I

This essay will describe what its author perceives to be a revisionist moment; although it inevitably risks caricature, we must first paint a brief picture of what is being revised. Synthesized from the existing literature, a standard narrative could run something like this. In its accounts of Jewish, Christian, and pagan religion, early modern historiography was marked by a fundamental absence of ‘criticism’, in two respects. On the one hand, it was mere pedantry: ‘learned accumulation’ which generated nothing but ‘intellectual regression’.Footnote ⁹ On the other, it slavishly espoused ‘orthodox’ narratives. Protestants wrote histories of the church's corruption by the papacy, Roman Catholics of its unchanging adherence to papal tradition, and both of the ancient Jews as God's unique chosen people. It took a veritable crisis to destroy this stale, crumbling, and pedantic orthodoxy, and that crisis came from late seventeenth-century heterodoxy and irreligion. Spinoza's biblical criticism – accompanied by that of his intellectual predecessor Isaac La Peyrère and supposed successor Richard Simon – was a radical break from the past that for the first time decentred the Jews and showed the Old Testament to be a work designed for a specific time and place.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, there was a quasi-inevitable shift from emphasis on an early ur-religion by some avant garde clerics like the Cambridge Platonists and ‘latitudinarians’ to emphasis on the commonality of ‘natural religion’, attack on priestcraft, and denial of revelation by deists and philosophes, all culminating in Hume's Natural history of religion (1757).Footnote ¹¹ The late seventeenth-century crise could also be found in patristic scholarship, where the sweeping away of a tired and complacent orthodoxy by the dawning sun of ‘enlightenment’ paved the way for the (in)famous chapters 15 and 16 of Gibbon's Decline and fall (1776).Footnote ¹² By the mid-eighteenth century, in short, ‘real’ history had replaced Christian ‘ideology’: although, rather paradoxically, the new ‘enlightened’ history was itself tied to an ideology, one of anticlericalism and tolerationism.

How did this narrative come into existence? Partly, as we shall see, it was the product of the false genealogies constructed by the eighteenth-century anticlericals themselves. But its most lasting roots were planted in the nineteenth century, by those operating in the context of English religious reform, such as Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Tulloch.Footnote ¹³ Although it was far from their central concern, all three placed the rise of a historicist attitude to religion in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England (as part of the rise of a ‘rational Christianity’).Footnote ¹⁴ And, aware of the looming contemporary figure of the German critic, they followed the influential analysis of one such German critic, Gotthard Victor Lechler (Geschichte des Englischen Deismus (1841)) in ascribing the genesis of German historical-critical methodology to the mid-eighteenth-century reception of English deism.Footnote ¹⁵ This story's success has proved remarkably long-lasting. Both German and English liberal theologians have continued to ascribe the genesis of a historical-critical approach to the late seventeenth century, albeit sometimes incorporating teleological claims about earlier Reformed emphasis on literalism as opening the door for this development.Footnote ¹⁶ This chronology has been picked up both by intellectual historiansFootnote ¹⁷ and by biblical scholars writing the history of their own discipline.Footnote ¹⁸ Since citing nineteenth-century Englishmen fell out of fashion some time ago, intellectual historians now tend to cite Paul Hazard's La crise de la conscience européenne (1680–1715) (1935) when delineating this chronology; but Hazard's work was no less the product of contingent (and related) forces, in this case French Catholic modernism.

A similar deist-centred chronology was established for the history of the study of early Christianity, albeit for different reasons. On the one hand, those with a strong theological allegiance continued to insist on the continuity of the approaches established soon after the Reformation. Catholic historians insisted on the continuity of Catholic patristics post-Baronio;Footnote ¹⁹ Anglicans similarly maintained the continuity of Anglicanism as a putative patristic-grounded via media from Hooker onwards.Footnote ²⁰ Once again, the whig tradition could then claim that this ‘orthodoxy’ was swept away by a vibrant and progressive heterodox historical criticism, and we return to a simple heterodox/progressive vs orthodox/conservative model of change.Footnote ²¹ And once again, this narrative was adopted not just by historians, but also scholars interested in the prehistory of their own approaches: thus, Albert Schweitzer placed the deist Hermann Samuel Reimarus in the key role in the development of the eighteenth-century ‘quest of the historical Jesus’.Footnote ²²

Why might this historiographical tradition be coming under attack? There are several reasons. One is the gradual (albeit very incomplete) realization by early modern intellectual historians that the figures they study for the most part eschewed abstract philosophical reasoning in favour of historical modes of discourse: narratives which privilege the supposed rise of philosophical rationalism as a ubiquitous explanatory mechanism, while still prevalent (as discussed below), are being challenged.Footnote ²³ But even more important is the rise of the history of scholarship as a discipline in its own right over the last three decades.Footnote ²⁴ The field had until recently been the preserve of scholars writing the prehistories of their own disciplines. But, stimulated in part by the legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano, and especially by the numerous works of Anthony Grafton (particularly his two-volume biography of Joseph Scaliger (1983–93)) the discipline has found its own professional identity.Footnote ²⁵ Of particular importance for us is that with the solidification of the discipline, the disciplines of biblical criticism and patristics – neglected while the history of scholarship was being practised by classicists who adopted a rather narrow modern definition of ‘classical scholarship’ – have finally started to receive systematic attention.Footnote ²⁶ For the most part, this development has been conducted primarily in the field of scholarly biography: Grafton on Scaliger is now supplemented by G. J. Toomer's astoundingly erudite biography of John Selden (2009). This has perhaps served to maintain an unwarranted distance between historians of scholarship and intellectual historians interested in broader patterns of change. However, Jean-Louis Quantin's recent (2009) study of seventeenth-century Anglican patristics – which will make several appearances in what follows – has set a new benchmark for how the history of scholarship can make a major contribution to histories of intellectual change. What follows is a brief overview of how the recent historiography is contributing the pieces to such a narrative, shifting attention away from late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century deism and heterodoxy to a broader range of scholarly developments. Section II will focus on the historicization of the Old Testament and of ancient religion; Section III on histories of early Christianity. Section IV will conclude by considering how these narratives might contribute more broadly to models of intellectual change.

II

The sacred history of the period before Christ's birth was the history of the biblical Jews as told in the Hebrew bible. We are well aware that the mid- to late sixteenth century saw major developments in what we might anachronistically label the textual criticism of the bible; although this moment requires further investigation it is becoming clear that Protestant emphasis on the literal sense was far from the only stimulus, for it was preceded and accompanied by the earlier humanist philological turn of which Erasmus and Lorenzo Valla were the main exponents, and by the dramatic rise in Greek and Hebrew learning, the latter stimulated by interest in Jewish mysticism (one thinks here of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin) before it was spurred on by rejection of the Vulgate.Footnote ²⁷ By the late sixteenth century, pure philology had mutated into historical criticism of the bible.Footnote ²⁸ Fundamental questions remain, which require extensive further research. How did the philological tasks of the grammarian mutate into what we call ‘historical criticism’? And what was the relationship between the exegetical practices of the divines in the theology faculties and their colleagues in arts faculties?Footnote ²⁹

For now, we can point out that it was in Old Testament exegesis that this historicist turn had perhaps its greatest impact, which some now speak of as the ‘antiquarianization’ of the bible. Two preconditions had to be met before this antiquarianization could fully blossom: first, the philological-historical realization that the biblical text had a history, and its corollary that there might thus be a history to be written of that text's authors and their intentions; second, the establishment of a stable chronology in which the new historicization of sacred history could be inserted. Grafton's Scaliger taught us how the Frenchman's De emendatione temporum (1583) and Thesaurus temporum (1606) transformed the field of ancient chronology (even if Scaliger sometimes advertised his novelty where he should have advertised his intellectual debts), demolishing the famous old forgeries of the pseudo-Berosus of Annius of Viterbo, and, even more importantly, establishing as a methodological principle that Old Testament history could only be understood within a contextual scaffolding constructed from pagan narratives.Footnote ³⁰ Scaliger settled few debates for certain, but his programmatic influence was vast, the historical thesis of the Thesaurus serving as a model to be emulated, almost as a test of any budding scholar's capacity.Footnote ³¹

