Textbook Gods - Genre, Text and Teaching Religious Studies - Bengt-Ove Andreassen
School Bible in the Service of The Danish National Church—A Case Study
Textbook Gods - Genre, Text and Teaching Religious Studies - Bengt-Ove Andreassen
Jens-André P. Herbener [+]
University of Southern Denmark
Description
In 2011 the Danish Bible Society published a huge work called The School Bible (Skolebibelen). It includes the following sections: A Bible Guide and a Bible Dictionary composed by Inger Røgild, the authorized 1992 Danish translation of the Bible and The New Agreement—the New Testament in present-day Danish from 2007, for which the Danish Bible Society itself is responsible. All together it is a work of 1.5 kilo and 2016 pages. The Danish Bible Society is a non-profit church organization. Its purpose is “making the Bible and biblical material available internationally as well as in Denmark,”1 and it is affiliated with the international organization the United Bible Societies. in the School Service of the Danish National Church (Kristeligt Dagblad 2011c). Both the author and the publisher present The School Bible exclusively as an academic publication that is tailor-made for Christian studies in the Folkeskole in Denmark. As the following review will show, this is a truth with many modifications. In fact, from an academic point of view, The School Bible is quite problematic and raises questions about the use of textbooks and translations published by religious organizations in the Folkeskole.