The history of the Scriptures should . . . teach us to understand the various vicissitudes that may have befallen the books of the prophets whose tradition has been handed down to us; the life, character and aim of the author of each book; the part which he played; at what period, on what occasion, for whom and in what language he composed his writings. Nor is that enough; we must know the fortune of each book in particular, the circumstances in which it was originally composed, into what hands it subsequently fell, the various lessons it has been held to convey, by whom it was included in the sacred canon, and, finally, how all these books came to be embodied in a single collection.113
Several assumptions can be discerned in this newly budding biblical criticism. (1) The Bible is to be subjected to critical study just as any other book. (2) The biblical material has a history of transmission that can be elucidated by determining the various circumstances through which it passed. (3) Internal statements, styles, and repetitions make it possible to deny single and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. It should be noted that Grotius, Hobbes, and Spinoza had moved away from the typical Jewish and Protestant view of religious authority and revelation and that their criticism was probably the result rather than the cause of such a move.
The most important and influential seventeenth-century biblical critic was Simon.114 As a Catholic, Simon sought to show that Protestantism’s reliance upon the Bible was not as sound a principle as the Catholic reliance upon Bible, tradition, and the church. He stressed the importance of a thorough knowledge of Hebrew for Old Testament study as well as textual criticism and philology. Simon emphasized the process by which the biblical materials were transmitted, pointing to their supplementation and alteration. Claiming inspiration for the revisers of the materials, on the analogy of church tradition, Simon argued that those who had the power to write the sacred books also had the power to revise them. Simon deliberately stressed the words ‘critic’ and ‘criticism’ in his writing, using them in the title of practically all his works. He explained the usage this way:
My readers must not be surprised if I have sometimes availed myself of expressions that may sound a little strangely in their ears. Every art has its own peculiar terminology, which is regarded more or less as its inviolable property. It is in this specialized sense that I have employed the words critic and criticism . . . together with some others of the same nature, to which I was obliged to have recourse in order to express myself in the terms proper to the art of which I was treating. These terms will come as no novelty to scholars, who have for some time been accustomed to their use in our language.115
Simon addressed his writings to the general educated audience, and wrote in French, not Latin, and his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, published in 1678, had, by 1700, gone through four Latin, two English, and seven French editions. The object of multiple attacks for its questioning of venerated traditions and positions, the book was condemned by the Congregation of the Index in 1683.
The humanists’ and reformers’ insistence on a ‘return to the sources’ and a literal reading of the text had been based on the conviction that there one could find the pristine faith, piety, and history. This confidence was to be shattered on the rocks of biblical criticism. What literary criticism found in the Bible was to produce a quagmire that was increasingly to absorb scholarly attention.
In the eighteenth century, and for the first time in Western history, a diversity of philosophical-theological systems with scholarly respectability competed in the intellectual marketplace. These included a variety of approaches to Christian theism ranging from scholasticism to experiential pietism, Pyrrhonic agnosticism, atheism, and pragmatic rationalism.116 The sanctity of tradition, the customs of culture, and the regulations of the marketplace all favored the theistic option; however, Christianity and the Bible were subjected to an unprecedented and trenchant examination and critique. The agent of this activity was deism.
Deism’s roots can be traced to various earlier influences and anticipatory figures. McKee has done this in the case of Isaac de la Peyrere, who in 1655 published a work advancing such hypotheses as the existence of men before the creation of Adam and the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Gay provides a good description of the exponents of the movement:
All deists were . . . both critical and constructive . . . All sought to destroy in order to build, and reasoned either from the absurdity of Christianity to the need for a new philosophy or from their desire for a new philosophy to the absurdity of Christianity . . . Deism . . . is the product of the confluence of three strong emotions: hate, love, and hope. The deists hated priests and priestcraft, mystery-mongering, and assaults on commonsense. They loved the ethical teachings of the classical philosophers, the grand unalterable regularity of nature, the sense of freedom granted the man liberated from superstition. They hoped that the problems of life—of private conduct and public policy—could be solved by the application of unaided human reason, and that the mysteries of the universe could be, if not solved, at least defined and circumscribed by man’s scientific inquiry.117
Various stances towards the Bible were taken by the deists, but as a rule, they sought to distill the biblical traditions; to siphon off the supernatural, the miraculous, and the unbelievable; and to leave behind the pure essence of a reasonable faith.118
During the height of the deistic controversy in England (1700–1750), two major studies of Israelite and Judean history were published. Prideaux’s work, which covers the period from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III to the lifetime of Jesus, comprises three volumes that totaled almost 1,400 pages.119 The work went through over a score of editions and was translated into German and French. Prideaux relied primarily upon the biblical traditions and Josephus, but made use of practically every known literary document from antiquity. Only occasionally did Prideaux take a critical attitude towards his sources. He challenged the authenticity of the letter of Aristeas and its account of the origin of the LXX and provided the reader with a history and description of the study of the LXX.120 Prideaux disagreed with Josephus on Alexander’s route to Jerusalem,121 and argued that the synagogue had its origin in the days of Ezra.122
Shuckford wrote his volumes to present the history from creation to the point where Prideaux had begun. Like his predecessors, from the fourth century on, Shuckford presented universal history in a biblical perspective, beginning with Adam and Eve. This was still the classical model. Sir Walter Raleigh had started at this point in his widely used History of the World, published in 1614, and although unfinished it covered history down to the Roman period. Basically the same model was employed in the multi-volume An Universal History from the Earliest Time to the Present, written by a consortium of scholars, mostly from Oxford and Cambridge, and published in 1736–50.123 Shuckford, like Prideaux, was thoroughly familiar with all the ancient sources as well as the historyof research. Both, for example, used, quoted, and opposed Spinoza and Simon. Shuckford’s work, which was never completed beyond the time of Joshua, was, perhaps because of the biblical material covered, more influenced by the deistic controversy than that of Prideaux. In describing the magicians at the court of Pharaoh, Shuckford presents them as deistic philosophers:
In Moses’s time, the rulers of the Egyptian nation . . . were then the most learned body in the world, beguiled by the deceit of vain philosophy . . . The Pagan divinations, arts of prophecy, and all their sorceries and enchantments, as well as their idolatry and worship of false gods, were founded, not upon superstition, but upon learning and philosophical study; not upon too great a belief of, and adherence to revelation, but upon a pretended knowledge of the powers of nature. Their great and learned men erred in these points, not for want of freethinking, such as they called so; but their opinions upon these subjects were in direct opposition to the true revelations which had been made to the world, and might be called the deism of these ages; for such certainly was the religion of the governing and learned part of the Heathen world in these times.124
Like his predecessors, Shuckford stretched his intellectual powers in defence of the biblical chronology, arguing that the antediluvians enjoyed longevity because before the flood the earth was situated so as to have a perpetual equinox, thus sparing its inhabitants the rigors of seasonal change.125 He argued that “at the flood, the heavens underwent some change: the motion of the sun was altered, and a year, or annual revolution of it, became, as it now is, five daysand almost six hours longer than it was before.”126 However, Shuckford,