Scaliger's chronological research led him to stumble upon historical puzzles, contradictions, and even downright mistakes in the biblical narrative, which could only be solved by suggesting that the text itself had a history. Some of these he wisely abstained from sharing with even the scholarly reading public, such as his conclusion, reached late in life, that the lack of concordance between the various Gospels (why does the Gospel of Mark say Christ was crucified at three o'clock and the Gospel of John at six?) and between the Gospels and non-biblical historical sources was the result of the very early textual corruption of the New Testament by the primitive Christians themselves (e.g. since the reliable Josephus did not report the claim at Matt. 2.16 that Herod had all the boys in Bethlehem aged two or under put to death, the latter must be a later interpolation, designed by the early Christians to ‘fulfil’ the prophecy at Jer. 31.15).Footnote ³² Other conclusions, though, were made public and proved hugely influential. One was his interjection into the debate over the age of the vowel points of the Masoretic Hebrew bible, which Scaliger not only affirmed to have been late and human rather than Mosaic and divine, but also subsumed into an elaborate narrative of the history of the Hebrew language, suggesting that it was Samaritan letters which had been used in Israel from Moses to the fall of the Temple.Footnote ³³

Here, Scaliger was operating within a debate that was already decades old. Where older scholarship once again looked towards the Spinoza–Simon nexus for the birth of the idea of textual historicity, newer narratives are shifting the focus back. The text's historicity was a commonplace as a methodological principle by the mid-seventeenth century: in his famous ‘Prologomena’ to the London Polyglot (1657) Brian Walton offered a contextual textual history for each of the nine versions (Hebrew, Chaldee, Samaritan, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Ethiopic, Greek, and Latin) of this beautiful textual monument: ‘for him, and those whose work he discusses, the history of the text cannot be separated from the history in which the text was produced’.Footnote ³⁴ And, as Peter Miller has charted, the even more beautiful Paris Polyglot of 1645 – the preparation of which ultimately ruined its publisher Guy Michael de Jay – also found its roots in the antiquarian interests of early seventeenth-century scholars in Rome, Paris, and beyond, from the former French ambassador in Constantinople, François Savary de Brèves, to the president of the parlement of Paris, Jacques-Auguste de Thou.Footnote ³⁵ Of course, the very idea of a polyglot implied that the existing biblical texts were by themselves insufficient, and that a critical-philological approach was necessary to get closer to an original version. This contradicted the exegetical rules set out in the sixteenth century on both Protestant and Catholic sides: the Protestant view that scripture was self-authenticating and that the Masoretic Hebrew version (first printed in Venice in 1525) was the directly inspired word of God,Footnote ³⁶ and the post-Tridentine Catholic position that the Vulgate (St Jerome's translation from the Hebrew) held ultimate authority, defended on the basis that it represented a translation from a better Hebrew version than the Masoretic, and, of course, on the authority of the church.

Both confessional polemic and subsequent scholarly discoveries rendered these positions precarious. The obvious anti-Protestant argument was that the Masoretic bible was corrupt, and this immediately involved Catholic scholars in a process of historical text criticism. They drew on the Masoret ha-Masoret (1538) of the much-travelled Jewish scholar, Elijah Levita, which argued that far from being given to Moses at Sinai, or even added by Ezra the Scribe after the return from the Babylonian exile, the vowel points which made much of the Hebrew scripture intelligible were only added after the composition of the Talmud (c. 200 ad).Footnote ³⁷ These findings were initially ignored by Protestants, but Catholics

This allowed Catholic scholars both to defend the superiority of Jerome's translation (supposedly based on an earlier non-corrupt Hebrew version) and to insist – given all these textual difficulties – on the necessity of the authority of the church in interpretation.Footnote ³⁹ Some Protestants, most notably the Basel Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf, in his Tiberias (1620), argued that the Hebrew bible in its modern (i.e. Masoretic) form had existed since the time of Ezra, but scholarly consensus made this position untenable, especially after the recovery in 1616 (by Pietro della Valle) and publication (by Jean Morin, in Le Jay's Polyglot) of the Samaritan Pentateuch, which differs from the Masoretic text in around 6,000 instances.Footnote ⁴⁰ An internal division within Protestantism was sealed when Louis Cappel, a professor of Hebrew at Saumur, published in 1624 and again in 1650 in favour of the late imposition of the vowel points (to the dismay of Buxtorf and his son); unlike the Catholics, he stressed the capacity of historical-philological scholarship to recover the original scriptural meaning.Footnote ⁴¹ Cappel's work may not have pleased all Protestants, but it was part of a mainstream debate about ‘how to reconcile the text's authority, which was divine, with its history, which was more and more evidently human’.Footnote ⁴² So, by the first half of the seventeenth century we have witnessed the exegetical revolution previously ascribed to Hobbes, Spinoza, or Richard Simon, as both erudition and apologetics shifted from viewing the bible as a miraculously perfect whole, authenticated either by itself or by the church, to the view that ‘the veracity of the historical parts of the text could be defended (not weakened) by treating them as eye-witness reports, on the same basis as any other direct account of human experience’.Footnote ⁴³ It is worth noting that although these developments were undoubtedly stimulated by confessional polemic, the recent historiography has emphasized that a narrative which reduces scholarship to politics does little to explain the cross-confessional appeal of these conclusions, or their intense contestation on both ProtestantFootnote ⁴⁴ and CatholicFootnote ⁴⁵ sides.

The establishment of a stable chronology and of a consensus that the Old Testament text had a history opened the door for contextual study of biblical Judaism. Here, we might be tempted to say that we are approaching the margins of orthodoxy, but we need to pause and ask what this ‘orthodoxy’ was and who was establishing it, for we have already seen that theologians on both sides of the confessional divide often welcomed historical criticism. Tension between theology and erudition arose not from historicization per se, but when historicization took a route outside the limits established by theological exegesis, limits which were in fact quite minimal. One limit was chronological. As part of Scaliger's reconstruction of the lost Chronicon of Eusebius, he included the list of Egyptian dynasties compiled by the priest Manetho of Sebennytus in the third century bc, a precious source for ancient Egyptian history, with the one inconvenience that the listed dynasties stretched back not only before the Flood, but also before any accepted date for the Creation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Scaliger's proposal of a period of ‘proleptic time’ convinced few (if any), and the most eminent seventeenth-century chronologists produced solutions which usually proposed that some of the dynasties were simultaneous rather than successive.Footnote ⁴⁷ A few, however, went in the other direction, of whom the most famous by far is Isaac La Peyrère, the Huguenot who combined chronological scholarship, scepticism about the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and millenarian speculation to arrive at his famous pre-Adamite hypothesis.Footnote ⁴⁸ As fascinating a figure as La Peyrère is, we now know that his theories had little sway in any serious intellectual circles in either the seventeenth or the eighteenth centuries, beyond such deliberate provocateurs as Voltaire, with his own theory of polygenesis.Footnote ⁴⁹ Far more important were debates within the mainstream, such as the argument that the Flood was a local phenomenon, or preference for the Septuagint chronology, both of which could be found in the well-known works of Isaac Vossius.Footnote ⁵⁰

It is at the second theological limit – still far less familiar to modern historians – that we encounter a possible friction between the new approach and something we might choose to label ‘orthodoxy’. In the Protestant world, the relationship between the Mosaic Law and the Law of Nature, between the moral and ceremonial Law, and between Law and Gospel had all engendered much debate. The problem was the connection between the Old Testament and the New: one answer was typological exegesis. While rejecting the allegorizing of the quadriga, from an early stage the Reformers insisted that the literal historical sense of scripture included typological meanings, where both type and antitype retain their historicity. History, supposedly still literal, becomes prophetical; the role of the exegete becomes, as it did in the Gospel of John, to find Christ prefigured in the brazen serpent.Footnote ⁵¹ The historical dimension of typology rendered it attractive even to the humanists like Casaubon who were otherwise suspicious of anything that smacked overly of forced apologetic readings.Footnote ⁵² Tension thus arose not when contextual history encountered theology, but when contextual history seemed to become Jewish, to abandon typology, and to explain the Old Testament as not only about the Jews, but solely for them as well. That boundary was sometimes crossed by Scaliger and by the circle at Saumur of which Cappel was a part. But it appeared most precarious in the works of Scaliger's student Hugo Grotius, who sent strong signals that contextualism was almost always enough for the Christian exegete: Christological types were there, but all forms of Old Testament prophecy more often referred to near-contemporary events, and Christians should content themselves with the knowledge that the New Covenant was clearer than the Old. What pushed this narrative beyond the bounds of acceptability for some was Grotius's concomitant historicization of the typological method: both the evangelists and the church fathers who cited the Old Testament for Christian apologetics followed an ancient Jewish allegorical custom: the allusion in the form of citation; when this was misunderstood, over-enthusiastic typology was born.Footnote ⁵³ In arguing this, Grotius was, as we shall see, treading in the footsteps of the latest patristic scholarship, but one is not surprised to find him being accused both of Judaizing and of Socinianism.Footnote ⁵⁴ These accusations were wrong, but when Grotius's method was further developed by Jean le Clerc it could be welcomed with open arms by a self-proclaimed freethinker like Anthony Collins to deny openly all prophetical readings of the Old Testament. But if the old historiography portrayed this as a characteristically ‘deist’ move, Sébastien Drouin has now taught us that we are dealing with the long reception of a debate about allegorical/typological exegesis that depended neither on heterodoxy nor on some sort of inevitable logic within Protestantism, but on a specific scholarly shift towards philological-historical exegesis.Footnote ⁵⁵

