1
After Allegory
New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance
Tenuis mea scientia versatur circa Grammaticam & Historiam. Dogmata fidei aliis tractanda relinquo. In Historia nulla haeresis, multo minus in Grammatica.
Drusius, De Hasidaeis
Early modern biblical scholarship has never attracted much attention. Some information is available on the origins of humanist exegesis; the growing interest during the late Middle Ages in the literal sense of the Hebrew Old Testament has been well documented, as has Valla's application of philological techniques to the Vulgate New Testament, continued and broadened by Erasmus in the early sixteenth century.[1] But the history of biblical interpretation between Erasmus's Novum Instrumentum of 1516 and the first stirrings of Higher Criticism in the late seventeenth century has received only fitful regard, especially among Anglo-American scholars.[2] The index authorum for the Gospel volume of the Critici sacri , the great Restoration compendium of Renaissance biblical scholarship, is a roll call of forgotten names—Drusius, Zegerus, Gualtperius, Cappel, Vatabulus—intermingled with those remembered only in the histories of classical philology—Scaliger, Stephanus, Casaubon.[3] The greatest Renaissance exegete, Hugo Grotius, has been handed over to the safekeeping of legal historians, despite Hugh Trevor-Roper's observation that as a biblical scholar, poet, and theologian he was the "immediate tutelary spirit, the father-figure" of the intellectual avant-garde in seventeenth-century England.[4]
The lack of modern interest in Renaissance biblical scholarship is not due to a paucity of material; the Critici sacri alone weighs in at approximately one hundred pounds, divided into nine double-column folio volumes, and it includes neither Jesuit scholarship nor the less strictly philological Protestant commentaries of Luther, Calvin, Beza, Bucer, or Melanchthon. There is no paucity of material but only considerable uncertainty concerning its significance. Patristic and medieval biblical scholarship has received detailed and intelligent study because its cultural import has generally
seemed unproblematic, given the near identity of theology and intellectual culture during the centuries between Origen and Ockham. For the three centuries following Ockham's death during the Black Plague, this identity no longer obtains; whether viewed as the Renaissance or the early modern period, these centuries have, at least since Burkhardt, narrated the long Gotterdammerung that preceded Nietzsche's succinct obituary. Given such a governing narrative, biblical exegesis seems either a lingering anachronism or yet another instance of secularization, its history thus being either too marginal or too familiar to occasion much interest.[5] The Renaissance Bible has therefore little historical importance unless one can demonstrate its larger significance for the interpretation of early modern culture. The primary aim of this book is to show, however partially, what this significance might be.
Except in primitive societies, however, culture is not a homogeneous domain. In this chapter I discuss mainly elite culture, what in the Renaissance was called the respublica litterarum , the international and interdisciplinary community of academics, diplomats, poets, lawyers, civil servants, and churchmen engaged in producing and consuming advanced humanist scholarship. The chapter thus addresses the implications of Renaissance biblical scholarship for (quite literally) intellectual history.
However, in recent years intellectual history has become a suspect discipline. As traditionally practiced, it seems vulnerable to the charge of constructing the past as an atemporal conversation between canonical texts: a scholar decided on a list of "important" works and then imagined each as a response to its predecessor. The recent emphasis on "local knowledge" seeks to avoid such pseudohistorical constructs by ignoring the afterlife of texts altogether. Modern historicisms, influenced by the cult of the newspaper as well as Foucault, tend to conceive of history as a discontinuous sequence of current events—politics, scandal, patronage, and plague—a dotted line, as it were, where each chronological point both succeeds and secedes from its immediate predecessor.
But the tendency to oppose cultural studies to intellectual history poses a false dilemma. As Milton noted, old books "are not absolutely dead things." They impinge directly on subsequent eras because social entities organize themselves around specific texts and exegetic practices. Calvinists, Roman Catholics, legal humanists, and Aristotelians define themselves, at least in part, by their commitment and approach to certain books. They are, in Brian Stock's phrase, "textual communities."[6]
In the Renaissance, biblical scholarship took place within a textual community. Although there were virtually endless "readings" of the Bible in the Renaissance—cabbalist, hermetic, Socinian, Lutheran, rabbinic, Miltonic—the practitioners of biblical scholarship for the most part formed a self-conscious community, bound by personal and professional ties.[7] While I am interested primarily in the nature of Renaissance exegetic practice, in order to locate this "intellectual tradition" as the activity of a historically determinate community I want to begin with a brief narrative—one that will have the additional advantages of sketching England's position in this hermeneutic circle and of providing some basic biographical scaffolding for the ensuing discussion of exegetical method.
The Respublica Litterarum Sacrarum
We may start on June 18, 1612, when Isaac Casaubon and his wife drove from London to Tottenham to visit the local vicar, William Bedwell.[8] Casaubon (1559–1614), one of the greatest Classical philologists of the era, had come to England in 1610 and in 1612 was just beginning his major work of biblical scholarship—the refutation of Baronius's Annales . Bedwell (1562?–1632) was the founder of Arabic studies in England. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1604 he had been selected to assist the Westminster company, led by Lancelot Andrewes, in the new translation of the Bible. In 1607 Andrewes presented him to the vicarage of Tottenham and continued to assist him in his research, whose fruits included a seven-volume lexicon of Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and Arabic words, which, left in manuscript at his death, became the basis for Castell's Lexicon Heptaglotton , published as part of Walton's magisterial Polyglot (1654–1657).
Andrewes, a close friend of Casaubon since the latter's arrival in England, was himself a student of Arabic; Casaubon remarks that the bishop owned one of the two copies of Raphelengius's Arabic dictionary available in England at the time. Apparently both Andrewes and Casaubon urged Bedwell to travel to Leiden in order to consult the rare Arabic manuscripts left to the university by Scaliger, Andrewes offering to defray expenses.
So in the same year, Bedwell arrived at Leiden with letters from both Andrewes and Casaubon to the university librarian, Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655), a biblical scholar as well as poet and classical philologist. Heinsius had been Scaliger's student at Leiden, as had Grotius (1583–1645), probably the greatest of the Renaissance exegetes as well as a distinguished jurist, dramatist, historian, and philologist. The biblical scholarship of both Heinsius and Grotius was deeply influenced by Scaliger's
teaching.[9] Scaliger introduced Heinsius and Grotius to Casaubon; in 1603–1604 they collaborated on an edition of Theocritus; Grotius and Casaubon remained friends until the latter's death. When Bedwell arrived, Heinsius was living in the former home of the Arabic scholar Franciscus Raphelengius (d. 1597)—a professor of Hebrew at Leiden and official printer to the university. But before his conversion to Calvinism, Raphelengius had been part of the cadre of Catholic scholars, including Benito Montano and Andreas Masius, who brought out the eight-volume Antwerp Polyglot in 1571; he thus supplies a link between the humanist Catholic scholarship of the mid-sixteenth century and the largely Protestant respublica litterarum of the post-Tridentine period.
Casaubon had urged Heinsius to come to England, in 1613 sending an invitation via the chaplain to Frederick V, Abraham Scultetus, himself a respected biblical scholar.[10] Heinsius, however, decided against crossing the Channel, but around the same time he began corresponding with several English scholars, among them Andrewes, Ussher, and Prideaux; from 1614 on he also maintained a close friendship with John Selden, who was a biblical scholar and Arabist as well as a jurist, member of Parliament, and student of English antiquities. Heinsius had Selden's De diis Syris reprinted in Leiden in 1636 and helped distribute several of Selden's other works on the Continent.[11] In any case, Heinsius was apparently most helpful to Bedwell, who returned to England in 1613.
Casaubon, however, had not been the first Continental scholar to visit Tottenham. We have record of at least two earlier visits. In 1610 the young Frenchman Louis Cappel, having just finished his theological studies at Sedan, commenced a peregrinatio academica to Paris, Leiden, and Oxford. While he was in England he went to see Bedwell, who apparently stimulated the beginning scholar's interest in Semitic languages. Cappel returned to France in 1613 and was appointed professor of Hebrew at Saumur, the Protestant academy founded by Mornay in 1593. In 1624 he published his Arcanum punctationis , arguing for the recent origin of Hebrew vowel-points; in 1629 the Spicilegium , a philological-historical commentary on the New Testament (reprinted in the Critici sacri ). In 1634 he completed the manuscript of the Critica sacra , a detailed and original study of the text of the Scriptures sufficiently disturbing to Protestant orthodoxy as to be unprintable. Cappel circulated it unsuccessfully for sixteen years until finally in 1650 it came out in Paris—a Catholic city.
A year before Cappel's visit, Bedwell had entertained another young scholar, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624), who had entered Leiden in 1602 where Scaliger encouraged him to study Arabic. At that time, however,
Leiden had no professor in the field. Instead, Erpenius finished his studies in 1608 and, still uncertain about his future plans, left for England with a letter from Scaliger. As in the case of Cappel, Bedwell's influence seems to have been crucial, and Erpenius departed from England to Paris to study Arabic with a Coptic émigré. There he met Casaubon, then librarian to the French king, who lent him rare Arabic manuscripts and encouraged his studies. In 1612 Casaubon wrote Grotius and Heinsius, recommending Erpenius for the chair in Arabic at Leiden, where he remained until his death.
Erpenius also taught Arabic to Sixtinus Amama (1593–1629), the professor of Oriental languages at the University of Franeker, which, founded ten years after Leiden, quickly became a second important Dutch center of humanistic scholarship. In 1613 Amama had gone to England to teach Hebrew and study Oriental languages with Prideaux, at that time rector of Exeter College, Oxford. The following year he went to Leiden, where he studied under Erpenius and met Heinsius. But Amama is better known as the student of Johannes Drusius (1550–1616), the first great Dutch Hebraist; Drusius died in his arms, and over the next two decades Amama published his teacher's massive commentaries and biblical essays in ten volumes.
Drusius was born to a prominent Protestant family in Flanders, but in 1567 the Inquisition forced him to escape to London, where his father had already fled. There he studied Hebrew with another exile, the French Hebraist Cevallerius. When Cevallerius became regius professor at Cambridge, Drusius and other young French exiles followed him. At Cambridge Drusius became a close friend of Thomas Cartwright, remaining at the university after Cevallerius returned to France, studying Greek and privately giving instruction in rabbinics to two English students, one of whom was Edward Lively (1545?–1605), later regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. In 1572 Drusius planned to return to France, but, prevented by the Saint Bartholomew massacre, he instead accepted Lawrence Humphry's offer to teach Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac at Oxford, where he remained until 1576. In 1577 he went to Louvain to study law but shortly thereafter was appointed professor of Hebrew at Leiden, where he taught until 1585, when the university's increasingly rigid Calvinism led him to accept a professorship at Franeker.
