I Introduction

Bible Reception in a Nordic Context

1 The Bible of the North

Ever since Christianity arrived in the Nordic countries during the Middle Ages, the Bible has been a source of authoritative values and has provided a grand narrative in the societies of the region. At the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Bible (or parts of it) were translated into different Nordic national languages. The most significant examples are Oddur Gottskálksson's Icelandic New Testament (1540), the Gustav Vasa Bible in Swedish (1541), Mikael Agricola's Finnish New Testament (1548), and Christian the III's Bible in Danish (1550). These Bible translations were seminal in establishing and maintaining Nordic national languages and identities-and in marginalizing other languages and identities in relation to the power of state as, for example, in the case of Norway under Danish rule.1 As such, the translations played an important ideological and political role comparable to the Lutherbibel in the German realm and the King James Version in the English-speaking world.

In late modern Nordic societies, the Bible's status as a grand narrative has diminished due to, for example, the increasing separation of church and state administration (not least in the public school systems), detraditionalization, and religious pluralism. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2017 disclosed that the percentage of adults in the Nordic countries who "believe in God as described in the Bible"-which is, of course, a highly indistinct statement-is considerably lower than the American 56?% and also well below the European median of 27?%. Finland scores 24?%, Norway 20?%, Denmark 17?%, and Sweden 14?%.2 The Nordic countries also display low scores on global indexes of religious belief in general, church attendance, and daily prayer practice.

Paradoxically, however, the Nordic region also exhibits a high degree of loyalty to the traditional Lutheran national churches. In all Nordic countries, the majority of the population are members of the Lutheran church, ranging from a low 56?% in Sweden to a high 74?% in Denmark.3 The Bible remains a perpetual steady seller in Nordic book markets, and it continues to set its footprint on a variety of practices such as the popular life cycle rituals of the majority churches, school education with basic biblical narratives in the curriculum, cultural identity debates, national memorial ceremonies, public holidays, and political debates about multiculturalism and migration. In this paradoxical landscape, the Bible continues to play a role as a significant container of cultural values in the Nordic countries.4

The present volume investigates, by means of case studies, how the so-called "Great Code" of Christianity and Western culture, despite all rumors of religious and cultural amnesia, is remembered and mobilized in the public sphere of the Nordic countries today. Unlike many Bible reception studies that concentrate on the Bible in literature, art, and popular culture, this book hones its focus on public and political discourses. As such, the book offers new critical reflections on the use of the Bible in the Nordic countries and is the first international study of Bible reception in the Nordic countries or Norden, as the Scandinavians call it, i.?e., the North European and North Atlantic geographical region that, according to the traditional understanding, covers the states of Denmark (including Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Finland (including the Åland Islands), Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.5 Norden is an identity that interacts with other collective identities such as regional, national, European, Western, and global identities. Ever since the Nordic Enlightenment and the eruption of Romanticist nationalism in the nineteenth century, Norden has been mobilized, for example, in the construction of national identities. In that process, the Nordic countries were often discursively demarcated from mainland Europe, the Nordic countries allegedly being democratic, Protestant, progressive, and egalitarian vis-à-vis the Catholic, conservative, and capitalistic mainland Europe.6 Since 1952, the Nordic Passport Union has allowed Nordic citizens to travel freely and reside in other Nordic countries. Today, Norden may not be a deeply ingrained identity in the public imagination, but it is promoted by the governments of the region, for example in the Nordic Council and the Nordic Council of Ministers. Even the present volume is a result of support from the Nordic Council of Ministers by means of its research funding program. As such, the volume not only analyzes Bible reception in the Nordic region, but it is also entangled in the structures that serve to produce and maintain Norden as an imagined community.

In Nordic Lutheran societies, the Bible has traditionally been perceived as a basis of religion and social cohesion. Whereas such religious and confessional factors are well-researched with regard to the historical background of the Nordic welfare states, the focus of the present volume is on public use of the Bible today.7 The case studies discuss how Nordic Bibles (translations, children's Bibles, rewritings, reenactments in cinema and politics) and Nordic Bible use (the Bible as argument and icon in the public sphere) legitimize and criticize common cultural codes and values of Nordic welfare societies (gender equality, individualism, national identity, religion as a private phenomenon, division of religion and politics, cultural heritage, secularized Protestant ideas, etc.). Moreover, two presentations will deal with Bible reception in relation to the use of the Jewish Bible and the Qur'an in a Nordic context. Without essentializing the idea of a "Nordic Bible," the case studies contextualize common and opposing trends in biblical discourse across the Nordic countries today.

2 Bible Reception in Biblical Studies: Approaches and Problems

Academic biblical studies have traditionally dealt with the origin and meaning of the Bible and its writings in their first ancient contexts. In recent decades, however, the discipline has witnessed a growing interest in the reception history of the Bible, i.?e., studies of the use of biblical texts in later historical and cultural contexts.8 One of the more practical reasons behind this trend is undoubtedly the limitless research possibilities that reception history offers to an academic field that is vulnerable to scholarly replay and iteration. One handbook definition describes this unlimited field in the following manner: Bible reception "comprises every single act or word of interpretation of that book (or books) over the course of three millennia."9 Within such a field, selection becomes imperative. The same handbook defines the study of biblical reception as

. a scholarly enterprise, consisting of selecting and collating shards of that infinite wealth of reception material in accordance with the particular interests of the historian concerned, and giving them a narrative frame. In other words, to get from the plenitude of reception to the finitude of reception history requires that historians of reception . envisage parameters: in particular, when reflecting on the history of responses to the Bible, whose responses do they deem to be of importance?10

Selection is a requirement of any reception history; but not all scholars define the study of biblical reception in terms of history. Some scholars prefer to speak of "reception criticism" or "reception theory." Indeed, the terminology used for the study of Bible reception varies widely.11 This variety reflects not only the variety of approaches but also the fact that, until recently, there has been little methodological discussion on what reception in biblical studies actually entails. For some, it means collecting uses of biblical texts and themes in religious traditions, in visual and performing arts, in literature, etc.; for others, it is mainly a theorizing task to explain the various responses that biblical texts can generate.12 This terminological variation is partly explained by the fact that key concepts such as Wirkungsgeschichte, Rezeption, and Rezeptionsästhetik were originally introduced in German and have been translated into English in several ways.

The Gadamerian concept of Wirkungsgeschichte was programmatically introduced to biblical studies by Ulrich Luz in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, first published in 1985 in the series Evangelisch-Katholischer...