The accusation of Judaizing – although unfounded in any narrow sense – contained a shred of truth, for Grotius was operating at the apex of a tradition of Old Testament scholarship which combined its contextualizing tendencies with rabbinic justification for them, especially those developed by the great twelfth-century codifier of Talmudic Law, Moses Maimonides. It was partially because of his systematization of the arcane threads of the Talmud that Christian scholars so revered Maimonides – typical of the ‘use and abuse’ approach to rabbinica, Scaliger intoned that ‘he alone among the Jews has given up talking nonsense’.Footnote ⁵⁶ And, as charted in an essential monograph by Aaron Katchen, the publication and study of Maimonides's works erupted in the Dutch Republic in the first half of the seventeenth century. Maimonides offered two tools to the historian of Old Testament Judaism. In his Mishneh Torah, he drew attention to the Seven Precepts of Noah, which the Talmud briefly mentions as commands given to the patriarch and to his descendants, who of course fathered all mankind.Footnote ⁵⁷ Post-Katchen scholarship has taught us much about how the Noachic Precepts became a staple of early modern sacred history by the mid-seventeenth century, especially in the hands of Grotius, Selden, and their many followers.Footnote ⁵⁸ The uses of the Precepts could be numerous – the jurist Selden used them both for a wholesale re-interpretation of English common law deployed against Charles IFootnote ⁵⁹ and for an anti-sacerdotal history of excommunication by the SanhedrinFootnote ⁶⁰ – but their greatest import was in making the Mosaic dispensation more contingent and stripping it of any universalist elements, that universalism now being reserved for the Noachic Precepts.

The notion that that Mosaic dispensation was historically contingent was enhanced through another Maimonidean inheritance. In the third book of his More Nevukhim (Guide for the Perplexed) – published in a very popular Latin translation by Buxtorf Jnr in 1629 – Maimonides asked the philosophical question of why a rational God had given the seemingly irrational commands that constituted the Hebrew ritual law, offered the philosophical reasoning that the answer could not simply emphasize God's omnipotent will, but then delivered a historical answer to defend the Creator's rationality: the ritual law was given to the mentally-backwards Hebrew nation to wean them off the pagan idolatry which had surrounded them and to which they had become addicted. Maimonides ascribed this idolatry to a mysterious people called the ‘Sabians’, a ‘fact’ he obtained from an Arabic agronomic text, the Filāḥat al-Nabaṭiyyah (The Nabatean Agriculture) by Ibn Waḥshiyya (d. 931), which is now suspected to be a compilation of texts produced mainly in sixth-century northern Iraq,Footnote ⁶¹ but which Maimonides believed to be an ancient Sabian work. Here, we have a double historicization: the specific historical explanation for the Mosaic Ritual Law, but also the idea that God operates in history through second causes, including the minds of men. This accommodationist hermeneutic, familiar to Christians from Augustine,Footnote ⁶² but given a new impetus by the quick integration of the Maimonidean narrative into mainstream sacred history and apologetics, would prove to have a phenomenally long afterlife, not only because many major scholars attempted to identify the Sabians, but because the idea that God operated in history through second causes meshed with the contemporary emphasis on God's general over His special providence.Footnote ⁶³

Within the framework established by Scaligerian chronology and Maimonidean rationalism, there was a wave of new investigation into the history of the relationship between biblical Judaism and ancient paganism. Some of the grandest names of European scholarship developed a new genre, the history of idolatry, tracking how the post-Noachic diffusion of the world's peoples had gradually led to the establishment of the various idolatrous religions of paganism, either from nature worship, Euhemerist deification of rulers, or priestly imposture.Footnote ⁶⁴ The three key texts of this tradition were John Selden's De Diis Syris (1617), which contextualized all the pagan deities mentioned in the Old Testament;Footnote ⁶⁵ G. J. Vossius's De theologia gentili (1641), which ascribed the errors of the pagans to a misunderstanding of God's operation in the natural world (it was thus keenly taken up by natural philosophers to defend the mechanistic worldview as anti-idolatrous);Footnote ⁶⁶ and Samuel Bochart's Geographica sacra (1646), which drew on an attempted reconstruction of Phoenician to ascribe particular importance in the diffusionist process to the Phoenicians.Footnote ⁶⁷ Future criticism by the likes of Richard Simon and Voltaire has led to the modern characterization of this scholarship as just another form of Renaissance syncretism, but, as Zur Shalev has astutely pointed out, this is a fundamental mischaracterization, for their

Historians are now recognizing the central importance of these histories of idolatry to the humanization of the biblical narrative and in establishing a new approach to paganism.Footnote ⁶⁹

As historians have begun to explore this world of antiquarian/contextual Old Testament exegesis and historia sacra, they have begun to emphasize that mid-seventeenth-century ‘orthodox’ approaches were neither stale nor defensive, and some fascinating (and often important) figures have been rediscovered or rehabilitated. Jan Loop has discussed how the much-read Zurich-based orientalist Johann Heinrich Hottinger introduced important new Arabic sources, such as a partial manuscript of the Kitāb al-Fihrist (938), a book catalogue by Ibn al-Nadīm that Hottinger had discovered amongst the papers of his teacher Jacobus Golius, as part of the continued effort to explore the pre-Islamic Arabs, adding another textual layer to the contextualization of the biblical near east.Footnote ⁷⁰ Dietrich Klein has taken a first step into what he rightly calls the terra incognita of Lutheran Arabic studies, with a fascinating account of Theodor Hackspan, a professor at Altdorf who in the 1640s used both a Jewish manuscript – the Liber Nizzachon – that his students had stolen from a local rabbi while Hackspan distracted him, and two suras from the Quran which praise the undistorted faith of Abraham, to argue that the patriarch was ‘some kind of proto-Christian living long before the birth of Jesus Christ’ and that Judaism was only a temporary accommodation to the Hebrews.Footnote ⁷¹ Noel Malcolm has excavated the remarkable figure of Jacques Boulduc, a Parisian Capuchin, who, in a series of works published between 1626 and 1640, not only gave early versions of the diffusionist histories of idolatry that would become so influential through the works of Vossius and Bochart, but also argued that alongside reintroducing the Seven Precepts of Noah, Jesus had re-promulgated the original ceremonies which had formed part of the natural-law religion of the early patriarchs – this made Boulduc not only ‘the only modern author before Selden to structure an entire account of natural law around the “praecepta Noachidarum” ’, but also a serious contributor to the task of reconciling the ur-religion with Christianity which became so prominent later in the century (moreover, it was Boulduc's exposition of the Book of Job which inspired Thomas Hobbes to use the biblical leviathan as a symbol of the relationship between ruler and people).Footnote ⁷² Perhaps even more striking has been the rehabilitation of that most derided of seventeenth-century polymaths, Athanasius Kircher. Kircher's sacred history was certainly idiosyncratic: he believed in an original Adamic revelation which was preserved through Noah and his sons to all the world's nations, which, although it descended into idolatry when its esoteric truths were misunderstood by the common people, could still be identified in the wisdom of the Egyptian priests (whose hieroglyphs Kircher thought he had translated via studying Coptic) and Jewish Cabbalists.Footnote ⁷³ His scholarly practices – such as his continued citation of Annius's pseudo-Berorus – left him open to ridicule.Footnote ⁷⁴ But Daniel Stolzenberg has resuscitated serious investigation of Kircher as a sacred historian, showing how pioneering (and influential) some of Kircher's ideas about Egyptian–Hebaraic contact were, and, more fundamentally, how we need to read Kircher not as an example of an out-of-date Renaissance syncretism, but as a contributor to ‘developing an original interpretation of Egypt that transcended the binary opposition of Egypt as the font of truth and Egypt as the nursery of superstition by regarding it as both’.Footnote ⁷⁵