And here the circle begins to close, for Drusius's student, Lively, was a fellow of Trinity and taught Hebrew at Cambridge from 1575 until the year before his death in 1605. But Bedwell and Andrewes, both protégés of Chaderton at that time, were also at Cambridge during the last quarter of
the sixteenth century. Bedwell had become a scholar of Trinity in 1584; Andrewes entered Pembroke in 1575 and remained at Cambridge until 1589.[12] Given their interest in Oriental languages, it seems probable that Bedwell and Andrewes were Lively's students.[13] The three names appear in conjunction at least once: on the original list of the committee appointed in 1604 to translate Genesis through 2 Kings for the Authorized Version. A year later, Andrewes had left Cambridge for the See of Chichester and Lively was dead, but for a moment these three English citizens of the respublica litterarum converge around a stack of old Bibles.[14]
As this partial circuit of biblical scholars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suggests, the respublica litterarum sacrarum possessed a social existence; it is not an a posteriori label imposed on diverse materials but a close-knit textual community whose axis ran from Geneva, Sweden, and the Palatinate in central Europe through France and the Low Countries to England in the west.[15]
The fact that English scholarship belonged to this international and interconfessional milieu is significant. Although England produced no major biblical or Classical scholars, with the exception of Ussher and Selden, until the mid-seventeenth century, English erudite culture in the Renaissance was no more insular than it had been in the Middle Ages and cannot be understood except in the context of European scholarship. Beginning with Erasmus's first visit to England in 1499, important Continental biblical scholars traveled and taught there on a regular basis: Paulus Fagius, a Hebrew scholar and student of Reuchlin; Immanuel Tremellius, translator of the major Protestant Latin Bible; Cameron, the teacher of Cappel and Amyraut; Bucer, Drusius, Scaliger, Amama, Casaubon, Cappel, Erpenius, Grotius. The two great seventeenth-century compendia of Renaissance biblical scholarship both come from England: the Critici sacri of 1660, compiled by a group of high-church divines led by John Pearson (later bishop of Chester), which prints in full the works of the major Renaissance exegetes; and Matthew Poole's Synopsis criticorum (1669), an exegetical catena summarizing a vast number of Catholic as well as Protestant commentaries—somewhat surprisingly, since Poole was a nonconformist Presbyterian.
The presence of Continental biblical scholars and scholarship in England is not simply an academic matter. The leading figures in the respublica litterarum stood close to the centers of power; this was, after all, the era in which colonial administrators consulted professors of theology before moving against native insurgency, and Leiden had to request permission from the king of France to hire Scaliger in 1593.[16] When Casaubon
came to England at Archbishop Bancroft's invitation, James, who valued learning in clerics as much as good legs in courtiers, requested his company on a weekly basis. James also encouraged and underwrote Ussher's research; Buckingham bought Erpinius's library for the Irish primate. Drusius was a correspondent of King James. Grotius likewise corresponded with the king and his bishops, attempting to enlist their support for the Remonstrants and his own eirenic projects. Knowledge may always be politicized, but only in the Renaissance was biblical erudition a recognized instrument of international affairs. One cannot imagine distinguished modern philologists assuming, simply in virtue of their scholarly attainments, such proximity to power.
One should not, however, confuse Renaissance biblical scholarship with its political uses. With a few exceptions, these works were not commissioned to serve specific government agenda, nor did the respublica litterarum sacrarum as a whole align with any one ideological faction. Renaissance princes and statesmen shared an interest in sacred erudition because, as Anthony Grafton observes, these "swollen and prodigious volumes, running to hundreds of pages and studded with interminable quotations in Greek and Hebrew," constituted "the staple of Europe's intellectual life."[17] If biblical scholars formed a small, tightly linked textual community, it was not therefore a culturally marginal or isolated one.
Rewriting the Vulgate
The Renaissance republic of sacred letters traced its own ancestry to the revolutionary biblical scholarship of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The chronological parameters of the Critici sacri reflect this historical self-consciousness; the anthology, whose selections span the two centuries separating Valla from Grotius, implicitly defines a single philosophical "moment," distinct from both the allegorical methods of medieval exegesis and the deconstructive textual criticism pioneered by Spinoza and Richard Simon. Yet, on closer examination, this moment forks and fissures along several trajectories. If biblical commentaries written between 1450 and 1650 share certain features, they also betray considerable divergences. The biblical scholarship characteristic of the late Renaissance republic of letters differs in crucial respects from the philological criticism of Valla and Erasmus and, more pointedly, from the methods employed by humanistically trained Protestant theologians. A history of Renaissance exegesis must attend to both the continuities and ruptures.
Beryl Smalley's rediscovery of medieval biblical humanism makes Renaissance exegesis seem somewhat less unprecedented than was once
thought.[18] But Renaissance exegetes, who generally did not know about this earlier humanism, defined their own project by contrasting it to medieval practice. For our purposes this sixteenth-century periodization provides the relevant starting point.
We can begin by looking at Matthew 26:13, which the Vulgate renders "Amen dico vobis, ubicunque praedicatum fuerit hoc evangelium in toto mundo, dicetur quod haec fecit in memoriam eius. " The interlinear gloss on this verse explains simply that mundus (world) means the church and eius , which can be either masculine or feminine, refers to Mary Magdalene; the citations added in the margins of the Biblia Sacra —a multi-volume Vulgate including the Gloss, postils of Nicholas of Lyra, and patristic commentaries—go on to note that the ointment Mary pours on Christ's feet signifies "bona fama " and that Christ's prophecy about Mary has been fulfilled.[19] The allegorization is light here, just a passing tropological extension, giving the moral and connecting Mary's act to the subsequent history of the church. But a comparison between these notes and Valla's comment on the same passage sets in clear relief the break between medieval and early humanist exegesis. In his Collatio Novi Testamenti (written between 1442 and 1457 but not published until 1505, after Erasmus stumbled on the manuscript),[20] Valla gives the Vulgate reading and then observes, "Eius in Greek is feminine. To what, then, does it refer? Certainly to the pronoun haec . Therefore it should read in memoriam suam. Quod , however, is a relative [pronoun]."[21] Valla does not discuss the meaning of Mary's anointing but its grammar, correcting the Vulgate on the basis of the original Greek and the rules of Classical Latin.
This sort of critique points in two directions, both characteristic of early sixteenth-century biblical scholarship. On the one hand, Valla treats the New Testament as a text —a series of words governed by formal lexical and syntactic rules—not as a document supplying information about the world. The Collatio is really a critique of the Vulgate rather than a biblical commentary. It exposes the barbarisms, grammatical errors, and false idioms of the received translation.[22] For example, Valla's note on Matthew 26:10 criticizes the Vulgate's unidiomatic quid molesti estis , remarking that "the Greek words are more properly and correctly (eleganter ) translated according to the practice of educated persons as Quid negotium exhibetis mulieri ? (that is, 'why do you accuse this woman?') as we have explained in De elegantia linguae Latinae " (6:862).
Valla's notes tend to identify "good" Latin with Classical Latin, a position that entails a fundamentally ahistorical and nonreferential approach to language—the sort of Renaissance Atticism that would later shrink into
Ciceronianism. For Valla, non-Classical Latin was both aesthetically and conceptually incorrect. Thus, in the Elegantiae he argues that Boethius's definition of the Trinity is meaningless because Boethius uses the term persona in an unclassical sense; Valla's entry under caritas simply ignores the Christian definition, explaining it as costliness (from carus ).[23] This linguistic purism occurs less frequently in the Collatio but lurks behind various notes as a background assumption. The note on Matthew 2:4 thus attacks the Vulgate's principes sacerdotum (chief priests)—a literal translation of the Greek—since the proper Latin term would be pontifex or praesul (6:55); it does not consider the possibility that the Jewish chief priests differed from Roman pontifices . Valla's apparently historicizing claim that meaning is determined by usage always has, in fact, a neoclassical twist, since he identifies "usage" with the literary Latin of the late republican and early imperial periods.[24] This Atticizing approach reached its climax in Castellio's Bible of 1551, which translates both testaments into excellent neo-Latin prose,[25] but by the later sixteenth century it had been replaced by a radically different understanding of language and philological method. This new hermeneutic, as we shall see, also derived from Valla's pioneering scholarship, but from his historical argument in the Donation of Constantine rather than from his biblical exegesis.
On the other hand, Valla's emendation of the Vulgate on the basis of the Greek heralded more permanent changes insofar as it privileged learning over logic (or fasting, for that matter) in the attempt to render luminous the magnalia Dei . Valla was virtually the first Western scholar since the end of antiquity to study the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament (medieval exegetes were more likely to know Hebrew than Greek), and all subsequent biblical scholarship in the Renaissance presupposes his intuition that learning dead languages is the beginning of wisdom. Even in the decade after Dort and the revenge of scholasticism, the Dutch Hebraist Amama could convince the Friesian Synod to make Greek and Hebrew requirements for all aspiring ministers.[26] Moreover, the notion that one approaches the eternal Word by studying biblical Greek implicitly severed humanist scholarship from neoclassical aesthetics. Valla did not correct the Greek of the New Testament, as barbarous with respect to Classical Greek as the Vulgate is to Ciceronian Latin. It was as a Greek scholar rather than a Latin formalist that Valla inaugurated Renaissance biblical exegesis.
Erasmus's Annotationes , first published in 1516 and successively revised until the fifth edition of 1535, borrows liberally from Valla (Erasmus's entries often begin by restating, without attribution, Valla's observations on the same passage). Like Valla, Erasmus was attempting to produce an
accurate Latin version of the New Testament in place of the solecisms and mistranslations of the Vulgate. But Erasmus was less of a neoclassicist than his predecessor; the Annotationes bears the same relation to Valla's commentaries as the former's De copia does to Valla's Elegantiae . Where Valla generally treats the correct Classical usage of single words, focusing on questions of vocabulary and syntax, Erasmus tends to explore nuance and idiom, handling longer discursive units as well as individual words and emphasizing expressivity over correctness.
In Erasmus, a basically rhetorical understanding of language takes the place of medieval allegoresis.[27] When Christ tells his already sleeping disciples to "sleep and rest" (Matt. 26:45), Erasmus thus remarks that although Origen, Chrysostom, Hilary, and Jerome explain the passage allegorically, "with all due respect to others' opinions, it is possible that Christ is being somewhat ironic" (6:867). Verbal nuance functions rhetorically; it specifies the tonal shades of social interactions and relationships. For example, although the beginning of Erasmus's note on Matthew 26:13 follows Valla closely, it then continues: "furthermore
But the Annotationes is also theological, particularly in the later editions, which supplement the basically philological notes of the 1516 text with patristic, polemical, and ethical commentary.[29] The notes on the fifth chapter of Matthew, for example, attack the characteristic enemies of the Erasmian philosophia Christi : monks, warmongering bishops, scholastic ignorance, false allegorization. In large part, the freshness of the Annotationes stems from Erasmus's application of rhetorical and philological method to theological questions. Erasmus's philological notes often have an explicit theological bearing. The most controversial entries in the Anno -
tationes —those on the Johannine comma, the correct translation of logos , and the subordination of Christ to God in the Pauline Epistles—all use philological argument to clarify and problematize doctrine.
