These two volumes, the one published to celebrate the bicentenary of Alexander Geddes's death, the other the 150th anniversary of John Colenso's consecration as bishop of Natal and the creation of that diocese, provide welcome and rich studies of two highly controversial figures who contributed significantly to the history of biblical interpretation, the one a Scottish Catholic priest, who was a close friend of many of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, the other a colonial bishop in South Africa, who was revered by the colonised as ‘Sobantu’, father of the people. They are both, that is to say, figures who crossed cultural boundaries which were fiercely guarded in their time and who in consequence saw the Bible with fresh and critical eyes. Both volumes also document a reconciliation between their subjects and the ecclesiastical authorities who disowned them in their day. The Geddes Conference concluded with a requiem mass for Geddes, which had been denied him at his death; the Colenso volume has a commendatory foreword by the archbishop of Cape Town, the successor of Colenso's antagonist and metropolitan, Bishop Robert Gray, and appeared a year after the provincial synod of the Church of the province of South Africa had overwhelmingly voted to lift his condemnation.

Alexander Geddes was born in 1737 into one of only two major strongholds of Scottish post-Reformation Catholicism, in Rathven, Banffshire, where his parents were tenant farmers. These communities were subject to fierce reprisals after the defeat of the Jacobite forces at Culloden. The small seminary at Scalan (two small rooms in a bothy now overlooked by a fine distillery) which Geddes attended in Glenlivet was burned out by government troops but it continued its work and Geddes and his cousin John, later a bishop, received their secondary education there, as did more than a hundred other priests. In 1758 Alexander moved to the Scots College in Paris, returning to Scotland as a priest and working in Dundee as chaplain to one of the leading Catholic families at Traquair House and then as a missionary priest in Auchinhalrig, some fifty miles from Aberdeen. In 1780, after deep disagreements with his bishop, George Hay, he left Scotland for London, to take up a chaplaincy at the Imperial Embassy. In 1792, after the publication of his Holy Bible, he was suspended from holy orders and never rehabilitated.

Geddes has for many years enjoyed the reputation of having questioned Eichhorn's source critical views of the Pentateuch, based on the different divine names in the text, and having propounded the view that, rather than being the compilation of different literary sources which recounted the same or similar stories, the Pentateuch was the work of a single author who had incorporated a number of oral or literary fragments into his sustained narrative. In his article in the present volume, John Rogerson dismisses this attribution: though Geddes was fully aware of Eichhorn's source critical views, which he rejected, it was not he but Johann Severin Vater who propounded the fragmentist theory in his commentary on the Pentateuch published in Halle in 1802–5. Vater acknowledged and translated Geddes's work in his commentary, but what he took from Geddes were his many text-critical and philological observations, contained above all in his Critical remarks. Geddes caused offence to the Catholic hierarchy because of his dating of the writing of the Pentateuch to the time of Solomon and consequent denial of Mosaic authorship and doubtless also because of his attacks on popular Catholicism and Protestantism, which are fully documented here. His association, not only with leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Thomas Reid, William Robertson and James Beattie (Geddes received an honorary doctorate from the University of Aberdeen in 1780) but also in England with Unitarians such as William Smith and Joseph Priestley, can hardly have helped his cause. His notes on the creation narratives show his acceptance of contemporary geology, while his criticisms of the Exodus narratives demonstrate his sympathy with Hume's views on miracles and resemble those of the Deists and Reimarus. This volume of conference papers offers a well-structured and finely executed account of this somewhat mercurial figure, who, alongside his work as a biblical scholar, was an accomplished poet and historian, and the author of a satirical attack on the slave trade. The volume investigates his links with the continental Enlightenment (Schwarzbach, Bultmann) and with continental Catholic biblical scholarship (Conroy), and concludes with a series of detailed studies of his biblical scholarship (Rogerson, Ska, Auld). It will go a long way towards restoring Geddes to his rightful place in the history of biblical scholarship.

Bishop John Colenso is a much better-known figure and in this respect the task of the editor of the second volume under review was less to introduce an almost unknown figure and more to provide fresh insights into and perspectives on a figure who succeeded in alienating most of his white colleagues, while becoming a revered counsellor to and advocate for the Zulu people. If in the 1960s Peter Hinchliff had rather dismissed him as a minor figure in English theology, Jeff Guy's 1983 study, published by the Ravan Press, a major protagonist in the Churches' struggle against apartheid, had presented him ‘as an imperialist who despite his love for his country, managed to gain insights into the colonial world as it was perceived by the colonized’ (Denis in the introduction, p. 1). One of this volume's contributions to Colenso studies is to examine the extent to which his more innovative biblical work was prompted by his encounter with the Zulu people. Jonathan Draper shows interestingly the extent to which Colenso's reading of Romans is indebted both to F. D. Maurice's universalism and to his deep revulsion against the preaching and theology of his fellow missionaries with their emphasis on salvation by faith alone. In their understanding, this condemned the whole Zulu race before the coming of the missionaries to eternal damnation making the world ‘the very shambles, as it were, of Almighty Vengeance’ and posing thereby a deep problem for a people who ‘emphasized the continuity of the living and the dead in unbroken community’ (p. 114). This required a re-reading of Romans, in which Colenso's experience of translating the Bible into Zulu played an integral part. Famously, Colenso's critique of the Flood narratives was prompted by questions from his Zulu co-translator Ngidi about their credibility (p. 45), though the kind of arithmetical calculations which Colenso advanced to undermine the trustworthiness of the narratives in the Pentateuch had their precursors in figures such as Reimarus (not discussed). Less well-known is the sense in which Colenso's attack on the credibility of the Pentateuch is allied to his sense of moral revulsion at its views on slavery (pp. 46–8). This book also provides valuable accounts of Colenso's educational work and the contributions which those he taught made to Zulu culture (Kearney, Khumalo) and his contribution to the emergence of black clergy (Lieta) and includes a valuable section on family and society which examines his attitudes and policies concerning polygamy (MacLean, Ngewu), and illuminating studies of members of his family (Goedhals, Guy).