An even more fundamental consequence has been a re-evaluation of the old narrative where a historicist revolution in biblical scholarship is said to begin with one of those three ‘radical’ deniers of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, Hobbes, Spinoza, or La Peyrère, whose ideas are then said to filter into the ‘modern’ approaches of figures like Richard Simon, Jean le Clerc, Anton van Dale, and the English deists. Noel Malcolm's landmark essay on the sources of Hobbes's, Spinoza's and La Peyrère's attitude to Moses concludes, ‘the most significant developments in biblical-critical thinking took place not at these extremes, but, so to speak, in the middle’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Into this middle-ground he places Simon, whose famous theory, in his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), that the Pentateuch was compiled by ‘public scribes’ mainly working under Mosaic direction, has previously been cited as the birth of a ‘modern’ approach. Dr Malcolm is accompanied in this revisionist judgement by Dr Shalev, who shows that Simon should be incorporated into ‘what may be called the “Cappel” turn – accepting the historical malleability of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, and applying this notion to defend their respective orthodoxies’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Much of Simon's reputation as a radically ‘modern’ figure came from the unexpectedly extreme reaction by Bishop Bossuet upon seeing the contents and the preface, leading to the almost total destruction of the French edition and to its glamorously exciting pirating, translating, and re-editing in various foreign editions.Footnote ⁷⁸ Just as pioneering as Simon was John Spencer, Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, who inverted the narrative of Maimonides's Guide: where the rabbi suggested that God had given the Jews rites which directly opposed those of the ‘Sabians’, Spencer's De legibus Hebraeorum (1685) instead argued that God transferred pagan (specifically Egyptian) rites into Jewish worship. Spencer's work laid the foundations for the attitude to the biblical Hebrews of Toland, Voltaire, Rousseau, Giannone, and a host of ‘enlightened’ figures; indeed, until the rediscovery of Spencer's work in the last two decades, it was assumed that such a marginalization of Jewish importance was a product solely of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁹ Subsequent historiography thus tried to explain how the Anglican cleric-scholar Spencer fitted within this narrative; it explained his conclusions as either the product of his idiosyncratic genius or of a closet rationalizing heterodoxy.Footnote ⁸⁰ But the most recent scholarship has disputed this interpretation, emphasizing Spencer's debt to long-term intellectual traditions – including the work of Kircher and other Catholic historians – and contextualizing him amongst a group of Anglican scholars whose political-ecclesiological ambitions were neither liberal nor ‘enlightened’ but aimed at shoring up Anglican intellectual and ecclesiastical authority.Footnote ⁸¹

It should be clear by now that the old narrative of a turgid anti-pagan ‘orthodoxy’ being bulldozed away by the deist invention of comparative religion is coming under sustained pressure. Recent works which continue to espouse deist-centred interpretations do so only by ignoring the fruits of the recent history of scholarship.Footnote ⁸² Those interpretations depend on the notion that there was some kind of semi-inevitable shift from an interest in the worldwide diffusion and later corruption of a primitive ur-religion to a belief in natural religion only. This narrative was followed in Peter Harrison's influential survey, which mapped these developments on to a putative shift from Cambridge Platonism to Toland's deism;Footnote ⁸³ others have claimed such a natural shift from Matteo Ricci's belief that the Chinese classics of the Late Chou and Warring States periods recognized the existence of a personal single God to the deism of Voltaire.Footnote ⁸⁴ This is to confuse prisca theologia – a phrase used by Renaissance Neoplatonists and almost entirely useless for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – with the diffusionism that became standard in early modern historiography. In this respect, Christian scholars were not the self-defeating simpletons they can be presented as: there was no incompatibility between diffusionism and narratives of Christian revelation, because diffusionism implied nothing about the epistemological or theological status of the primitive (usually Noachic) revelation. The diffusionist approach was versatile, adaptable, and productive, able to incorporate both new evidence (like that on Chinese religionFootnote ⁸⁵) and new historical techniques (especially the conjectural histories of civil society developed in post-Pufendorfian German jurisprudenceFootnote ⁸⁶). Gibbon may have smirked at the Noachic genealogies, but even his smirk was directed only at their more far-fetched nationalistic proponents,Footnote ⁸⁷ and he relied heavily on the scholarship of those inheritors of Bochart who offered more reliable narratives, such as Antoine-Yves Goguet, whose De l'origine des loix, des arts, et des sciences (1758) happily inserted its subject matter into a Noachic-diffusionist framework.Footnote ⁸⁸ Although geological arguments had been introduced into the debate in the mid-seventeenth century, most famously in Nicolaus Steno's development of a theory of stratification in his Prodromus (1669), it was not until the nineteenth century that they offered a comprehensive and convincing challenge to the chronological underpinnings of biblically grounded historia sacra.Footnote ⁸⁹

Some early modern scholars did follow Eusebius and argue for a Mosaic source for most of pagan culture: most prominent here are the names of Pierre-Daniel Huet in France and Theophilus Gale in England.Footnote ⁹⁰ There has been a tendency to read too much into these examples, and to claim that anyone who charted the post-Noachic spread of religions in the eighteenth century and did not suggest that they were all derivations from Mosaic truth was in some sense ‘heterodox’ or espousing a ‘Christianized deism’: recent years have seen such claims made about Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, the discoverer of the Avesta, and about Sir William Jones, the famous ‘father’ of comparative philology (via his work on Sanskrit's relationship to classical Greek and Latin).Footnote ⁹¹ Here, there is the assumption that ‘orthodoxy’ was about ‘upgrading’ the Jews and ‘downgrading’ other civilizations,Footnote ⁹² but, as we have seen, post-Maimonidean ‘orthodoxy’ was more than happy to emphasize the backwardness of the chosen people, and thus God's need to operate in historical time through divine condescension. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century orientalism was the home of huge innovations, but a widespread emphasis on ‘natural religion’ was not, for the most part, one of them.

Of course, some truly radical thinkers did use this type of scholarship to attack biblical miracles as Ezran fabrications, or to defend the putatively Spinozan monism of Confucian religious philosophy.Footnote ⁹³ But the most popular irreligious texts, we are now realizing, offered little more than anticlerical readings of established narratives. The best recent work has focused on the importance of the creative reception of humanist scholarship as central to late seventeenth-century freethought, from the Anglican schoolmaster Thomas Burnet, whose desire to defend a Cartesian Creation theory led him to misunderstand Spencer and to stumble into claiming that Moses was a lawgiver who told tactical untruths to the primitive JewsFootnote ⁹⁴ (deists from Toland to Voltaire jumped on this narrative, leading to its fervent opposition by VicoFootnote ⁹⁵); to Isaac Newton, whose dog-eared pages of the early seventeenth-century scholarship of Selden and Vossius testify to his creative use in adapting them for his own clandestine antitrinitarian purposes;Footnote ⁹⁶ to the use of Grotius's historicization of allegorical interpretation in the querelle des anciens et modernes;Footnote ⁹⁷ and even to David Hume, whose Natural history of religion (1757) has recently been shown to have been in part an outgrowth of the seventeenth-century debates.Footnote ⁹⁸

The famous conclusions of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are, in short, being demonstrated to have been the product less of a self-contained ‘early enlightenment’, applying post-Cartesian scepticism to the field of ancient religious history, and more the gradual outgrowths of the contextualization of the Old Testament from the late sixteenth century onwards.Footnote ⁹⁹ This is reflected in a recent monograph by the prominent historian of late antiquity Guy Stroumsa, which argues

Professor Stroumsa's discussions of important figures like the Oxford orientalist and historian of Zoroastrianism Thomas Hyde are by far the best available.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But Professor Stroumsa has ultimately written as a scholar writing the prehistory of his own discipline, and this is reflected in his work's lack of engagement with the theological underpinnings of much of his subject matter; we await a truly historical treatment of how the writing of ancient religious history developed in our period.