Similarly, Erasmus's attempts to identify the original audience and occasion behind biblical utterances and his focus on the intention (voluntas ) of the speaker as opposed to literal sense of his statement (scriptum ) rely on essentially rhetorical procedures. In Erasmus's commentaries, these procedures serve, as they do in Classical rhetoric, to distinguish the universally valid thesis implicit in a passage from the historical contingencies informing it (what in rhetoric is called the hypothesis ). In a long note on 1 Corinthians 7:39, for example, Erasmus argues that Saint Paul did not forbid remarriage after divorce in all cases: he was addressing a Jewish audience concerning the Jewish practice of allowing divorce for relatively minor marital disputes where reconciliation was still possible (7:1031–34). Had he taken account of more serious conjugal disasters, Erasmus concludes, "perhaps the Apostle would have responded differently, according to the circumstances of the case, and relaxed somewhat from the rigor of his earlier advice; he would, I think, have interpreted his own writings more humanely (civilius ) for us than we ourselves interpret them" (7:1032–33). This passage analyzes the historical context in order to differentiate culturally specific injunctions from the theological "sense" of Paul's teaching on marriage, the same "sense" informing all of Scripture: namely, "Christian charity" or "equity" (7:1025, 1034). Erasmus, that is, distinguishes the historical from the universal in order to bracket the former as no longer pertinent; the whole point of his rhetorical method is to isolate the unchanging, general principles that should govern a Christian understanding of divorce from the parasitic tangles of historical detritus that medieval literalism often mistook for the main trunk.[30]
Erasmus's philological and rhetorical procedures were, of course, seminal; as an exegete, he was a forerunner both of liberal theologians like Castellio, Hooker, and Milton and of such humanistically trained Reformers as Calvin, Zwingli, and Beza—although the Erasmian philosophia Christi is more concerned with mores than dogma. But the main lines of late Renaissance biblical scholarship , while clearly indebted to Erasmus, advanced in a different direction.
Dogmatic Humanism
In his generally excellent book on early humanist biblical scholarship, Jerry Bentley concludes, "Problems of doctrine and discipline, not philology or criticism, engaged the attention of most students of the New Testament,
whether Protestant or Catholic, in the middle and later years of the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, sixteenth-century scholars broke little new philological ground after Erasmus."[31] This negative assessment helps explain why so little work has been done on post-Erasmian biblical scholarship. However, even for the mid-sixteenth century it is not altogether true, and by 1600 biblical scholars were cultivating terra incognita. Sixteenth-century humanists slowly assembled an exegetic infrastructure, publishing Hebrew grammars and the basic texts of ancient lexicography, translating rabbinic commentaries, editing the early Church Fathers, and inaugurating the study of inscriptions, coinage, and chronology. Contemporary biblical commentaries assimilated this material and were transformed by it, although in two rather different ways.
One type of assimilation produced what might be called dogmatic humanism : the deployment of the new philology in the service of doctrine. Thus, Beza, although commonly considered the first Protestant scholastic, relies heavily on humanist scholarship, particularly that of Scaliger, Drusius, and Erasmus, in his New Testament commentary. Baronius, the conservative papal apologist, also has a remarkable range of (at least secondhand) erudition, citing numerous Classical and rabbinic authors in the first book of the Annales , which deals with the life of Christ. But both tend to use their erudition to defend theological positions. Beza, for instance, argues that New Testament Greek employs the present tense for the proximate future—a nicely grammatical point—to teach that justifying faith apprehends the unseen as if it were present; similarly, Baronius cites the Talmud as evidence that Jews buried criminals together with the instruments of their punishment, thus providing a historical basis for the Roman church's claim to possess the crown of thorns and similar relics of the Crucifixion.[32]
This assimilation of advanced scholarship to theological controversy rests on the premise that the Scriptures are specula ecclesiae or types of church history. For Baronius, New Testament narrative provides both the origin and model of ecclesiastical practice and dogma: transsubstantiation, fasting, reliquaries, pilgrimages. For Beza, as for Calvin, the biblical accounts of the elect persecuted by institutionalized power and superstition foreshadow the struggles of the early Reformed churches. Dogmatic humanism minimized temporal distinctions because the past is type and (rhetorical) figure of the present.[33] T. H. L. Parker thus remarks of Calvin's New Testament commentaries:
We almost forget which century we are in; we hardly know whether the participants are they or we . We are talking about the Judaizers in
Galatia—no, we are not, they are the Romanists in France and Switzerland—indeed, we are not talking about the Judaizers at all, we are joining in the controversy, we are taking sides.... Or St John is speaking: but as we listen, his Greek strangely becomes the sort of Latin or French with which we are familiar and we find to our surprise that he knows about our modern problems and says the definitive thing about them.[34]
Calvin was a trilingual humanist, as was Beza; they were students of the historical sense of Scripture—but their history is a hall of mirrors. This is not allegory; the letter contains no hidden spiritual sense; yet Calvin replaces the language of medieval allegoresis with rhetorical terms like synecdoche and complexus "to cover an extended meaning virtually identical in content to that covered by allegory or trope.... None of the [Reformed] exegetes—Luther, Oecolampadius, Melanchthon, and Calvin—wanted to lose the flexibility of reference available to the allegorical method: The text must be allowed to speak to the church."[35]
Vetustissimus Mos
This interpretation of history differentiates dogmatic humanism from the biblical scholarship characteristic of the respublica litterarum . This second strand of exegetical humanism—what Laplanche calls "l'érudition philologico-antiquaire "[36] —while deeply indebted to the humanist philology of Valla and Erasmus, slowly shifted its focus from textual to historical criticism. That is, unlike dogmatic humanism, it presupposed the fundamental alteriority of the past. Its intuition of a rupture between antiquity and modern civilization probably derived from sixteenth-century French legal historiography, which both investigated the multiple historical layers redacted in the Justinian Code and exposed the estrangement of contemporary society from the world presupposed by Roman law.[37] Cujas, one of the seminal figures in this new jurisprudence, taught Scaliger as well as Franciscus Junius (along with Tremellius, translator of the great Protestant Latin Bible). Grotius and Heinsius were pupils of both at Leiden.
Beginning probably in the 1580s—Scaliger's De emendatione temporum came out in 1583, Casaubon's New Testament scholia in 1587—a new sensitivity to historical discontinuity developed, replacing the seamless fabric of typological time with the stratified divisions of a cultural archaeology that disclosed the break between the early ecclesiastical traditions of Baronius and the underlying Semitic culture of the New Testament. Scaliger's chronological treatise De emendatione temporum differs from its predecessors by refusing to organize history as typological or numerological recurrence.[38] Such scholarly exegesis operates from a synchronic
perspective rather than the typological one of both medieval and Reformation historiography. The biblical text becomes a historical document that both implies and elucidates late antique culture.
This avant-garde scholarship, it should be noted, was not disinterested. To take just one example, Scaliger's polymathic historical output was, as H. J. de Jonge has noted, "an immense effort to shew [sic ] that ... the critical use of the historical sources removed the foundations of Catholic tradition."[39] Nor was it secularized. No biblical scholar during this period seems particularly skeptical of either the mystical or the miraculous, both of which continued to occupy historical space. Hence, in his reply to Baronius, Casaubon carefully explicates the nature of Christ's splendid robe (vestis candida ) in Luke 23:11, citing Valerius Maximus, Hirtius, Jerome, Suetonius, Josephus, Clement, Plutarch, and Theophrastus to show that in antiquity it could have been either a royal or a priestly garment. This learned discussion concludes: "Who does not see that divine providence mysteriously contrived that Christ, who is the true king and true priest, should thus be garbed in a splendid robe by his mockers!"[40] Neither Grotius nor any of the other critici sacri questions the earthquake at the Crucifixion—nor do they defend it; it remains a fact rather than a problem. Hence, it will not do simply to describe biblical scholarship in the late Renaissance as historicist; its philological antiquarianism differs in essence from the skeptical and secularizing tendencies central to Higher Criticism.
The Sociology of Language
The developments in biblical scholarship between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries were first of all changes in philological method .
In his 1519 edition of the Annotationes , Erasmus occasioned considerable controversy by translating the logos of John 1:1 as sermo rather than verbum . The justifications he gives for this revision are of particular interest. After pointing out that logos can have a variety of meanings—verbum, oratio, sermo, ratio, modum , and so forth—he defends the superiority of his reading to the Vulgate verbum as theologically more precise, since "whatever the Father speaks, he speaks through the Son" (6:4); but sermo , which refers to an extended discourse, better captures this speaking than does verbum , which means just a single word. The bulk of the note, however, defends the orthodoxy of sermo by providing extensive evidence that the Latin Fathers regularly employed it as a translation for logos . For Erasmus, as for most early humanists, the crucial historical break came around the year A.D. 600, dividing the learned and holy Fathers from the baleful Schoolmen; the difference between the Semitic milieu of the
Gospels and the Hellenistic culture of the patristic era weighs far less heavily on his historical consciousness. Hence, Erasmus simply does not pose the question of what logos might have meant to John or his original readership. Nor does he really consider the question in historical terms at all. He cites the Fathers in order to rebut charges of heretical innovation, but his principal argument for translating logos as sermo is that it better expresses the orthodox understanding of the Trinity and (implicitly) Erasmus's own rhetorical understanding of the relation between human and divine discourse.[41] Erasmus is not primarily a historical critic but a rhetorically trained philologist, engaged in a debate with medieval tradition rather than attempting to tease out the praxes of late antiquity from the traces glancingly imprinted in the biblical text.
Three-quarters of a century later, Johannes Drusius—among the earliest of the new biblical scholars—comments on the same passage:
In the beginning was the word [verbum ] Or Sermo ... whence ... the Targums generally refer to the messiah as the sermo DOMINI . In the Koran also Christ is called the word of God as a proper name. In a letter to Rabbi Isahac, the leader of the synagogue, Rabbi Samuel Israelita writes, "They say in the Koran that Eise (i.e., Jesus Christ), is the Word of God. And among these Saracens, the Word of God is the proper name of Jesus Christ, since no one else is called by this name except Jesus, whom in Arabic they call Eise ." (6:26)
It is not quite clear what Drusius is getting at here. Are the citations from the Koran and the rabbis supposed to demonstrate that Moslems and Jews recognize Christ as the Word of God, or is Drusius attempting to show that John's terminology needs to be contextualized in terms not of Trinitarian theology but of Semitic idiom? The note is methodologically confusing, but its choice of quotations points to a crucial reorientation of exegesis from patristics to orientalism.
Drusius's recognition that the Johannine description of Christ as logos bore some relation to the phraseology of the Targums is clarified and expanded in subsequent commentaries. Cameron (1579–1625) and Grotius thus note that the Chaldee Paraphrase (the Palestinian Targum) consistently renders Hebrew expressions like "God did" or "God said" as "God did or said something through his word (per verbum suum )." Cameron concludes, "In the Jewish church (as the Chaldee Paraphrase clearly shows) that by which God does and ordains all things is termed ...
significance of the Aramaic idiom (the language that Jesus spoke) for understanding the theology implicit in New Testament phrasing. It is of little importance whether either was correct in assuming a Semitic substrate for biblical Greek—a view held by Scaliger, Heinsius, and other important seventeenth-century scholars. The significance of their observation is methodological: it treats semiotics as a branch of cultural history rather than of either lexicography or theology. The earlier humanist claim that meaning is a function of usage underlies such scholarship, but it has now been stripped of the classicizing premise that restricts legitimate usage to certain specified periods and hence tends toward a formalist rather than historical approach to language. This sense of the historical embeddedness of discourse deepens in Grotius's final comment on this passage: "John here rejects the theories (figmentum ) of the Gnostics, who said that Mind was born only after many ages from a prior principle, and that Mind then bore the Only-Begotten, who bore the Word" (6:38). With this, Grotius moves from a consideration of the New Testament's cultural idiom to its ideological context. Words have a politics as well as a history.
