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Peter Thuesen's study focuses on the theological implications of Bible translation controversies in American Protestantism, from the origins of the Revised Version (RV) in 1870 to the start of work on the New International Version (NIV) in 1965. Although the book thus spans nearly a century of American Bible translation, Thuesen devotes three of his five chapters to a close analysis of the creation and ensuing debates concerning the Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the mid-twentieth century. While this analysis is carefully contextualized (all the way back to William Tyndale), the reader should know from the outset that the book reads largely like a case study of the RSV—but in Thuesen's hands, this study yields a veritable cornucopia of insights into Protestant Bible translation in particular and nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Protestantism in general.
Three salient themes emerge from Thuesen's analysis. First, the tension between "real" history (what actually happened) and biblical history (the way the Bible chooses to relate the events) lay at the very foundation of the intense and rancorous translations debates between various Protestant factions in the United States in the period under consideration. Thuesen argues that "the detachment of biblical history and 'real' history forces interpreters to take sides on whether the two histories correspond with each other completely (fundamentalism) or loosely (liberalism)."
Second, while American Protestants may hold fast to a rhetoric of Sola Scriptura, where the Bible alone stands as their guide for all truth, such self-accrediting views of Scripture are not always that useful in practice. As Thuesen writes: "For Christians who, in theory at least, claimed the Scriptures as the final court of appeal in all doctrinal disputes, who could adjudicate disputes over the biblical text itself?" Thuesen makes a masterful argument that Protestants increasingly took on certain "Catholic" characteristics in seeking ways to gain a kind of imprimatur for various Bible translations. Whether they liked it or not—and most Protestants did not—the debates over what version of Scripture would be profitable for teaching and instruction became as much a matter of which governing body approved a given translation as of how accurately a certain passage captured the true sense of the Greek or Hebrew words it represented.
Finally, Thuesen's examination of various Protestant translation efforts and their reception reveals the depth of anti-Catholic sentiment centuries after the Reformation and the religious wars that followed—hence, for example, "many opponents of the Revised Version found sixteenth-century anti-Catholic language polemically useful, for it served the dual purpose of chastening Protestant liberals while reasserting Protestant biblicism in the face of the Romanist menace."
Thuesen begins his analysis by looking at Protestantism's great patron saint of Bible translation, William Tyndale. Thuesen chooses Tyndale rather than Luther or Wycliffe because he is interested in telling the story of how the English Bible came to replace various forms of religious authority with a virulent, iconoclastic biblicism. While Luther and Wycliffe still adhered to a certain emphasis on pictures and other religious institutions, Tyndale emphasized "God's Law" (Scripture taken in its entirety) to an extent that helped lay the foundation for the American Protestant enshrinement of the Bible.
While the English Bible may have increasingly taken a regal position in Anglo-American Protestantism, just what version of the English Bible would actually occupy the throne became a flashpoint for various American Protestant constituencies. Wycliffe's desire for a vernacular text was echoed with the appearance of the KJV in 1611, a translation for the common people, but by the 1870s the KJV was falling out of favor with certain segments of Protestantism because of new manuscript discoveries and its archaic language.
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