More work still needs to be done here, for example on popularizing texts such as Bernard Fontenelle's De l'origine des fables (published 1724, but probably written some time in the 1680s); Fontenelle's self-conscious desire to please his genteel reading public led him to shift emphasis to what one might call the anthropology of primitive mythology, and although some work has charted the debts of this approach both to travel literature and to Epicurean psychological theories, a narrative remains to be written which connects such a text (which undoubtedly also informed Hume's Natural history) to the world of previous historical scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰² But the historical challenge of the deists and the philosophes now appears less like the culmination of a late seventeenth-century Hazardian crise and more as a polemical and popularizing interlude in the gradual scholarly recognition that studying the Old Testament involved studying the history of ancient paganism, and concomitantly the rise of the study of oriental religion. Of course, the eighteenth century witnessed major new developments. A rather obvious one was the increased access to the east offered by periods of peace with the Ottomans. A second was the rise of more advanced philological-historical apologetics: particularly important here were the researches of Albert Schultens, who argued first that Arabic was a form of a purer Hebrew preserved by Abraham's son Ishmael, and later that Hebrew and Arabic were both descended from a now lost Semitic mother language; both theses allowed him to use Arabic to defend the comprehensibility of biblical Hebrew.Footnote ¹⁰³ Finally, there was a scholarly shift from grand historical to micro-textual philological defences of the bible, inspired initially by the manuscript-based emendations suggested in Richard Bentley and John Mill's New Testament (1710), but then most forcefully developed in Germany in the researches of Johann Albrecht Bengel, Johann Semler, and Johann David Michaelis, as the bible was increasingly defended as a literary and cultural artefact. Although deism might have been on the agenda for these figures, they were inspired as much by the orthodox criticism developed in eighteenth-century Oxford, especially by Robert Lowth and Benjamin Kennicott.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ These approaches, with their stress on literary form and their use of anthropological conjecture, were certainly different from the humanist approaches discussed above, but even Michaelis's approach to the bible depended on the fundamental realization of the ‘cultural particularity of the Ancient Israelites’ that undoubtedly had its roots in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ That moment, rather than any of its later ‘radical’ manifestations, had the longest afterlife. As Suzanne Marchand has written in her epic study of nineteenth-century German orientalism:

III

We saw briefly that new narratives of pre-Christian religion might involve a critical attitude towards the textual auctoritas of the church fathers and even the evangelists, and we need now to turn to the early modern study of primitive Christianity. One need hardly be reminded that here the Reformation was a key incentive to scholarship,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ although we should not forget that Italian humanists had been producing editions of the Greek fathers since the mid-fifteenth century, especially in the wake of the attempts at reconciliation between Rome and Greek Christians at the Council of Florence.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Following some pioneering mid twentieth-century research,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ a small industry devoted itself to charting both Reformed and Counter-Reformed recourse to patristic authority.Footnote ¹¹⁰ But the use of the church fathers as testimonia for doctrinal positions begs the obvious question of the relationship between ideology and scholarship. Here, the literature lay for some time under the shadow of Pontien Polman's 1932 thesis that after the Reformation, history was almost entirely subsumed to confessional ideology; so much so that its use by Protestants was only a doctrinal betrayal of the principle of sola scriptura.Footnote ¹¹¹ Polman's work remains a mine of important information. But its central arguments have been disputed. Starting with the latter claim, the recent scholarship has shown that when, say, Cranmer relied on the ‘authorities of doctors’Footnote ¹¹² first to defend and then to deny the notion of a Eucharistic Real Presence, or when Melanchthon argued for the reintegration of patristics into the Protestant university curriculum,Footnote ¹¹³ neither felt any tension between the notion of sola scriptura and their historically grounded apologetics: for both, the consent of the fathers was not meant to establish doctrine but only to confirm the correct interpretation of scripture. Lutherans and Reformed could disagree whether the canon of scripture was known through the unchanging authority of the church (a position difficult to sustain from the start)Footnote ¹¹⁴ or from the inner witness of the Holy Spirit,Footnote ¹¹⁵ but even Lutherans ‘insisted that the reception of scripture as having been transmitted by the Church by no means pledged them to accept traditions other than the Bible’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ These were no concessions to the Tridentine insistence that truth was to be found in the written and unwritten tradition preserved by the Holy Ghost within the church.

More fundamentally, Polman's first claim – that scholarship was subsumed to confession – is being heavily revised. Let us first remind ourselves that an early modern ecclesiastical historian was defined as such not by his adherence to a denomination but by his subscription to certain ancient methodological principles: for all the ideological appropriations that this tradition endured, ‘ecclesiastical history remained large in scale and tightly connected to the compiling and the study of documents’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Bearing this in mind, some of the most vibrant recent literature has charted the fruitful interplay between history and ideology, the most important of which is Irena Backus's work on historical method and confessional identity, which argues that ‘the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were characterized by an interest in history first and foremost and the very omnipresence of history made it the obvious means whereby theologians of all religious parties could confirm their confessional identity’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Although Backus includes Cardinal Baronio's Annales in her account, her strengths undoubtedly lie in the Protestant world, and she offers an important discussion of the Magdeburg centuries (1559–74), that remarkable undertaking of collaborative Protestant sacred history, brought together by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, a scholar and theologian who in our time has become associated, through the bizarre vicissitudes of intellectual history, with Gadamer's hermeneutics.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The methodological revolution enacted by the Centuriators is well known: condemning their predecessors – Socrates, Theodoret, Nicephorus, and above all Eusebius – the Centuriators proposed that the subject matter of ecclesiastical history was not the acts of individuals or the church as an institution, but doctrine.Footnote ¹²⁰ One need not deny that there was an ideological component to this – emphasizing doctrine allowed one easily to chart the shifting locale of the ‘true’ (i.e. proto-Lutheran) church, rather than the institutional history of the Church of Rome – but this focus on the history of thought posed new methodological problems, and we might not be entirely foolish to see here an important step in what would become the history of ideas.Footnote ¹²¹ It is perhaps no coincidence that the latest research is suggesting that the Centuriators’ methodology was inspired partly by the same modes of legal historiography that informed Scaliger's contextual approach to the bible.Footnote ¹²²

On the Roman side, that Baronio intended his Annales (1588–1607) as a reply to the Centuries is well known,Footnote ¹²³ and we are unsurprised to find him returning to institutional history.Footnote ¹²⁴ In part the unwitting inheritors of Protestant propaganda, some modern historians continue to scoff at the cardinal's enterprise as little more than the accretion of papal commonplaces; while we can hardly deny the polemical intent of the work, deeper research has explored the complex culture of post-Tridentine antiquarianism and metropolitan sacred history which informed it (where energetic bishops like Carlo Bascapè in Novara all ‘agreed that the cause of holiness in the various churches of their own day could best be promoted by proving the existence of holiness in the same churches in the past’)Footnote ¹²⁵ and into the continent-wide research network of which Baronio was but one member (notwithstanding his efforts to suppress the fact), itself stimulated by the new and reformed religious orders of the Counter-Reformation, most importantly the Roman Oratorio established by Filippo Neri, who would conduct tours of the newly excavated Roman catacombs.Footnote ¹²⁶ It was this combination of antiquarian and local history which marked Italian historia sacra and produced such monuments of large-scale scholarship as the Roman martyrology (1583) commissioned by Gregory XIII.Footnote ¹²⁷ And like the Centuriators, Baronio's methodological choice to focus on institutional history involved him in a project that eclipsed his ideological ambitions, leading him to mine the Vatican archive to showcase the annals format in its greatest glory: ‘Both the Centuriators and the Annales were fundamentally apologetic in tone but it is more important to note that each represented a well-defined school of history.’Footnote ¹²⁸ This revisionism has not simply focused on Baronio: the important recent work of Arnoud Visser on Tridentine use of Augustine has emphasized how scholarship could transcend confession: ‘in many ways confessionalism actually promoted new scholarship, sharpened critical awareness, and refined philological and historical method’.Footnote ¹²⁹

For all his archival diligence, however, Baronio had one great fault: it quickly emerged that he was barely competent in Greek, never mind in Hebrew.Footnote ¹³⁰ For one of the great findings of the recent historiography is that it was when the Hellenistic and the Semitic met (and sometimes clashed) with the patristic that early modern visions of primitive Christianity appeared at their most novel and their most suggestive. Eusebius and his antique counterparts had treated the church as a self-contained institution that had appeared – like the animals of Creation – fully formed. But already the Centuriators ‘adopted a radically different approach … From the start of their work, they insisted that one could not hope to understand the church that Jesus had created without first surveying the Jewish beliefs and institutions he had known and worked with.’Footnote ¹³¹ We have already encountered the importance of such narratives of cultural translatability, but in discussions of early Christianity they took on a new urgency: more work is undoubtedly needed on those Christian Hebraist pioneers who explored the Jewish background of early Christianity, such as the German scholar and cosmographer Sebastian Münster, whose Latin notes to his Hebrew edition of Matthew's Gospel (1537) offered a ‘cultural discussion of the Gospel’ which focused ‘upon the Jewish background to the apostolic age’, and Paul Fagius, whose Hebrew prayers (1542) recognized the Lord's Supper as a Passover Seder.Footnote ¹³² More generally, a full treatment of the early modern reception of Josephus remains a desideratum, for his work served as the premier ancient model for treating God's chosen people both as divinely elect but also part of ordinary human history.Footnote ¹³³

