Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God's Word Questioned

Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age explores the hypothesis that in the long seventeenth century humanist-inspired biblical criticism contributed significantly to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims. Historiography pictures this era as one in which the dominant position of religion and church began to show signs of erosion under the influence of vehement debates on the sacrosanct status of the Bible. Until quite recently, this gradual but decisive shift has been attributed to the rise of the sciences, in particular astronomy and physics. This authoritative volume looks at biblical criticism as an innovative force and as the outcome of developments in philology that had started much earlier than scientific experimentalism or the New Philosophy. Scholars began to situate the Bible in its historical context. The contributors show that even in the hands of pious, orthodox scholars philological research not only failed to solve all the textual problems that had surfaced, but even brought to light countless new incongruities. This supplied those who sought to play down the authority of the Bible with ammunition. The conviction that God's Word had been preserved as a pure and sacred source gave way to an awareness of a complicated transmission in a plurality of divergent, ambiguous, historically determined, and heavily corrupted texts. This shift took place primarily in the Dutch Protestant world of the seventeenth century.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Editors' Introduction 1: Henk Nellen and Piet Steenbakkers: Biblical Philology in the Long Seventeenth Century: New Orientations Part I: Famous Cases of pia fraus 2: Grantley McDonald: The Johannine Comma from Erasmus to Westminster 3: Jan Krans: Stronger than Fiction: The 'Velesian Readings' of the Greek New Testament Part II: The Boundaries of Early Modern Orthodoxy Challenged 4: Dirk van Miert: The Janus Face of Scaliger's Philological Heritage: The Biblical Annotations of Heinsius and Grotius 5: Anthony Ossa-Richardson: The Naked Truth of Scripture: André Rivet between Bellarmine and Grotius Part III: Old Testament Judaism 6: David Kromhout and Irene E. Zwiep: God's Word Confirmed: Authority, Truth, and the Text of the Early Modern Jewish Bible 7: Benjamin Fisher: God's Word Defended: Menasseh ben Israel, Biblical Chronology, and the Erosion of Biblical Authority Part IV: Benedictus de Spinoza: Ancestry and Heritage 8: Anthony Grafton: Spinoza's Hermeneutics: Some Heretical Thoughts 9: Jonathan Israel: How Did Spinoza Declare War on Theology and Theologians? Part V: Innovative Exegesis by Remonstrant, Mennonite, and Other Liberal Thinkers 10: Kęstutis Daugirdas: The Biblical Hermeneutics of Philip van Limborch (1633--1712) and Its Intellectual Challenges 11: Jean Bernier: Pierre Bayle and Biblical Criticism 12: Maria-Cristina Pitassi: Bayle, the Bible, and the Remonstrant Tradition at the Time of the Commentaire philosophique 13: Scott Mandelbrote: Witches and Forgers: Anthonie van Dale on Biblical History and the Authority of the Septuagint Part VI: Orthodox Reformed Exegetes Enter the Fray 14: Aza Goudriaan: Biblical Criticism, Knowledge, and the First Commandment in Gisbertus Voetius (1589--1676) 15: Jetze Touber: Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate in the Dutch Republic in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century Part VII: Biblical Criticism in the Eighteenth Century 16: Martin Mulsow: The Bible as Secular Story: The Northern War and King Josias as Interpreted by Hermann von der Hardt (1660--1746) 17: Bernd Roling: Critics of the Critics: Johann Scheuchzer and His Followers in Defence of the Biblical Miracle Bibliography Index of Locorum Index of names and subjects

About the Author :
Dirk van Miert is Assistant Professor of Early Modern Cultural History at the University of Utrecht. Henk Nellen is Senior Research Member at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences at Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, and Emeritus Professor of the History of Ideas of Early-Modern Times in the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam. Piet Steenbakkers is Senior Lecturer of the History of Modern Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Utrecht, and Emeritus Professor of Spinoza Studies at the Erasmus Universiteit, Rotterdam. Jetze Touber is Lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication at the University of Utrecht.

Review :
At their strongest, the chapters in this volume begin to put forward intriguing and significant new interpretations of seventeenth-century biblical scholarship. ...they reveal a snapshot of a subject in rapid transition, one increasingly focused on new--and more interesting-- questions, which have the promise to alter our understanding of early modern biblical scholarship. gives an idea of the wide scope of early modern biblical philology, avoiding the pitfall of focusing only on elements that fit our present picture of "modernization". the volume gives a wonderful overview of Dutch seventeenth-century biblical scholarship in the Golden Age, from orthodox, libertine, and Jewish points of view, and even in the period after the Golden Age Republic had waned in the 1670s. Of course, not everything or everybody is covered, but those who want to learn about seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century biblical scholarship will find much valuable in this collection of essays. This is a useful and in several cases outstanding collection of essays that confirm the longer-term significance of late humanist biblical scholarship and explain several otherwise inexplicable aspects of the passage from post- Reformation and Renaissance intellectual culture into the early Enlightenment... The essays gathered in this volume show that historians of biblical criticism are beginning but only just to understand what it will take to write a multi-faceted, fully contextualized account of their subject. By treating biblical philology as an engine of religious and philosophical innovation, this book adds to a growing body of new work that highlights the thick lines of continuity running from Renaissance humanism and Reformation-era controversies to the Enlightenment. It will benefit not just specialists in early modern biblical scholarship but anyone interested in the intellectual origins of modernity.