This historicized approach to language had a polemical edge, since, as Casaubon observes, Counter-Reformation theology rests on the fallacy of attributing more recent meanings to biblical terms.[42] But it also enabled a new sensitivity to the complex relations between semantics and social practice. In a fairly lengthy discussion, Casaubon thus shows that the Old Testament has no word specifically designating a cross or crucifixion, although it implies that criminals were sometimes strung up on a tree after having been stoned or executed; following the Roman conquest of Palestine, the term for this sort of postmortem shaming came to be used for crucifixion. Therefore, Casaubon argues, since the term that means "crucifixion" in late Hebrew previously had a more general reference and since in biblical Hebrew there is no word for crucifixion per se, it is highly probable that this punishment was unknown to the ancient Jews—despite the contrary claims not only of Baronius but of the more scholarly Carolus Sigonius and Justus Lipsius.[43] Casaubon is not arguing that every res must have it own verbum , which is clearly false, but that usage follows praxis, that philology recapitulates sociology, that the very instability of language—the historical drift of the signifier—enables reference, enables one to distinguish historical strata according to the type of linguistic artifacts deposited there.
Like Casaubon, other late Renaissance exegetes tend to view individual words less in terms of either theology or lexical meaning—the fixed relation between signifier and signified—than as elements in a culturally spe-
cific discursive system, whether the Hebraic penal code or ritual practice. Whereas, for example, Beza reads "testament" according to Protestant covenant theology, Grotius interprets the testament as a treaty (foedus ) and analyzes its relevance to the Gospel narratives by establishing the ancient role of blood sacrifice in ratifying such agreements (6:33–34). Meaning here derives from cultural practice. Similarly, commenting on Mary's anointing of Christ (Matt. 26:8), Drusius connects the apostles' protest against such extravagant waste (perditio ) with a rabbinic observation that even the rulers of the Jews were not allowed expensive burial rites because "this is wasteful (perditio ) and the work of gentiles" (6:878); that is, by linking the apostles' reaction to Jewish burial customs, Drusius implies that the events represented in the New Testament operate within a cultural system and are intelligible only in terms of it.
Frequently the commentators explicate biblical terminology with reference to Hebraic legal codes, treating law as the articulation of cultural categories. Thus, in a passage that gives the post-Freudian reader pause, Daniel Heinsius shows that the Pharisees' claim that Christ was a "deceiver" (Matt. 27:63) explains why they resolved to kill him, for according to Jewish law, "Filio necessitatem aut ministerium caedendi patris aut devovendi nunquam imponi, nisi sit seductor "—that is, a son is obliged to kill or curse his father only if the father is a "seducer" (seductor [or planos in the Greek], meaning, however, simply one who leads astray).[44] One can compare Heinsius's explanation with the more strictly philological note characteristic of mid-sixteenth-century exegesis; thus, in 1572 the Lutheran scholar Joachim Camerarius glosses the same passage by observing that "Horace uses the term 'planus' for a mountebank and vagabond who deceives men with idle nonsense."[45] Camerarius approaches semantics from the standpoint of Classical usage, whereas in the previous examples ordinary language is treated as in some sense "technical," as belonging to a specific and systematic body of rules. Just as one cannot understand a rook in chess without knowing the rules of the game, so even apparently general terms like "deceiver" or "testament" have a precise significance inseparable from the codes and customs operative in a given society.
Renaissance biblical scholarship likewise sifts textual cruxes for evidence of rule-governed praxis. A particularly interesting sequence of notes considers the problem of miscitation. The beginning of Matthew 27:9 reads: "Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet," a line that always presented difficulties since the ensuing passage does not
appear in Jeremiah but instead closely resembles Zechariah 11:12–13. Earlier sixteenth-century exegetes like Erasmus and Sebastian Munster generally view the transposition as an early scribal error or as a mistake on Matthew's part.[46] But Erasmus also offers an alternative explanation, based on Origen and Jerome, which found wide acceptance among subsequent Roman Catholic exegetes: the citation derives from a lost apocrypha of Jeremiah. Interestingly, Erasmus is far less uneasy than Jerome about the possibility that "an oracle explicating the mystery of the Passion" could have a noncanonical source (6:930); he elsewhere notes in passing that
clearly not a few books of the Old Testament have been lost, the titles of which still remain in the canonical books: the books of the Wars of the Lord, cited in Numbers 21, and the book of the just (librum Justorum ) cited in Joshua 10 and 2 Kings 1.... [Such books] must have had great authority, since canonical Scripture so often rests on that authority. But whether they belonged to the Hebrew canon I leave to others to discover. (6:132)
This explanation, repeated in the commentaries of Clarius and Zegerus, moves toward a historical understanding of the Hebrew sacred texts before the Synod of Jamnia fixed the Old Testament canon in its final form at the end of the first century A.D. These scholars, all of whom were Roman Catholic (since Protestant orthodoxy was committed to a rigidly literalist view of biblical inspiration),[47] begin to treat the misquotation not in terms of faulty recension but as evidence for the corpus and circulation of texts in ancient Jewish society. The locus of the problem shifts from the individual, whether scribe or apostle, to the cultural and textual conditions presupposed by Matthew's citation.
Grotius's note on the same passage goes far beyond patristic conjecture in analyzing the rules governing ancient textual production and canon formation. He begins by positing the existence of oral traditions: "It should be considered certain that among the Jews many of the prophecies (oracula ) of the ancient prophets were preserved in memory rather than writing, although subsequently those who received [such prophecies] from their parents privately wrote them down." Inasmuch as Grotius was not a Roman Catholic but an Erastian Erasmian (or something like that), this is not a jury-rigged apologia for Roman traditions. The note begins with a discussion of intertextuality, observing that later prophets frequently wove their own works out of the words of their predecessors: "Thus many passages in Ezekiel have been taken verbatim from Jeremiah ... and many
portions of the Apocalypse of John can be found in Ezekiel and Daniel." Moreover, since Zechariah drew extensively from the text of Jeremiah, so much so that "the Jews were accustomed to say that the spirit of Jeremiah was in Zechariah ," it is not improbable that he also quoted Jeremiah's unwritten sayings. The fact that such sayings are "noncanonical" does not mean they are not true but simply that they lack the sanction of "public authority" (6:948–49).
However briefly and awkwardly, Grotius is here attempting to account for the crux in Matthew by adducing culturally specific rules for textual transmission. He thus considers not only the generic intertextuality of prophetic discourse (a notion seemingly incompatible with direct divine inspiration) but also the interplay between textuality and orality in biblical culture, whereby the sayings of one prophet could be incorporated into the text of a later one and yet simultaneously survive within an oral tradition still attached to the name of the earlier figure. Elsewhere, dealing with a similar problem of miscitation, he comments on how passages in written texts detach themselves and begin to circulate orally as sententiae or proverbs and as such later find their way into subsequent texts (6:904). Hence, folk sayings are not necessarily earlier than texts; rather than an irreversible shift from oral to literate culture, Grotius hypothesizes a reciprocal exchange between scribal and popular traditions.[48]
De Natura Rerum
While the largest number of entries in Renaissance biblical commentaries discuss philological matters, antiquities form the second most popular category; miniature essays on such topics as Mary's alabaster box, the nature of hyssop, whether Jews reclined during meals, Pilate's atrium, and the location of Golgotha fill the great folio columns. Minor exegetes like Gualtperius and Zegerus deal with little else. Such notes, which usually involve quotations in multiple alphabets, fonts, and languages (English even shows up once: "DAD" printed in gothic capitals as a literal translation of the opening words of the Lord's Prayer), initially seem both unfamiliar (why would anyone research such stuff?) and tedious. Insofar as post-Enlightenment historiography concerned itself with the great shaping forces of civilization—whether kings, Geist , or class struggle—it could have little sympathy for the Renaissance's scholarly fascination with the material culture of antiquity: the detailed explanations of clothing, pots and pans, burial customs, coinage, table manners, and other such ephemera. The Renaissance borrows this methodology from Classical philology: ancient literary criticism, especially practical criticism, involves supplying
lengthy explanations for place-names, unfamiliar artifacts, and ancient customs; it is correspondingly far weaker on modern topics like character analysis and thematic structure. Both ancient literary criticism and Renaissance scholarship have received virtually no attention primarily because they traffic in little objects rather than large ideas. But this archaeology of knowledge, so oddly parallel to contemporary cultural materialisms, shapes Renaissance historical method and is fundamental for its interpretation.[49] It suggests a view of history as synchronic structure rather than causal process, a refusal to privilege agency over artifacts as historical signifiers, a sensitivity to social behavior rather than the infamous/autonomous individual. That is, the material focus of Renaissance exegesis is not mere antiquarianism; rather, it assumes (again using modern terminology) that thick description provides a basis for cultural interpretation.
One can see this relationship between the specification of artifacts and historical analysis in the notes on biblical clothing. For instance, medieval exegetes generally treated the passage (Mark 14:51) about the young man wearing only a linen cloth (sindon ) who appears suddenly at the moment of Jesus' capture, is seized by the soldiers, and escapes naked—a notoriously opaque verse[50] —as an allegory about fleeing the entanglements of the world and nudus sequens nudum Christum , often identifying the nameless youth with Saint John: partly because he was probably still young, partly because he loved Christ most and thus remained after all the other disciples had fled.[51] Neither medieval nor earlier Renaissance exegetes mention the sindon . Then beginning with Reformed commentators like Calvin and Beza, one finds notes that ignore the traditional association of the youth with John and the allegory based on it, instead asserting that the sindon is, in Beza's words, "une chemise "; the anonymous young man, awakened by the tumult, has dashed outdoors in his undergarments, and the fact that the soldiers apprehend this half-dressed bystander demonstrates their barbarity—which is the point of the episode.[52] The passage does not seem to have been particularly controversial, however, until 1588, when Baronius published the first volume of his Annales , in which he defends the traditional identification of the youth with John based on a rather extended argument to the effect that Jesus and his disciples ate wearing cenatoria , or Roman dining robes; Jesus put this robe over his clothes for the sake of decency, but the other disciples wore it without any undergarments. When John heard that his master had been captured, he was so stricken by grief that he forgot to change into his regular clothes and ran out wearing only this dining robe, which Mark calls a sindon .[53] To this Casaubon responds with considerable erudition and sarcasm that an
cient peoples did not strip for dinner, and hence there is no reason to connect the unnamed youth with the Evangelist; furthermore, the sindon was not a cenatoria but "probably should be understood as nightclothes or pajamas (cubitoria ), as Petronius calls them, which the youth took along when he hastened out of bed."[54] Later commentators like Grotius and Hammond follow Casaubon's reading, adding that the youth was probably unknown to Jesus, just a nearby villager drawn out by curiosity.[55]
What is at stake in this debate is the construction of narrative background and simultaneously of social milieu: Baronius and the Fathers almost always identify the minor figures in the Gospels with familiar names; narrative background is shallow and well-lit, occupied mostly by Christ's family and friends. In Protestant exegesis, events recede into a shadowy hinterground peopled by hostile or anonymous figures. The young man who shows up during the nightmarish scene at Gethsemane is a curious villager, a nameless intruder into salvation history, a figure from ordinary Jewish society who accidentally wanders into the sacred text. These opposed constructions unfold as readings of sindon , since the nature of that garment provides the sole clue concerning the identity and purposes of the mysterious youth.