If the early history of these revolutionary conclusions remains hazy, it is only recently that the historiography has begun to come to terms with their consequences. The painstaking scholarship of Joanna Weinberg has thrown light on the central place in this narrative of the remarkable Italian-Jewish scholar Azariah de’ Rossi, and his reassessment of that most important product of Alexandrian intellectual-religious syncretism, the Jewish biblical philosopher Philo Judaeus (20 bc – ad 50). Eusebius had identified the ‘Therapeutae’ described by Philo in his De vita contemplativa as the first Christian monastic order, and had portrayed Philo as a sort of proto-Christian – this story was then embellished and the Christian Philo reappeared when the first translations and editions of his works were printed in the middle of the sixteenth century. Using a combination of Christian and rabbinic sources, De’ Rossi redefined Philo as a strange type of Hellenistic Jew, who knew no Hebrew and whose Platonic inclinations led him to allegorize the bible.Footnote ¹³⁴ Several years later, Scaliger – motivated perhaps by the criticisms directed at his work by Theodore Beza – reconsidered the ἑλληνισται (Hellenists) mentioned in Acts 6.1, identified since Erasmus as Jews who lived in the Greek and Roman lands of the empire. Scaliger, as Anthony Grafton has documented, made a crucial new suggestion: the verb ‘to Hellenize’ did not simply mean ‘live among the Greeks’, but ‘to speak Greek’, and so the Hellenists of Acts were Jews who spoke Greek and read the bible in Greek, in the Septuagint version. Moreover, Scaliger followed De’ Rossi in classifying Philo as a Hellenistic Jew.Footnote ¹³⁵

This scholarship had two fundamental consequences. It served to historicize the text of the Septuagint, showing that it was produced not, as the famous Letter of Aristeas affirmed, by seventy inspired scribes, but by one linguistically limited person addressing the specific needs of a community of Hellenistic Jews: in other words, in a specific time and place and for a specific reason. This philological historicization of scripture was thrust into the spotlight in the early seventeenth century in an ill-tempered debate between two professors at the University of Leiden, Daniel Heinsius and Claude Saumaise.Footnote ¹³⁶ But just as important were the consequences for the understanding of early Christianity. De’ Rossi suggested that far from being an early example of Christian monasticism, the Essene sect (aligned by him with the Therapeutae) was a branch of Hellenistic Judaism which in turn became Christian monasticism: ‘The origins of Christian monastic institutions were Jewish: Philo's Essenes were a Jewish, not a Christian, sect.’Footnote ¹³⁷ Protestants had long complained about the intrusion of monasticism into the primitive church, but had tended to date that intrusion far later, sometime in the fourth or fifth century. Not only did the new historicization shift the corruption back, it also suggested that the world of early Christianity was pregnant with intellectual traditions – Jewish and Hellenistic – very alien to those used to the standard patristic narratives. Just as fundamentally, reconstructing the Jewish context of early Christianity could destabilize the historical authority of the church fathers, who could now be castigated for their lack of knowledge of Hebrew.Footnote ¹³⁸

The evangelists and the church fathers could now be seen not as conveyors of blindly trustable testimonia, but as humans with their own contingent intentions. It was this late sixteenth- century finding that informed Grotius's historicization of allegorical exegesis of the Old Testament (see above), and would inform Jean le Clerc's ‘enlightened’ attitude to early Christianity (see below). But we can already see it being repeatedly deployed by the great Casaubon. Long ago, Mark Pattison somewhat regretfully noted that ‘what stirs his soul is Christian Greek’;Footnote ¹³⁹ Casaubon's devotion to primitive Christianity has finally received the treatment it deserves at the hands of Joanna Weinberg and Anthony Grafton.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ And here, we find that if many of Casaubon's investigations began with the ideological desire to refute Baronio, they quickly alighted from that path to investigate the consequences of this ‘enculturation’ of early Christianity. Not only did Casaubon launch a deeper investigation into the relationship between early Christians and Jewish ascetic sets like the Essenes,Footnote ¹⁴¹ but the intentions of the early believers – and their possibly unforeseen consequences – now came under the historical spotlight. Just as for his friend Scaliger, the Letter of Aristeas could be dismissed, and the Septuagint shown to be the product of a local culture.Footnote ¹⁴² It emerged that Paul and the apostles, in their attempts to convert the gentiles, perhaps unwisely incorporated elements of pagan mystagogic vocabulary into the primitive faith.Footnote ¹⁴³ And even more profoundly, the realization of cultural malleability taught both Scaliger and Casaubon that the early Christians had, in a spirit of syncretizing enthusiasm, produced ‘pious forgeries’ designed to appeal to the Hellenistic pagans and Jews – the Hermetic corpus, the Sibylline oracles, and the Testimonium Flavianum –and they were wrong to do so, not only because falsehood does not beget truth, but because the unforeseen consequences of these forgeries were the rise of ascetism and monkishness.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ There is a deep irony here, in that it was Casaubon's conclusions which had the unforeseen consequences of destabilizing patristic auctoritas. Frances Yates considered Casaubon's redating of Hermes the birth of a modern mind because it signalled the end of Renaissance illuminationist-magical Hermeticism;Footnote ¹⁴⁵ we now find that she may have been correct but for entirely the wrong reason, for the real significance was that the history of primitive Christianity could now be the history of error, or at least of religious, philosophical, and cultural intermingling and confusion.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

We are here at one defining point when patristics becomes ‘critical’, for if the early church is pregnant with Judaism, yet that Judaism is itself infused with Hellenistic intellectual culture, we have an encounter between Christianity and paganism that can explain but also goes beyond Paul's sermon to the Athenians. The evangelists and church fathers now have their own contextually determined intentions and the theology that they produce now has a clear human history. One might think that here we have the end of notions of patristic orthodoxy, but it would be a mistake to jump to this conclusion. Theological (and political) leaders on both sides scrambled to ally this criticism to confessionalism, and we find a poignant tug of war over Casaubon's allegiances between the ultramontane Cardinal Du Perron (who would invite him to breakfast to attempt to convert him through patristic citation), the French Calvinists whose rejection of the fathers he had come to deplore, and, belatedly, the English church of the scholar-king James I and the polyglot Bishop Lancelot Andrewes.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ That French Catholicism had tempted him should not surprise, for under Du Perron's leadership it was itself undergoing a critical turn: the cardinal's contact with Casaubon was just one of many signs that a shared method could transcend confessional boundaries.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The decree of the fourth session of the Council of Trent (1546) that the traditions of the church were equal in status to scripture, which should not be interpreted without the ‘unanimous consent of the fathers’, had raised as many question as it answered: who qualified as a father, and how many were required for unanimity?Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Anti-scholastic sentiment may have encouraged the idea that St Bernard was the ‘last of the fathers’, but this sat rather uneasily with the principle of unanimity: ‘Taken in isolation, each one of [the fathers] is liable to make a mistake and thus can only provide the theologian with a probable argument; considered together, they cannot err and their consensus is certain proof of the truth of a doctrine’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In the battle between unanimity and history Du Perron favoured the latter, and ‘shifted the debate from doctrine to history, from the Fathers “as Doctors” to the Fathers “as witnesses of the Customes and practice of the Church of their times”’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Jean-Louis Quantin has charted the great influence in France of this historicizing turn: it led to the development of what became known as ‘positive theology’ (especially popular with the Benedictine Maurists and the Jesuit Bollandists): self-consciously anti-scholastic and patristic.Footnote ¹⁵² Here we have the direct prehistory of the ‘golden age for the study of Christian antiquity’ in France,Footnote ¹⁵³ of which the most prominent product was the Jansenist Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont;Footnote ¹⁵⁴ but here we also have the potential clash of criticism and ‘orthodoxy’ well before ‘heterodoxy’ has become a major component of the narrative. For the critical method was liable to being turned against itself: in his Traité de l'emploi des saints pères (1631), probably the most important anti-patristic text of the seventeenth century, the French Calvinist Jean Daillé ‘aimed specifically at Du Perron's new care for the authenticity of the Fathers’:Footnote ¹⁵⁵ the paucity of sources made the fathers unreliable as witnesses, whereas Du Perron's own critical approach had demonstrated their shortcomings as doctors, for had not the cardinal himself pointed out that before the Arian controversy the language of the fathers was hardly reconcilable with Nicene dogma?Footnote ¹⁵⁶ And had Casaubon not taught the world that the early Christians resorted to forgeries?Footnote ¹⁵⁷ But not even inter-confessional polemic was necessary for theological trouble, for the Casaubonian inheritance could inspire a devout Jesuit, Denis Petau, a friend of the Genevan while the latter was in Paris but an able opponent of Scaliger in matters chronological (and perhaps the foremost exponent of ‘positive theology’) to argue, in his Theologica dogmata (1644–50), that the Christological speculations of the ante-Nicenes – infected as they were by Hellenistic Platonism – were indistinguishable from those of the Arians.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Petau was even suspected of Socinianism: these suspicions were undoubtedly misplaced, but they were signs of the possible tension in theology's marriage to criticism, not least because Petau's conclusions were soon taken up by real antitrinitarians, from Christoph Sand and Daniel Zwicker in Germany (both ended up in the Dutch Republic) to John Biddle and Isaac Newton in England.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Jansenists’ continuous citation of Augustine perturbed Rome enough that the optimism of the early seventeenth century was replaced by ‘a growing rift between the attempt to return to the sources based on the works of the Fathers, on the one hand, and on the other, a theological and disciplinarian movement approved by the Church’.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ By the time of Unigenitus, the vast investment in patristics could be seen to have failed, not because of a radical heterodox challenge but because of the quality of its own scholarship, and we may note in passing here that it was this scholarship – rather than any Spinozan iconoclasm – that informed Bayle's articles on the fathers in the Dictionnaire (1697).Footnote ¹⁶¹

