deutero-canonical writings from the Old Testament.

literature

  • Johann Conrad Gasser: The New Zurich Bible Translation . Zwingli-Verlag Zurich 1944.
  • Hans Rudolf Lavater: The Froschauer Bible 1531. Afterword to the reduced, facsimile edition of the Zurich Bible 1531. In: The whole Bible of the original Hebrew and Greek waarheyt according to the most faithful verteütschet. Theologische Verlag, Zurich 1983, ISBN 3-290-11529-1 , pp. 1361-1422.
  • Traudel Himmighöfer: The Zurich Bible until Zwingli's death (1531). Presentation and bibliography. von Zabern, Mainz 1995, ISBN 3-8053-1535-X . ( Publications of the Institute for European History Mainz , 154 Department of Religious History ), (At the same time: Mainz, Univ., Diss., 1992/1993).
  • Hans Rudolf Lavater: The Zurich Bible 1524 until today. In: Urs Joerg, David Marc Hoffmann (ed.): The Bible in Switzerland. Origin and history. Schwabe, Basel 1997, ISBN 3-7965-1004-3 , pp. 199-218.
  • Thomas Krüger: On the revision of the Zurich Bible (Old Testament). A workshop report from an exegetical point of view . In: Walter Groß (Ed.): Bible translation today. Historical developments and current challenges. Stuttgart Symposium 2000. In memoriam Siegfried Meurer . German Bible Society, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-438-06252-6 , pp. 301–327. ( Works on the history and impact of the Bible 2). ( PDF )
  • Evangelical Reformed Church of the Canton of Zurich (ed.): Zurich Bible. 2007. Verlag der Zürcher Bibel, Zurich 2007, ISBN 978-3-85995-240-9 .
  • Carl Heinz Peisker: Zurich Gospel Synopsis. 7th expanded edition. J. G. Oncken Verlag, Kassel 1967.
  • Christoph Sigrist (Ed.): The Zurich Bible from 1531. Origin, distribution and effect. Theological Publishing House, Zurich 2011, ISBN 978-3-290-17579-5 .
  • Peter Schwagmeier: The Zurich scholar Jakob Hausheer . In: Johannes F. Diehl and Markus Witte (eds.): Studies on the Hebrew Bible and its post-history . Hartmut Spenner, Kamen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89991-116-9 , pp. 41–144. (= KUSATU - Small investigations into the language of the Old Testament and its environment , 12.13.)
  • Peter Schwagmeier: The newly translated Zurich Bible . In: Bibel und Liturgie , Vol. 85 (2012), pp. 236–244.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ z. B. Ulrich Knellwolf : A tower at Babel ; PDF 24kb
  2. ↑ TVZ-Verlag: The new translation of the Zurich Bible ( Memento of the original from January 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.tvz-verlag.ch
  3. ↑ St. Galler Tagblatt (July 14, 2007): sentence by sentence «made German» ( Memento from March 31, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Neue Zürcher Zeitung (December 29, 2007): Almost 40,000 copies sold - second edition comes around Easter. The new Zurich Bible is a bestseller