John Spencer and the Perils of Sacred Philology*

Extract

In 1650 the Bible's status as infallible revelation — unique guide to salvation and universal history of mankind's origins — appeared secure to most educated Europeans. True, more than a century of confessional struggle and theological debate had exposed scripture to unprecedented scrutiny and proliferating interpretations. Yet, amid the wrangling, scarcely any author questioned its divine authorship or historical reliability. Meanwhile, biblical scholars were at work shoring up the foundations of scriptural authority with the tools of Renaissance philology. But appearances were deceptive. The following decades witnessed scandalous publications by Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère and Baruch Spinoza, which openly challenged established assumptions about the Bible, setting the stage for Enlightenment polemicists such as John Toland and Voltaire. Historical scholarship was a major arena for these debates, with orthodoxy challenged, not only by evidence extending the age of the world beyond the confines of biblical chronology, but also by arguments displacing the Hebrew nation from its privileged historical role. Enlightenment critics of Judaeo-Christian revelation, from Toland at the beginning of the eighteenth century to Friedrich Schiller at the end, turned sacred history on its head by arguing that, long before the Jews, the ancient Egyptians possessed a monotheistic religion, which Moses, raised in their culture, plagiarized.¹