English theologians meanwhile, buoyed by Casaubon's declaration that it was their church which best preserved primitive purity, developed their own critical turn. Since the Oxford Movement at least, Casaubon's welcome into the fold had consistently been portrayed as yet another step in the continuous journey that was ‘Anglicanism's’ unchanging marriage to Christian antiquity: as old as Hooker and Jewel and permanently opposed to the pincer-like challenge of popery and puritanism. This narrative has been swept aside by Professor Quantin's remarkable aforementioned monograph. Neither Jewel nor Hooker not any of their contemporaries ‘ascribe[d] special authority to any period of the history of the church’,Footnote ¹⁶² for just like their Reformed counterparts on the continent, Elizabethan divines could resort to anti-papal patristic citations without investing historical tradition with any intrinsic theological authority. It was the contribution primarily of continental émigré scholars, whether Casaubon himself or Marcantonio De Dominis, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Spalato who temporarily joined the English church,Footnote ¹⁶³ to begin to ascribe to that church a definitively ‘patristic’ identity, and ‘only after the Restoration did the reference to antiquity become essential to the new synthesis which, by that time, can fairly be called Anglicanism’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Once again, it was the alliance of ‘orthodoxy’ and criticism that produced the most spectacular results. Nowhere is this more evident than in the defence of the English church by the Anglo-Irish scholar Henry Dodwell, in an argument whose learning was matched only by its inventiveness and idiosyncrasy. Under the Jewish Covenant, sacrifices enacted a mystical union with God, and the Christian bishops continued the functions of the Jewish High Priest in preserving this union (traceable through the Neoplatonic vocabulary of the apostles and the ante-Nicene fathers): communion with the bishop was thus necessary for communion with God. Even if this narrative was deployed to buttress the church Dodwell adored, it can hardly be explained by simple ideological mapping: Professor Quantin has demonstrated beyond doubt that Dodwell's refusal to take up clerical orders stemmed not, as all his subsequent biographers claimed, from a desire to maintain a façade of neutrality, but from a covert scepticism, born from his research, about the apostolic purity of the Athanasian Creed. The same critical acumen led him later to deny that the primitive church held belief in the natural immortality of the soul: a remarkable claim which shocked his Anglican (and by then nonjuring) friends and served as ammunition for gleeful freethinkers.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

We have reached a point where historians start talking about ‘enlightenment’, but it is unclear what is being signified.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ Dodwell was working with the world of a Hellenistic-Judaic Christianity which we found being erected by early seventeenth-century scholarship. The subsequent century saw the Second Temple Jewish background to Christianity explored in painstaking scholarly detail, especially by John Selden, now the subject of G. J. Toomer's aforementioned biography.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ We have encountered Selden already as a contextualizer of the Old Testament, but perhaps his greatest contribution was to paint the fullest picture yet of the Jewish background to the apostolic age, and Professor Toomer charts for us how these conclusions rested on new Jewish sources, such as the Karaite texts deposited in England by a professor of oriental languages at Königsberg University, J. S. Rittangl, after his ship had been attacked by Dunkirker privateers on its way to Holland,Footnote ¹⁶⁸ on newly recovered Arabic texts like the world chronicle Naẓm al-Jawhar (String of pearls) by Eutychius (Said ibn Batriq), a tenth-century patriarch of Alexandria, fragments of which contained anti-episcopalian readings of early ecclesiology,Footnote ¹⁶⁹ and on Selden's deployment of his scholarship for religio-political ends, not least in the Westminster assembly.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ The monumental forthcoming edition of the minutes of that assembly will be an essential source for those wishing to chart the role of scholarship in early modern political life, when John Lightfoot could pontificate for an afternoon on Homeric philology so as to explain the third article of the Apostle's Creed (Christ's descent into Hell), because ‘The Greeke Phrase is a Phrase used among the Heathen originally.’Footnote ¹⁷¹ It was Selden's (and to a far lesser extent Hobbes's) Erastian readings of Christianity's Jewish inheritance that forced both Catholics like Simon and Anglicans like Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, and Dodwell into elaborate counter-narratives.Footnote ¹⁷² And here we come to the crux of the matter, for it was the church's investment in scholarship (only accentuated by the catastrophe of the Civil War), and in an ever-more historically defined Christianity, that led patristics into the troubles of which Dodwell's intellectual career is only one manifestation. While in France patristic ‘orthodoxy’ smashed against Jansenist citations of Augustine on predestination, in England (where the focus on the ante-Nicenes circumnavigated any Augustinian embarrassment)Footnote ¹⁷³ defenders of the post-1689 ecclesiological settlement could throw Dodwell back at his high church and nonjuror friends: why must one accept the authority of Cyprian on episcopacy (which Dodwell had defended in a timeless edition produced at John Fell's famous Oxford press),Footnote ¹⁷⁴ yet reject the early church on the immortality of the soul?Footnote ¹⁷⁵

All this brings us to the fifth instalment in John Pocock's magisterial series on Edward Gibbon as a historian and as a participant in plural ‘enlightenments’. This volume deals with Gibbon as a church historian, in the infamous chapters 15 and 16 of the Decline and Fall, where Gibbon began by telling his readers that he would chart the secondary causes behind the rise of Christianity and finished by pointedly noting that the darkness that followed the death of Christ, as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, went unrecorded in other ancient sources. As in the other volumes in this series, the great value of Professor Pocock's work lies in his willingness to explore in depth texts other than Gibbon's, in this case a set of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ecclesiastical historians: the Amsterdam-based Swiss journal editor Jean le Clerc,Footnote ¹⁷⁶ the pastor of the French church in Berlin and historian of Manichaeism Isaac de Beausobre,Footnote ¹⁷⁷ and the Lutheran chancellor of the University of Gottingen Johann Lorenz von Mosheim.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Labelling their histories of Christianity's encounter with Hellenistic philosophy a ‘Protestant enlightenment’,Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Professor Pocock goes on to detail how Gibbon replaced them with a history of early Christianity's encounter with Roman civil philosophy.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ This contrast gives a double cadence to the book, and one sometimes senses that the real hero is less Gibbon and more le Clerc, whose linguistic-contextual approach to early Christianity Professor Pocock ingeniously labels ‘proto-Skinnerian’.Footnote ¹⁸¹ For le Clerc, so confused and confusing was the Platonic speculation employed by the primitive Christians to explain St John's logos – itself developed against Philo's Hellenism and to be translated as ratio rather than verbum – that the historian must resign themselves to describing but not understanding the mindset of intellectual hybridity that had produced it.Footnote ¹⁸²