Casaubon's interpretation of the sindon seems to have been widely accepted, but in 1663 the English Hebraist John Lightfoot (1602–1675) suggested a new reading, arguing that the youth was probably an Essene; the details in the text—that on a chilly night (the same night Saint Peter tried to warm himself in front of the fire at the High Priest's house) he was wearing only a simple cloth, that he had no cloak or undergarments—are particularized cultural signifiers, intelligible only via Talmudic research into the social context of late Judaism. According to the rabbis, a sindon is a tallis, worn by the ascetic Essenes without undergarments in order to "macerate their bodies, and afflict them with hunger and cold even above the severe rule of other Sects."[56] Lightfoot does not suggest a relation between the Essenes and the followers of Jesus; rather, he is interested in the sindon as a clue to the social structures of first-century Palestine. The artifact functions as a historical trace, allowing one to reconstruct the chiaroscuro and alien landscape of Christian origins, where the self-enclosed sacral realm of medieval Heilsgeschichte has been replaced by an unfamiliar world with its own alien sects and objects.
The gradual evolution of both antiquarianism and philology into the study of the underlying rules, both written and unwritten, governing social
behavior (including textual production) differentiates biblical historicism from its Classical counterpart. Classical history, from Thucydides to Gibbon, is largely political and biographical, dealing with generals, emperors, demagogues, and statesmen. A few Renaissance works attempt to adapt the Bible to this generic model. Thus, the 1554 edition of Castellio's Bible (which, incidentally, translates ecclesia as respublica ) reshapes the biblical text along the lines of ancient history by inserting long passages from Josephus's Jewish Wars between the Old and New Testaments in order to supply a continuous political narrative.[57] But in general, biblical scholarship in the Renaissance focuses on culture rather than politics. Since the events of the New Testament are only marginally related to the vicissitudes of imperial power, exegesis turned instead to the exploration of social praxis and the fabric of ordinary existence, studying clothing, table manners, dishware, marital and burial customs, penal codes, kinship structures, and ritual practice. Hence, it seems possible to extend Auerbach's seminal description of biblical mimesis from literature to scholarship. In the commentaries of the late Renaissance critici sacri the "random everyday depths of popular life" enter the domain of historical representation.[58] The half-lit recesses of biblical narrative, first discovered by these Renaissance exegetes, become sites for the serious representation of cultural forms. In these commentaries, "the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable."[59] The magnalia Christi occur not merely against a realistic backdrop but within a social milieu where locus and platea form a single whole; the events of sacred history occupy the same space as ordinary workings of local politics and unfold according to the cultural logics of Roman provincial government and intertestamental Judaism. Exegesis becomes less an explication of things (res ) mentioned in the text than an inquiry into the codes and customary practices (mos ) implicit in both the composition and content of scriptural narrative. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Grotius, the best practitioner of this sort of cultural history, was also the greatest jurist of his age, since humanist jurisprudence from its inception dealt with the cultural entanglements of law and the historical mechanisms of its transmission.
The Last Supper
The rise of cultural analysis resulted from the fusion of this legal historiography with the wealth of information pouring in from newly rediscovered Jewish texts: Josephus, Philo, the Targums (Aramaic paraphrases of the Old Testament produced between 250 B.C. and A.D. 300), the Midrash
(rabbinic commentaries on the Old Testament), the Mishnah (a collection of rabbinic laws composed around A.D. 200), the Talmud (commentaries on the Mishnah incorporating a variety of sources dating from before A.D. 200 to as late as the mid-sixth century).[60] Access to these texts marks the critical rupture between Renaissance biblical scholarship and patristic exegesis. After the mid-sixteenth century the Church Fathers, still principal authorities for Erasmus, were gradually replaced by Hebraic texts as sources for the philological and cultural interpretation of the New Testament. As early as 1535 Sebastian Munster (1489–1552)—student of Reuchlin and teacher of Calvin—remarked on the inadequacy of patristic scholarship. He explains to Henry VIII:
In our era we are assisted by the multitude of books, which we know were unavailable in earlier ages. For St. Jerome himself had no help in interpreting the Old Testament except a naked Bible and an uneducated (and untrustworthy) teacher: no Aramaic translation or Targum, no commentaries, not even a Hebrew grammar—without which many places of Scripture cannot possibly be accurately explained, no matter what some people say. (6:ii)
The majority of Renaissance exegetes were professors of Hebrew or Oriental philology; the evolution of biblical scholarship took place outside the theological faculty, which remained heir to the scholastic tradition even (or especially) in Protestant countries.
The works of some medieval Hebraists, particularly Nicholas of Lyra and Paulus Burgensis, remained in print throughout the Renaissance. But Renaissance Hebrew scholarship began with Reuchlin's De rudimentis linguae Hebraicae of 1506, the first printed Hebrew grammar and dictionary.[61] During the early sixteenth century, Christian Hebraists, including Reuchlin, often inclined toward cabbalistic esoterica rather than scholarship, but some of Reuchlin's students began the work of editing and translating Hebrew texts and the lexical tools needed to understand them. In 1508 Fagius published the first Aramaic dictionary, in 1546 an edition of the Targum Onkelos . In 1517 the first rabbinic Bible appeared, complete with the Hebrew text, commentary, and Targums; the next year Petrus Galatinus printed his De arcanis , which opens with a survey of the Talmud.[62] Sebastian Munster, like Fagius a student of Reuchlin, brought out an Aramaic grammar in 1527 and a literal translation of the Hebrew Bible in 1535. With the founding of the trilingual colleges in the early sixteenth century—Corpus Christi, Louvain, Alcala, the Collège de France, Wittenberg—Hebrew became an integral part of humanistic philology.[63]
By the middle of the sixteenth century, France had replaced Germany as the center of Hebraic studies, and at the same time such research loosened its connections with cabbalistic mysticism. In addition, biblical philology began to include the other Semitic languages. Thus, the newly discovered Syriac Bible came out in 1555, followed by a Syriac grammar in 1556; between 1613 and 1616 Thomas Erpinius published the first Arabic grammar and New Testament. By that time the Wars of Religion and the Jesuits had driven the two greatest Hebraists of the period, Scaliger and Casaubon, from Paris, leaving the Dutch universities and the French Calvinist academy at Saumur the dominant forces in Semitic studies during the seventeenth century; the great Orientalists of this period—Erpinius, Cappel, Drusius, L'Empereur, Amama, de Dieu—were all professors at Saumur, Leiden, or Franeker. Significantly, starting with Coccejus's Sanhedrin (1629), Dutch scholars begin translating the Mishnah and Talmudic tracts, which had previously been accessible only to a small cadre of specialists. Earlier translations from the Oriental languages had concentrated on the text of the Old Testament and the Targums; the growing interest in the Mishnah and Talmud, which treat Jewish laws and customs, derived from and informed the new scholarship on biblical culture and social praxis that dominated exegesis in the late Renaissance.[64]
The discovery of Jewish antiquities transformed biblical scholarship from a philological to a historical discipline. The apparatus to the Antwerp Polyglot of 1572, written by the Erasmian Catholic and secret Familist Arius Montanus (and placed on the Index in 1607), includes essays on Hebrew idioms, measures, coinage, architecture, clothing, and political geography, along with a translation of the Targums and Masius's Syriac grammar and dictionary.[65] In 1585 another Erasmian, Carolus Sigonius, published his influential work on Jewish political institutions, De republica Hebraeorum . This type of exegesis dominated seventeenth-century biblical scholarship; the inset essays in the Critici sacri include Cappel on the nature of the Corban, Drusius on Jewish sects (De Hasidaeis ), Edward Brerewood on the weights and values of ancient coins, Montanus on Jewish antiquities, and so forth.
English biblical scholarship, which reached maturity in the mid-seventeenth century, belongs to the same tradition. Henry Hammond, one of the first English biblical scholars of international stature, has an elegant and characteristic note on Jesus' reply to Nicodemus (John 3):
And when Nicodemus a learned Jew, and a Master among them, seems to be ignorant, and wonders how this can be, and asks this gross question ... how one that is of age can be born again, Christ wonders at
him ... intimating that this is the very doctrine of Proselytism, which no knowing Jew can be ignorant of, to wit, that he is to be wash'd and circumcised, and being so, is by the Jews counted as one recens natus , new born, brought forth by another mother, so that he who was kin to him before, is now no longer kin to him.[66]
Hammond locates this apparently cryptic exchange in the customs and rituals of first-century Judaism, treating the mystery of new birth as an idiom, a borrowing from the rabbinic theology of conversion, familiar to both Christ and Nicodemus. One may compare this reading with Erasmus's note, which cites Chrysostom and Cyril to the effect that "born again" in Greek may also mean "born from above" (6:62) and hence signifies baptismal regeneration. In Hammond interpretation does not point forward—to the church—but reinserts the text in its discursive milieu.
We may look at one example of such scholarship in some detail. With a certain scholarly exultation, Scaliger recounts the Talmudic prescriptions concerning the Passover seder in his De emendatione temporum of 1583. "Ecce [behold], they reclined during the seder as a sign of security," he begins—a small point but one that had confused earlier commentators since the Old Testament mandates that the Passover be eaten standing .[67] Scaliger goes on to describe how the seder involved a double ablution (thus explaining why in John's Gospel Jesus apparently washes the disciples' feet after rather than before the meal), because two meals were eaten in the paschal ceremony, each preceded by an ablution. In the first, he continues, they ate the sacrificial lamb; in the second, which was called the caena dimissoria and which corresponds to the secunda mensa of the Gentiles, they gave thanks to God, passed a ceremonial cup around the table, dipped the bitter herbs, and broke the unleavened bread.
