The Bible has always been a contested legacy. Form late
antiquity to the Refomation, debates about the Bible took place
at the center of manifold movements that defined Western
civilization. In the eigtheenth century, Europe's scriptural
inheritance surfaced once again at a critical moment. During the
Enlightenment, scholars guided by a new vision of a post-
theological age did not simply investigate the Bible, they
remade it. In place of the familiar scriptural Bibles that
belonged to Christian and Jewish communities, they created a new
form: the academic Bible. In this book, Michael Legaspi examines
the creation of the academic Bible. Beginning with the
fragmentation of biblical interpretation in the centuries after
the Reformation, Legaspi shows how the weakening of scriptural
authority in the Western churches altered the role of biblical
interpretation. In contexts shaped by skepticism and religious
strife, interpreters increasingly operated on the Bible as a
text to be managed by critical tools. These dev