Scripture in the Vernacular: Biblical Intertextuality, Poetic Re-Creation, and Literary Authority in Pjetër Budi’s Christian Doctrine

Abstract

This article reconsiders Pjetër Budi’s Christian Doctrine as a formative work of early Albanian literature in which biblical reception, vernacular writing, and communal address become mutually constitutive. Rather than treating Budi’s poetry as a derivative versification of Scripture or as a document whose religious purpose excludes literary analysis, the article argues that biblical material is transformed through poetic re-creation in Albanian. Budi receives Scripture as a narrative sequence, moral pattern, image, voice, and rhetorical authority. His retellings of the Fall, Cain and Abel, the Flood, the Passion, and Resurrection preserve recognizable biblical structures while changing their mode of address through rhythm, compression, repetition, dramatic speech, and collective exhortation. The article further argues that vernacularization is itself a literary event. Budi’s insistence that prayer must be understood in the language of the community, together with his invocation for divine illumination so that he may sing a “new song” in Albanian, makes language part of the work’s theology and poetics. Scripture thus becomes more than a source behind the poems: it becomes a medium through which Albanian acquires spiritual, poetic, and public authority. Budi’s work offers a significant case for biblical literary studies because it shows how a small vernacular literary culture with limited institutional infrastructure can convert inherited sacred forms into an instrument of literary formation and communal self-recognition. Note on translations: Unless otherwise indicated, English translations of quotations from Albanian sources are the author’s.