This was the true rite of celebrating the Passover at the time of the Messiah, as the ancient canons of the Talmud clearly demonstrate.... If Christ, as certain enemies of good letters pretend, did not bind himself to the rites of the Jews, why did all these things, which can be found in the Jewish ritual codes, take place here? Why are they virtually identical?[68]
Earlier biblical exegesis either had not recognized that the Last Supper was a seder or had not considered the fact significant, instead treating the gospel narratives in terms of the origin of the Eucharist. But just a year after the publication of De emendatione , Beza incorporates Scaliger's discoveries,
along with similar observations by Tremellius, into his New Testament commentaries; he rehearses the double meal, the distribution of the cup and pieces of broken matzoh, the custom of reclining. One grasps how novel this information appeared from Beza's final remark that because of the research of Scaliger and Tremellius, the Last Supper "is finally intelligible."[69]
Subsequent exegesis of this passage refined Scaliger's original observations; for example, Hammond suggests the cultural provenance of the words of institution in his remark that the paschal lamb "was wont to be called ... the body of the Passover , or ... the body of the Paschal Lamb . So in the Talmud ."[70] But the process of refinement also led to a more complex account of late biblical society than that implicit in Scaliger's comparison of paschal and eucharistic ritual. To see this, one needs to look at a second and more problematic aspect of the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper. The synoptic Gospels clearly depict Jesus as eating the Passover the evening before the Crucifixion. John, however, does not include the narrative of the Last Supper and seems to imply that the Crucifixion took place before the Passover meal; for example, John 18:28 reports that the leaders of the Jews led Jesus to Pilate, but "they themselves went not into the judgment hall, lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the passover."
The Western fathers (and Roman Catholic exegetes like Baronius and a Lapide) followed the synoptic narrative and explained John's references to the passover as pertaining to the whole seven days of unleavened bread.[71] This explanation, however, has its difficulties, as Casaubon observes, since elsewhere "the Passover" always refers exclusively to the festal meal held on the first night; furthermore, Jewish apologists pointed out that if the Last Supper were a passover meal, Jesus could not have been captured, tried, and killed that day, since Jews do not work on high feasts.[72]
In the fifteenth century, Paulus Burgensis, a Spanish bishop of Jewish descent and to my knowledge the first exegete since Saint Jerome to apply Hebrew scholarship to New Testament questions, proposed a solution based on Hebrew calendrical tracts. The argument is fairly technical but in essence states that according to Jewish law, if a feast day falls on the day before the Sabbath it will be transferred to coincide with the Sabbath, since otherwise, given that Jews cannot work on either high feasts or the Sabbath, salads and corpses would have to be left standing for two days in the subtropical heat, with unfortunate consequences. In the year Jesus died, the passover, which should have begun Thursday night (15 Nisan), had for the above reason been postponed to the subsequent evening. Jesus, how-
ever, chose to eat it on Thursday, the day prescribed by the Old Testament, although the other Jews celebrated it the following night. Hence, both the synoptics and John are correct since they are referring to different events. The majority of Protestant scholars—Munster, Bucer, Lively, Beza, Scaliger, Casaubon, Cameron—accepted the Spanish bishop's analysis,[73] but in the 1630s Johannes Cloppenburg, a professor at Franeker, raised a further problem: how could Jesus have gotten a ritually sacrificed lamb on Thursday if such lambs were not slaughtered in the Temple until the following day, when the rest of the Jews celebrated the passover?[74]
Modern scholars are not likely to find these discussions of much interest, although the problem of dating the Last Supper fascinated Renaissance exegetes, who treated the issue in extraordinary detail, partly because it was theologically insignificant and hence allowed speculative latitude.[75] But the discussions are themselves suggestive—in their use of rabbinic law to reconstruct Jewish customs and rituals but also in their feeling for the actuality of bodies: Casaubon's vegetables (olera ) wilting in the Judean sun and the "bodies of the dead [which] cannot last in the autumnal heat of these warmer regions,"[76] or Cloppenberg's lambs still alive and bleating on Thursday night. At one point, when Scaliger wants to confute the post-Talmudic Jewish claim that the paschal lamb was killed and eaten between the time the sun touched the horizon and its disappearance from sight, he queries "how in such a brief time, virtually no time at all, can a lamb be killed, flayed, eviscerated, dressed, roasted, [and] served?"[77] These discussions of calendrical matters are lit by a new historical imagination: a realization of the solidity of historical existence, of bodies located in chronological rather than sacral time, bodies that putrefy after two days.
Grotius rejects the solution given by Paulus Burgensis, in part because it failed to explain Christ's reason for anticipating the date mandated by the Sanhedrin for that year. Instead, he argues that Jesus ate the Passover a day early but ate it without the sacrificial lamb, which would not yet have been ritually slaughtered. Grotius defends this unusual reading by noting that in the first century there would have been two Passover ceremonies. The Passover ritual described in the Old Testament could be celebrated only at Jerusalem, since the lambs had to be killed in the Temple; "but because in times of war the people could not come together, and after the Babylonian exile and other diasporas it became increasingly impossible for the Jews, now scattered far afield, to come to Jerusalem, in place of the sacrificial passover they substituted a memorial passover" (6:894). Christ knew he was going to die before he could eat the sacrificial passover, but mindful of his Father's law (observantissimus legis Paternae ), he
wanted to celebrate this sacred feast and thus, following the custom of the Jews of the Diaspora, held a memorial passover (6:894–95).
This explanation is notable because it differentiates ancient from post-exilic Judaism, whereas previous commentators generally regarded Judaism more as a fixed doctrinal system than a historical entity. Moreover, Protestant theology periodized biblical history according to the different covenants and empires established by God; Grotius divides sacred time into political segments.[78] The passage points to a new sensitivity to cultural discontinuity and change, which it analyzes in terms of legal and ritual practice rather than divine revelation. At least at one point, this approach allows Grotius to anticipate the nineteenth-century concept of the development of dogma. Again the Babylonian Exile is the turning point. Before that time, Grotius notes, Judaism contained no explicit teaching concerning life after death, although a few may have held this belief; but after the Exile
when the splendor of the Jewish empire had been taken away, when the people, groaning under external threats and punishment, suffering, and oppressed by the fear of death, began to lapse from Judaism, Daniel first used the word "resurrection"—ambiguously but in a way that seemed to veil something of great import. Ezekiel followed Daniel.... And the Chaldee Paraphrase, which is believed to have been written before Christ, makes open mention of a judgment after death, both in the story of Abel and elsewhere. (6:185–86)
Yet, Grotius continues, in the first century belief in an afterlife remained a matter of doubt and anxiety, denied by the Sadducees, who adhered to the explicit teachings of Moses and the Prophets, but affirmed by the Pharisees, who had only the "authority of tradition" to support their view; thus, "amid the quarrels of different schools, many souls wavered to and fro." Christ's teachings and resurrection resolve this eschatological crisis, but the terms he uses—"the kingdom of God," "paradise," "gehenna"—come not from the Old Testament but "have been lifted from popular speech." Grotius's account of doctrinal development, like his account of liturgical evolution, attempts to get "behind" the explicit witness of the sacred texts, which know nothing of memorial passovers or the gradual elaboration of soteriology, to investigate the oral traditions and customary praxis of late biblical Judaism, reconstructing a specific cultural moment from the silences and indirections scattered in the Bible, the rabbis, and the Fathers.
Law and Narrative
As the preceding examples indicate, Grotius basically understands culture as a body of rules. That is, he analyzes Christ's words and actions by grounding them in the customary and legal codes governing social praxis at the time: Christ eats the passover without the sacrificial lamb because there existed a mos allowing him to do so. This concern for the juridical context of narrative, as noted above, characterizes late Renaissance exegesis, directing its research into the Mishnah and Talmud—the central texts of Jewish law.
Selden, for example, includes a striking chapter in his De jure naturali (1640) on the legal background for Christ's cleansing of the Temple. Selden argues that, according to Hebraic legal codes, if a private citizen came upon another Jew publicly violating the Law, he could punish him, even by death, on the spot.[79] Such self-appointed defenders of God's majesty were legally recognized as "zealots." In whipping the merchants and moneychangers out of the Temple, Christ acted according to the jus Zelotarum ; the existence of such a law, acknowledged both by Christ and the Sanhedrin, explains why the latter did not arrest Jesus, who of course lacked any official jurisdiction, for disturbing the peace. The same religious zeal, in fact, motivated the stoning of Saint Stephen and the fury of Caiaphas's officers against Christ.[80] What interests Selden is not the timeless moral exemplarity of Christ's actions but how both Christ and his persecutors behaved according to shared cultural assumptions and, consequently, how Jewish legal codes structure the biblical narrative. In 1640 Selden's observations may also have had a political resonance; given that Selden was a common lawyer and member of the Society of Antiquaries, one is inclined to detect a parliamentarian undertone in his remark that
it is nothing new for wicked men to conceal their misdeeds under the pretext of some sort of ancestral law, as those wicked men did under pretext of the law of zealotry. But as long as pious and virtuous men used it, who although private citizens were nevertheless warranted by public authority and the customs handed down from their ancestors, it was well done.[81]
This Machiavellian moment hints at the connections between the seventeenth-century obsession with customary law and the new biblical scholarship. In fact, the links between legal historiography and biblical exegesis in the Renaissance are pervasive and methodological. The resistance of legal historians to royal and papal absolutism encouraged them to analyze
political bodies in terms of their laws, traditions, and customs rather than their rulers. Both on the Continent and in Britain, the constitutional crises of the late Renaissance lay behind the new interest in ancient constitutions, whether feudal or biblical, directing scholarly attention to the evolution, supersession, and authority of customary law and to the way such codes govern and interpret social praxis.
Kinship and Calendars
The common-law mind tended to view immemorial custom as normative for subsequent practice. This politicized antiquarianism also marks important strands of Renaissance biblical interpretation; witness Andrewes's A Summary View of the Government both of the Old and New Testament , which outlines the sacerdotal organization of the Aaronic priesthood as a validating paradigm for Anglican episcopal orders. But Andrewes was a theologian rather than a historical philologist. The later critici sacri of Pearson's magisterial compilation, and preeminently Grotius, do not excavate the structures of biblical culture in order to live in them again; they describe the alteriority of antiquity. Their subject matter thus resembles that studied by cultural anthropology: not the normative precedents that interested the common lawyers, nor fairly universal practices like marriage or promise keeping, nor simply odd customs—the sort of thing that fascinated Montaigne—but underlying and culturally specific rules, like kinship laws and temporal categories, which they see as governing both social behavior and narrative form. Grotius, to be sure, invokes such rules to explain textual cruxes, but he grasps the philological occasion as an opportunity to sketch the latent structures of an ancient society; that is, he analyzes texts as part of a cultural economy. Thus, in order to explain the biblical phrase "from the sixth hour" (Matt. 27:45), he provides a brief explanation of the Hebraic system of temporal divisions:
For this manner of speaking (mos loquendi ) arose from the customary practice of the Temple, where sacrifices and prayers generally took place at the third, sixth, and ninth hours.... Especially on festal days, these times were signified by blowing a trumpet ... so that these hours might be celebrated by the people, as being of greater importance. (6:958)
One glimpses here momentarily the connection between ritual and chronology, the cultural embeddedness of temporal systems. The detail about the trumpet (tuba ), which is not required by anything in the biblical text, deepens the sense of historical actuality: the explanation of the rule
governing temporal divisions gives way to a brief image of the shofar sounding over ancient Jerusalem as the priests pray and sacrifice in the Temple.