This, in Professor Pocock's discussion of the ensuing debate through Beausobre and Mosheim, is what constituted one branch of the ‘Protestant enlightenment’, when theology is ‘replac[ed] with the history of theology’.Footnote ¹⁸³ But here, the astute reader will have noted, is where we encounter the problem of periodization that has been hanging over us from the start. To become an ‘enlightenment’ this story must begin c. 1680, and so in Professor Pocock's hands le Clerc's linguistic turn is informed by two 1680s intellectual movements: first, Richard Simon's defence of Catholic tradition through contextualization, and concomitant demonstration of the fallibility of both the fathers and the texts of scripture; second, by Locke's theory of knowledge, ‘which insisted that we could know only our thoughts concerning an object of knowledge, but that the object could never be known directly’.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ But we have seen already that the key contexts for understanding le Clerc did not emerge in the 1680s, but around the 1580s, to which we can trace both the direct prehistory of Simon's historical-philological method and the recognition of the cultural hybridity of early Christianity. While le Clerc certainly resorted to fashionably Lockean language, he hardly needed it when the historical-philological researches of Petau were available to him.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Yet, if our story begins in 1580 (or before), are we then still talking of ‘enlightenment’? Undoubtedly, le Clerc was in touch with real antitrinitarians – the most important name here is that of the author of Le Platonisme dévoilé (1700), the Huguenot Jacques Souverain – but one must associate Socinianism with both vast influence and with an overly vague ‘rationalism’ before one can equate it with ‘enlightenment’, moves which Professor Pocock resists, in line with other recent historiography on the movement.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ It is similarly unclear whether the category of ‘enlightenment’ helps explain developments later in the century. Where Schweitzer had emphasized the influence of the deist Reimarus in progressing the study of Christianity's earliest days by stressing Jesus's supposedly political motivations, more recent scholarship has emphasized that the debate was ‘won’ by Reimarus's orthodox critic Johann Salomo Semler, who used his knowledge of Philo and rabbinics ‘to show that the idea of a spiritual religion superseding Judaism was not something invented by the apostles’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Scepticism built on philology could always give way to optimism built on better philology: for Semler, ‘it was not necessary to deploy an argument from miracles to defend the authenticity of the Gospel witnesses to Christ: the texts themselves made clear in a historical manner both the expectations of a special figure by the Jews and Christ's fulfilment of that expectation’.Footnote ¹⁸⁸

IV

Gibbon himself drew a line back to the late sixteenth century when he chastised the encyclopédistes for ‘contemptuously’ tarring the ‘successors of Lipsius and Casaubon’ with the ‘new appellation of Erudits’. D'Alembert and his colleagues, he pointed out, had accused the humanist scholars of forsaking the faculties of imagination and judgement in favour of memory.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ We are introduced here to the relationship between history, philosophy, and politics, and this is apt, because the historiography has tended to over-determine that relationship. Gibbon was correct: the encyclopédistes did indeed condemn erudition as the bare exercise of memory over imagination or reason.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ But, it is being suggested, we should believe neither them, nor Gibbon's judgement of them. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century humanists ascribed to a complex (and often implied) epistemology, but one which was undoubtedly ‘critical’ (i.e. not simply reliant on the faculty of memory) in the most historically precise sense that we can say this.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The matrix through which the accusation of pedantry became a literary commonplace was the querelle des anciens et modernes, the artificial product of Louis XIV's programme of cultural aggrandizement which pitted those who claimed that the achievements of the ancients could only be imitated against those who claimed that they could be outdone by French neo-classicism and, perhaps more importantly, understood on their own terms.Footnote ¹⁹² Having inherited and accentuated the anti-erudition rhetoric of the querelle, the philosophes were perennially embarrassed by the fact that they then ‘proceeded to write history, and could neither do without erudition nor acknowledge their debt to it’.Footnote ¹⁹³ Recognizing this, a recent narrative has deviated from Gibbon and suggested that even the ‘enlightenment’ of the encyclopédistes was often little more than humanism bifurcated through the querelle.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Specifically for our topic, we might recognize that while Scaliger famously called for his students to read pagan authors to understand the bible, by the late eighteenth century classicists were calling for the methods of sacred philology to be applied to classical antiquity more generally.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

The history of scholarship, it seems to me, is central to this revisionism. Attempts to chart an ‘enlightenment’ in the writing of the history of religion have floundered on two variants of the anti-humanist reductionism inherited from the philosophes. One reduces all change to change in philosophy: new history depended on new metaphysics. Of course, in some extreme cases, metaphysical baggage did shape exegetical conclusions (Spinoza being perhaps the most prominent example). But, as we have already seen, the recent historiography has found the most long-lasting changes occurring not at the philosophical extremes, but in the historical-critical mainstream. Reducing history to philosophy probably tells us more about our intellectual preoccupations that those of whom we study.

The second reductionism is when an ‘enlightenment’ in historiography is fixed to a politico-ecclesiological movement. In its late seventeenth-century Huguenot variety, the erudite republique des lettres, we are told, became a movement for political reform, with Bayle and le Clerc as its two leaders.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ New or ‘progressive’ history, it follows, was written by those who were theologically ‘liberal’. But this sociological model does not fit the facts. First, it leads to the awkward shoe-horning of those who seem embarrassingly ‘orthodox’ into ‘enlightened’ categories: so the Anglican John Spencer becomes a closet Socinian, the scholar le Clerc becomes Locke's partner in an all-encompassing reform movement, and Richard Simon is disconnected from every possible influence that is not Spinoza.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ More fundamentally, the best recent work on the Republic of Letters has demonstrated that it did not possess an ideology of political reform, but, if anything, an ‘ideology of the non-political’.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ This was a respublica which was elitist, inward looking, and concerned above all with its own scholarship.

The history of scholarship is proving to be a corrective to this search for unifying explanations: history is being explained not solely as a function of the underlying categories of philosophy or politics, but as the result of actual historical practice. This leaves us with the fundamental question of why such major changes in the writing of historia sacra happened at all. Here, I would like to propose a tentative avenue for future research which can account for change without reducing it to a Hazardian crise stimulated by politics or philosophy. We have seen that as the period of confessionalization set in, the various churches scrambled to mobilize scholarship to their side. Consequently, the confessionalized clerisy came together with the humanist respublica litteraria and opened the door for the tools of humanist critical historiography to be applied to the sacred past, and for this to be done not from the outside, but in defence of religion. The history of this moment is as much an institutional as an intellectual history: Peter van Rooden has hinted at it in his essential study of Constantijn L'Empereur and the world of Dutch university Hebraism.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ But for the most part, this moment – when an Oxford Regius Professor of Theology could happily endorse in a lecture Cappel's historicist reading of the bible only two years after its first publication in printFootnote ²⁰⁰ – has gone uncharted.Footnote ²⁰¹ It was the moment when various ‘orthodoxies’ sought to replace philosophy with history as the handmaiden to theology. This had obvious benefits, not least a way of maintaining the steadying sociological authority of the scholar-cleric in the wake of the Wars of Religion.Footnote ²⁰² But it also set up an institutional and intellectual culture where historical criticism was inescapable. The revolutionary moment was when this culture was established, not any of its later products (whether Spinoza, Simon or whoever). Note please that we are not dealing here with the category of ‘conservative enlightenment’, which is still predicated on political considerations (scholarly conclusions lead to ‘liberal’ churchmanship),Footnote ²⁰³ but with the creation of a sociology of knowledge that transcended both politics and confessions. Paradoxically, it could be the case that what we treat as ‘enlightenment’ in the study of the history of religion in fact emerged far earlier than we thought, and stemmed from confessionalization, and the scholarly opportunities that if offered. Of course, to study this moment is difficult: it involves going beyond the well-known vernacular texts in which ‘enlightenment’ is usually said to have manifested itself, and it involves understanding the debates within ‘orthodoxy’ as much as the arguments directed against it: as Professor Pocock has written: ‘Criticism is unintelligible unless we know what is being criticized; and irreligion is unintelligible unless we know the possibly complex and sophisticated religion that is being disbelieved’.Footnote ²⁰⁴ There is of course another option: we can continue to believe the self-serving rhetoric of the philosophes, to reduce all the complexities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholarship to a battle between philosophical rationalists and the ‘undiscriminating bigots of orthodoxy’,Footnote ²⁰⁵ and to dismiss the traditions of humanist scholarship that do not fit out chronologically convenient schemes as ‘tied to a cultural system steeped in authority and credulity’.Footnote ²⁰⁶ It appears that the history of scholarship has become too well established a field for this second approach to go uncriticized.