The Italians Lelio (1525–62) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), with their moderate unitarian theology and their assumption that the veracity of Scripture should be subjected to rational judgment, were among the first to formulate a view of religion whose modernity even antagonized the reformers.103
Following the Council of Trent (1545–63), which reaffirmed the Vulgate canon and text of the Bible but recommended the latter’s revision, a long debate ensued between Catholics and Protestants and among Protestants themselves over which Old Testament text—Latin, Greek, or Hebrew—was authoritative. Even the inspiration of the Hebrew vowel points became involved.104 The attempts to decide such issues led to heated controversy and, though perhaps not widely recognized, to humans sitting in judgment over the text.
The reformers had argued that a person could interpret the Scriptures aided by divine light or fides divina. Luther, at the Diet of Worms (1521), had spoken of being “convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason.”105 Gradually the fides divina had to give more and more to ‘clear reason’ and the divine or inward light tended to become “really the Lumen naturale under a mask.”106 The seventeenth century witnessed the dethronement of the Bible as the authoritative source of knowledge and understanding and saw biblical interpreters and historians utilizing the products of the lumen naturale.107
The heliocentric theory in astronomy, expounded in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and opposed by Luther and Melanchthon, was undergirded by Kepler’s mathematical work and Galileo’s theory of dynamics and his invention of the telescope. Kepler suggested that science should be used in understanding the Bible and proposed (in 1606) that the Bethlehem star was due to the unusual conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in the sign of Taurus in 6 BCE. The discovery and exploration of new lands brought to attention the existence of peoples beyond the purview of the biblical texts. Travel accounts reported on the life and customs of distant lands. For the first time—in the writings of figures like Pietro della Valle and Michael Nau—reports on monuments, sites, and life in Palestine became known. The scientific revolution possessed its philosophical counterpart in the thought of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. Based on an empirical and critical approach to all knowledge, the new philosophy sought, as Bacon stated, “a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon proper foundations.” The establishment of history as an independent discipline in the major universities necessitated the self-consciousness of the field as a ‘science’: the earliest professors of history were primarily commentators on the writings of ancient historians. The first professor of history at Cambridge University was dismissed in 1627 because his comments on Tacitus were considered politically dangerous.108 Historians produced manuals on the art of history writing and the use and criticism of documents. The most important of the latter was Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica (1680). Generally, in the seventeenth century, antiquarian or archaeological and historical concerns were pursued separately. The former was undertaken, with some exceptions, by dilettantes possessed by an abundance of leisure and some interest in the arts and travel. Much energy and money were expended to secure artifacts for the adornment of museums and livingrooms. Near the end of the century efforts were made to combine historical and antiquarian interests; some scholars went so far as to claim the superiority of archaeological over literary evidence in reconstructing history.109 The seventeenth century was also a time of general questioning of authority, both political and religious, as the Puritan movement and the Cromwellian revolution in England demonstrate.
The impact of the intellectual climate of the seventeenth century upon the study of biblical history can be illustrated through the selection of three examples: the desire to produce a definitive biblical chronology, the attempt to defend a literal interpretation of biblical events through the use of the new sciences, and the growing literary-critical approach to Old Testament documents.
In 1583, Scaliger (1540–1609), the most outstanding philologist of his day, published his De emendatione temporum, which provided a synchronized world chronology incorporating Greek, Roman, and Jewish calculations and utilizing recent astronomical discoveries. In 1606, he published his Thesaurus temporum, a collection of every chronological relic extant in Greek and Latin. The most influential biblical chronology in the English-speaking world was published in 1650–54 by the Irish bishop James Ussher (1581–1656). In the preface to his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, Ussher confidently assured the reader: “If anyone well seen in the knowledge not only of sacred and exotic history, but of astronomical calculation, and the old Hebrew calendar, should apply himself to these studies, I judge it indeed difficult, but not impossible, for such a one to attain, not only the number of years, but even of days from the creation of the world.” Of the date of creation, he wrote: “In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth, Genesis 1, verse 1, which beginning of time, according to our chronologers, fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the 23rd day of October in the year of the Julian Calendar, 710 . . . Marginal note: the year before Christ, 4004.”110 Subsequently, Ussher’s chronological calculations were placed in the margin of the King James Version of the Scriptures. Chronographers, of course, differed in their calculations, but many of the scientific minds of the seventeenth century sought to establish scientifically the biblical chronological data. Even so great a mathematical mind as that of Isaac Newton, in a work published posthumously in 1733, sought to demonstrate the accuracy of the predictions in Daniel when applied to papal power. He also sought to make biblical chronology agree with the course of nature, astronomy, sacred history, and the classical histories, especially Herodotus.
One of the most debated topics in the seventeenth century was Noah’s flood—its historicity, nature, and extent. In a classical study, Allen has shown how all the sciences of the time were drawn upon to expound the flood in a literal sense and to explain it in rational terms. Scholars discussed the chronology of the flood, the size of the ark, the number and names of the animals, the amount of food needed to feed the ark’s passengers, and so on. The most vexing problem was, of course, the question of the origin of sufficient water to flood the entire earth to a depth of fifteen cubits. With the discovery of new lands and new animals, living quarters on the ark became more crowded. Even astronomical phenomena, such as comets, were brought into the picture as explanations. A local flood theory developed when reasonable arguments for a universal flood wore thin. Such an enormous superstructure of arguments was developed to support a literal flood until the whole thing was doomed to topple from its own weight. What resulted from such attempts to support the literal historicity of biblical narratives was a “rational exegesis, a form of pious explanation that innocently damned the text that it expounded.” “Theologians now required the Bible to conform to the reason of men.”111
A third seventeenth-century development was the application of literary and documentary criticism to the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch. Documentary criticism meant that questions about the origin, nature, and historical reliability were to be asked of the biblical materials. Earlier scholars, such as Isaac ben Suleiman in the tenth century, Ibn Ezra in the twelfth century, Carlstadt and others in the sixteenth century, had raised questions about the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The significant biblical critics of the seventeenth century were Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), an English philosopher; Benedict de Spinoza (1632–77), a Dutch-Jewish philosopher; Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a Dutch jurist and theologian; and Richard Simon (1638–1712), a French Catholic priest.112
Spinoza outlined