A longer and more complicated passage analyzes the Hebraic rules concerning endogamous and exogamous marriage, which, as Mieke Bal has shown, are a crucial subtext of biblical narrative.[82] Grotius is here dealing with the problem that Matthew derives Christ's genealogy from Joseph, to whom he had no biological connection, rather than from Mary (Matt. 1: 16). The Gloss had suggested that Mary and Joseph might have belonged to the same tribe.[83] Grotius rejects this suggestion, showing that in general Jewish marriages were exogamous, but then he goes on to argue that if a woman had no brothers she was obliged by the Law to marry her nearest relative (agnatus proximus ) so that the family's ancestral goods would not pass to strangers. This relative was called a redeemer (vindicans ), one who married according to the law of inheritance (hereditario iure ducens ). The law, Grotius notes, is given in Numbers 36:8, but he demonstrates its continued force by analyzing patterns of endogamy and exogamy elsewhere in the Old Testament and Apocrypha, concluding that it remained in effect during the Babylonian Exile, when inheritance of property was no longer a meaningful consideration for the dispossessed tribes, because the emergent hope of a Davidic messiah depended on preserving genealogical continuity.[84] Hence, if Mary were an only child, as the biblical narratives suggest, she would have married not only within her tribe but within the same family; she is related to Joseph and belongs to the same messianic bloodline (6:39–41).
As is often the case, a summary cannot convey the range of historical and philological erudition involved in such an argument. Grotius moves through biblical, Talmudic, and Classical authorities—including Donatus, Demosthenes, Isaeus, Josephus, Origen, Epiphanius, Theodoretus, Chrysostom, the Theodosian Code, Philo, and the Talmudic writers—in order to build his case for the endogamous marriage of only daughters, reconstructing from the scraps and fragments of available evidence the kinship structures of ancient Judaism and their bases in social and religious ideologies. The passage is simultaneously special pleading and investigation of the internal cultural logic structuring social/textual events. It is as if, for Grotius, the textual crux functions as an oddly shaped mound does in archaeology: as the surface manifestation of a buried culture. Hence, exegesis becomes an occasion for anthropology. This sort of inquiry stands in sharp, if implicit, tension to the Reformation program for restoring modern
society on the basis of Holy Scripture. Grotius's notes defamiliarize and denaturalize biblical culture—without, however, questioning the sacred authority of the biblical text.
The Mediterranean World in the Age of Christ
A further aspect of Grotius's genealogical investigation deserves mention. At one point, he introduces a Classical witness for the practice of endogamous marriage with the comment that ancient Athenian law derives from the laws of Moses and therefore can be used as evidence for Hebraic culture (6:40). This belief in a fundamental connection between Hebraic and Classical civilizations seems to have been widely shared by late Renaissance scholars, who, however, do not cite either Orpheus or the Hermetic corpus—the traditional texts of the ancient theology—which Casaubon had discredited in 1614.[85] But Casaubon himself also hypothesized that Greek derives from Hebrew, and Scaliger's edition of Varro argues at length for the Near Eastern origin of Latin words.[86] Heinsius at one point even conjectured that Homer had read the Old Testament,[87] while both Selden and Grotius defended the tradition that Pythagoras studied among the Jews.
These cultural etiologies, which are rarely worked out in any detail, provided a rationale for the prior methodological intuition, encapsulated in Scaliger's advice to biblical exegetes: "Lisez les bons auteurs, la Metamorphose d'Ovide, le Thalmud, illa sunt necessaria ad Biblia ."[88] From Erasmus through the seventeenth century, almost all biblical scholars drew extensively on Classical texts to illustrate biblical customs and usages, generally without theorizing the grounds validating such comparisons.[89] Yet since theological commentators, particularly among Protestants, pointedly did not employ Classical citations, their use among scholarly exegetes (keeping in mind the imprecision of these labels) cannot have been merely reflexive.
Scaliger again appears as a seminal figure. Mark Pattison remarks of the De emendatione temporum :
We are so accustomed to take this point of view of Universal History that we do not readily imagine the effort required to rise to it at a time when the primitive classical ages were imperfectly known, when nothing at all was known of the extra-classical world (Syria, Egypt, etc.), and when between the classical and biblical world an impassable barrier was considered to exist, and it was a cherished principle of Protestant exegesis not to bring any secular knowledge to the interpretation of Holy
Scripture. Scaliger was the first to perceive that the history of the ancient world, so far as it could be known at all, could only be known as a whole.[90]
Scaliger's sense of the interpenetrations of Classical and biblical culture developed along two lines of inquiry.
All the New Testament commentaries recognize that Palestine had been partially hellenized beginning in the third century B.C. and was, during Jesus' lifetime, a Roman province, operating under Roman legal and penal codes—an awareness that can occasionally be found in medieval authors; thus, the twelfth-century Glossa Ordinaria (which Erasmus cites without acknowledgment) explains the flagellation of Christ by noting that according to Roman law those sentenced to be crucified were first whipped.[91] Renaissance exegesis complicates and extends this investigation, focusing particularly on the interpenetration of Roman and Hebraic legal and penal institutions. Lipsius's De cruce (1593) is a book-length treatment of the death of Christ, analyzing the different types of crucifixion used by the Romans, their legal bases, and the various tortures prefacing their performance.[92] Such research supplements the study of Talmudic law, both functioning to explicate the codes shaping social behavior and, consequently, narrative organization. Thus, Casaubon explains the apparent oddity that, although lacking the right to impose capital punishment, the Sanhedrin nevertheless passed a sentence of death against Christ, by observing that "among the Romans, inquisitores , from whom the praetor demanded cognizance of the crime, could establish whether someone were indictable or not; however, the praetor retained the right of pronouncing the final sentence."[93] Similarly, Grotius gives Classical precedents for the way Pilate's soldiers humiliate Christ by dressing him up as a king: Livy and Philo narrate similar events (6:954–55). The recognition that for ancient peoples this sort of mockery had a ritualized, customary aspect replaces the traditional interpretation of the scene as an outburst of savage blasphemy and the furor impietatis .[94]
This interest in political symbolism shades over into considerations of political power. Thus, many of the notes dealing with Christ's trial and execution attempt to sort out the competing spheres of imperial and local authority—the structures of power in colonized societies. The nature of the custodia sent to apprehend Christ and guard his tomb, for example, occasions a debate on the relations between Roman and Jewish militia: Drusius claiming that the custodia formed part of the Temple guard (6:943) against Scaliger, who thinks that "they were Roman soldiers, garrisoned, according to Josephus, in the tower of Antonia" (6:943). Grotius, again citing
Josephus, supplies additional detail, arguing that the guard accompanying Judas to Gethsemane, although perhaps led by Temple officials, was probably composed of Roman soldiers, who were regularly sent from the imperial garrison on high feasts, since the authorities felt that the crowds flocking to Jerusalem required additional police protection. Hence, Jesus calls them "sinners" (Matt. 26:45), the customary Jewish term for those living outside the Law (6:909–10).
Alongside this fairly straightforward clarification of the Roman juridical background to the New Testament, Renaissance exegesis began to explore the murkier terrain of cross-cultural relations. Especially after 1580, biblical scholarship increasingly treated New Testament society as part of ancient Mediterranean civilization, pointing out shared customs, rituals, and codes, sometimes hypothesizing a process of cultural transmission although more often simply remarking on the similarity. Hammond thus notes that the Jewish customs of carrying palm branches and singing were likewise "usual among the Grecians in any time of sacred festivity."[95] In 1572 Pierre Pithou, a French medievalist and friend of Scaliger, published and annotated a late antique manuscript on the parallels between Mosaic law and the Twelve Tables.[96] Other late-Renaissance biblical scholars likewise remarked on the homology between Greco-Roman and Hebraic social conventions: the lustral ceremonies, the twofold ritual meal, the custom of reclining rather than sitting to eat.[97] Almost invariably, the annotated similarities pertain to customs no longer practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather, such comparisons presuppose what Grotius calls the "jus vetustissimum apud omnes prope gentes " (6:216), a socio-cultural substrate common to all archaic societies, constituting them as anthropological other rather than the subject of mimetic retrieval; one returns to the source only to discover the estrangement of the past. The Jewish practice of meticulously removing every trace of leavened bread from their houses before the Passover reminds Scaliger of "the scrupulosity of women celebrating the rites of the Bona Dea, who would destroy even a mouse-nest rather than allow a male mouse in such a place."[98] Ancient societies share strange taboos, sometimes savage ones—as when Grotius observes that the notion of a "new testament in Christ's blood" (Matt. 26:28) derives from the widespread ancient custom of ratifying treaties with animal or human sacrifice.
Yet if the perception of the cultural unity of the ancient Mediterranean world exposed the primitive origins of Western civilization, it also revealed the universality of the moral law (jus naturale ); much of Grotius's De veritate is spent showing that Classical poets and philosophers ac-
knowledged the fundamental tenets of Christianity: the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and similar axioms. Grotius was, in fact, a friend of Edward Herbert and encouraged him to publish his own De veritate .[99] Grotius thus seems simultaneously an ancient theologian and an anthropologist—a paradox that the next chapter will attempt to unravel.
The Mirror of History
In his essay on modern biblical scholarship in The Cambridge History of the Bible , Alan Richardson remarks that "a new type of exegesis" appeared during the nineteenth century, "namely one which is based upon sound historical scholarship.... [It was] no longer possible to treat the words of the Bible as timeless truths addressed to the world at large ... since their real meaning cannot be understood apart from their historical context."[100] This is not, however, true. Renaissance biblical scholarship is no less historical than the Higher Criticism of the nineteenth century. Their historicisms differ in that after the Renaissance biblical research focused on questions of authorship—on the extratextual site of cultural production rather than the cultural milieu implicit in the text. For example, Harper's Bible Dictionary —a fairly standard modern reference work—defines historical criticism as concerned with the "time and place of composition [of a biblical book], the circumstances in which it was produced or written, its author or authors ... how it came to be written, and the audience(s) to which it was addressed"—all basically questions concerning the author or authors.
Renaissance biblical scholarship does not often deal with such issues—to my surprise, since I began this chapter planning to record the emergence of the subject out of the ashes of medieval allegorical exegesis. This project failed because Renaissance biblical scholarship evinces almost no interest in the intentions, motives, or inner life of either the biblical writers or the texts' sacred personae. Subjectivity dissolves into language and culture—that is, into philological and historical analysis.[101] One almost never finds phrases signaling authorial intention, like "Matthew here attempts to show" or "Luke includes this episode because"—the familiar currency of modern biblical exegesis. Renaissance scholars generally consider the author only as an "authority"—as a passive witness to the events depicted in his narrative and hence the guarantor of its veracity. The author thus pertains to a prefatory note, having no further relevance to the shape of the narrative, which is analyzed as a linguistic and cultural performance.
This lack of interest in the author as a category of explanation corresponds to a lack of interest in either the moral or psychological character of
the narrative personae. The notes in the Critici sacri deal with alabaster pots, linen undergarments, ritual codes, chronologies, flagella, kinship laws, and lexical glosses; they rarely treat personal agency, and then not directly. Christ's final cry of desolation, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"—where one would expect commentators at least to touch upon his sorrow and agony—raises only questions of dialect: is Christ speaking Aramaic or Hebrew?[102] This disappearance of the subject intensifies in Protestant commentaries since they omit the pious fictions concerning Christ's family and friends with which medieval and Roman Catholic exegetes filled the dark background of New Testament narratives. The little intimacies characteristic of Cornelius à Lapide's Great Commentary —how "Simon and his friends" feasted Christ, while "Martha ministered at this supper ... because she was a neighbour"[103] —do not occur in Protestant scholarship. In granting analytic priority to the cultural codes marking the text over both characterization and authorial intention, Renaissance biblical commentaries resemble the new historicisms of the late twentieth century, which may help explain the elective affinity these approaches seem to have for early modern studies.
Yet if the philological antiquarianism of biblical exegesis during the Renaissance seems a distant precursor of modern cultural studies, it is also, at least in one respect, crucially different. We can approach this difference by looking in some detail at Grotius's note on the tearing of the veil concealing the Holy of Holies at the moment of Christ's death (Matt. 27:51). After a somewhat technical discussion of the architecture of the Temple, Grotius remarks that one needs to understand the symbolism of the veil itself in order to understand the significance of its tearing. When the author of Hebrews says that the Holy of Holies
is a figure of true things (verorum figura ), namely of the highest heavens, he said nothing new but mentions what would have been known to all Jews, as I shall show by explicit testimonies. Josephus says ... "the third section of the building ... was like the heaven set apart for God." ... Philo, in his life of Moses, [writes] that "the innermost part of the Temple symbolizes the intelligible realm." ... The objects outside this penetralia not obscurely shadowed forth the visible world. For the red of the veil [signified] fire; the linen, earth; the hyacinth, air; the purple, the sea; the seven lamps, the planets.... Therefore it seems fairly clear that the innermost part symbolized the intelligible world.... Philo, almost certainly drawing on ancient traditions, says that the propitiatorium was a symbol of divine mercy. He thought the Cherubim designated God's creative and kingly powers.... Given all this, I think
the significance of the tearing of the veil is not unclear. For it signifies the access opened through the death of Christ—first to Christ himself, and then by his goodness to the saints of the Old and New Covenants—to that invisible heaven which Holy Scriptures call the heaven of heavens, the dwelling place of the Divine Majesty.... For the Romans and other gentiles, however, this miracle would not obscurely signify the atrocity of the crime committed against Christ. In a comedy, Philippides, here speaking about Demetrius, who dared to compare himself to the gods, thus says: "the veil was torn because of his impiety." (6:962–63)
The logic of this passage is curious; it begins by trying to establish what the veil would have signified to the Jews of the first century and also attempting to picture it—to give some sense of its historical reality as an object. But it then seamlessly moves into theology, as though cultural symbolism provided access to the eternal wisdom of God—as though there were no veil between the visible and intelligible worlds. The passage ends with a discussion of how the Roman inhabitants of Judea might have understood the miracle, whose historicity Grotius never questions.
The juxtaposition of cultural hermeneutics and theological essentialism here is jarring, since in the modern academy these are ideologically incompatible.[104] Yet Grotius does not even seem to distinguish them as separate discourses; the colorless scholarly Latin of the passage flows across apparent discursive boundaries without the slightest hesitation.[105] Reality is a stylistic effect, and in Grotius the same style serves for miracles and old curtains. The passage pulls one behind the Enlightenment, prior to the moment when the Western intelligentsia turned against their Fathers, shutting up theology from the rest of the respublica litterarum behind bars of irony. The deicidal urges characteristic of modern culture are not emergent here; this passage provides singularly little evidence for encroaching skepticism and secularization; it does not belong to post-Enlightenment narratives.[106]
The rhetoric of biblical scholarship does not demystify; it demythologizes sacred history. The implications of this particular discursive rendering of the world are perhaps clearest at its origin: Valla's Donation of Constantine , one of the earliest and most brilliant works of cultural analysis. What Valla does, in effect, is identify rhetorical probability with cultural rules and customs. The donation lacks probability because it does not "fit" the cultural logic of the late Roman Empire; it does not square with codes regulating social praxis during that period. The strictly philological
aspect of Valla's argument—his demonstration that this forgery was written in medieval Latin—forms only a part of the Donation , which also examines how power was customarily transferred under the Empire, what ancient peoples wore on ceremonial occasions, how old coins reflect political history, how the whole texture of late antique culture—its rituals, political organization, dress, laws—bears on historical interpretation. In place of the forged donation's mythic background of virgin-eating dragons and miraculous cures, Valla sets the social fabric of fourth-century Rome, a fabric conspicuously lacking in dragons but stocked with leather neck bands, crescent-shaped shoe ornaments, silk diadems, and horse-cloths.[107] The rhetorical construction of history is thick description, the rendering of cultural artifacts and customs rather than saints and monsters.
Valla's identification of rhetorical probability with the conformity between an event and its cultural milieu—his sense of historical verisimilitude—clarifies the resonance of the biblical commentaries, which seem triumphant rather than anxious about their discovery of the historical embeddedness of scriptural narrative. The demonstration that biblical events belong to a specific culture and are governed by its codes renders them alien, but it also makes them seem real, attaches them to the historical world of late antique bedclothes and Roman provincial government rather than the mythic domain of hagiography, fables, and piae fraudes .
Both Valla's revolutionary essay and Renaissance biblical scholarship, it seems to me, should be viewed as an episode in the conceptual management of diversity, as a way of categorizing and analyzing the unfamiliar—rather, that is, than as a stage in the gradual secularization of Western culture. The commentaries examined in this chapter differ from earlier texts precisely in their handling of the mass of alien and exotic details unearthed by humanist scholarship. The Renaissance inherited two traditional methods of managing diversity. The first and more familiar erases history, subordinating diversity to repetitive pattern, whether exemplary or typological. Augustine's two cities, Protestant ecclesiology, and the moralized history of humanist pedagogy all construct the past as proleptic repetition rather than linear sequence.[108]
The second method derives from Aristotle's biological works (including the Problems ), which record the almost limitless variety of habitats, social organizations, sexual preferences, morphological structures, and domestic arrangements found in nature. Aristotle's approach is singularly amoral;
he is not interested in animal behavior as evidence of a normative jus naturale or as a model for human society. He simply lists, column after column, the variety and strangeness of things found in nature:
Some animals at first live in water, and by and by change their shape and live out of water.... Furthermore, some animals are stationary, and some move about.... Other creatures adhere at one time to an object and detach themselves from it at other times.... Again, many animals move by walking as well as by swimming.... Some are gregarious, some are solitary.... Again, of these social creatures some submit to a ruler, other are subject to no rule.... And again, both of gregarious and of solitary animals, some are attached to a fixed home and others are nomadic....
Crabs copulate at the front parts of one another, throwing their overlapping opercula to meet one another.... Insects copulate at the hinder end, and the smaller individuals mount the larger; and the smaller individual is the male. The female pushes from underneath her sexual organ into the body of the male above....
Partridges build a nest in two compartments; the male broods on the one and the female on the other. After hatching, each of the parent birds rears its brood. But the male, when he first takes his young out of the nest, treads them.[109]
In the pseudo-Aristotelian corpus, the fascination with heteroclite multiplicity overwhelms Aristotle's taxonomic method; scientific classification dissolves into rehearsing wonders. A randomly selected passage from On Marvellous Things Heard thus records:
68. They say that the frogs in Cyrene are altogether dumb, and that in Macedonia, in the country of the Emathiotae, the swine have solid hoofs.
69. They say that in Cappadocia there are fertile mules, and in Crete black poplars which yield fruit.
70. They say also that in Seriphos the frogs do not croak; but if they are transferred to another place they croak.
71. Among the Indians, in what is called the Horn, it is stated that there are little fishes, which wander about on the dry land, and run away again into the river.[110]
Wonder, as Bacon noted, is broken knowledge. The listing of curiosities constructs nature as an assemblage of alien and amoral oddities, unstructured by hierarchical order or the cosmological analogies in which "even
the least thing in the whole world ... serveth to minister rules, canons, and laws, for men."[111] Nature here is the principle of heterogeneity rather than plenitude.
This is also the method of Montaigne's "On Cannibals" and "Of Custom"; Montaigne simply transposes the rhetoric of Aristotelian biology to the human sciences, fashioning a litany of the variety and strangeness of things found in culture—a textual Wunderkammer .[112] The methodology in both cases is aggregative and paratactic, an encyclopedic "heaping" of unrelated exotic details. This pack-rat accumulation of curiosities and broken pieces of knowledge characterizes empirical and humanistic studies (in contrast to scholastic philosophy) through the sixteenth century. It is endemic to the topical organization recommended in Renaissance rhetorics; Erasmus, for example, proposes this as a model entry: "remarkable longevity, vigorous old age, old head on young shoulders, remarkable happiness, remarkable memory, sudden change of fortune, sudden death, self-inflicted death, horrible death, monstrous births, remarkable eloquence, remarkable wealth, famous men of humble birth, ... and so on."[113]
Late Renaissance exegesis treats its materials neither as timeless exempla nor isolated curiosities. The difference is evident in Drusius's little essay, written sometime before 1616, on the pre-Christian Hasidim ("Assideans" in the Authorized Version) mentioned in 1 and 2 Maccabees—a strange and unfamiliar item, if not as luridly foreign as cannibals. Rather than either marveling at or moralizing these mysterious Hasids,[114] the essay attempts to untangle their relation to the New Testament Pharisees and to the Essenes ("Hessaei" or "Hesseni") described by Philo and Josephus, in order to elucidate how the various sects and factions are genetically or politically interrelated. He locates the strange name within the ideological configurations of intertestamental Judaism (5:339–52).
Drusius treats the Hasids in terms of their placement within a cultural syntax —a system of written and unwritten laws that order items in relation to one another and regulate their interaction. This example, clearly similar to those already discussed, registers a new mode of managing diversity, in which law—or a sort of legal structuralism—replaces heteroclite order and typological pattern. Especially after the middle of the sixteenth century, the philological antiquarianism of earlier Renaissance exegesis modulates into a study of the codes governing social praxis. The commentaries increasingly read unfamiliar detail as participating in a system of rules organizing behavior and discourse in a particular society. To explain something is to discover the culturally specific customs or laws
implicit in its alien morphology. The odd details of the text become vestiges of a cultural logic, which in turn renders them intelligible.
In the second half of his essay, Drusius rejects the possibility that the Essenes are simply the Old Testament Nazerites under a different name. Instead, he hypothesizes that they originated in the second century B.C. when the Sadducee high priest Hyrcanus began a fierce persecution of the Pharisees, driving some of them into the woods and deserts where they formed separate communities, which then split off from those Pharisees who chose to temporize rather than flee (5:339–52). Like most late Renaissance exegetes, Drusius views the laws governing praxis as themselves historicized, thus giving cultural forms both a diachronic and synchronic extension. The organization of biblical society is not immutable, not fixed by Mosaic law. Instead, philological inquiry opens out onto the development and structures of late biblical Judaism; the strange bits of nomenclature with their perplexing variants—Hasids, Hessens, Chasids, Assidians, Hessaes—belong to an unfamiliar yet intelligible historical narrative.
As in Valla's Donation , the historical estrangement of the text itself endows the events it relates with the solidity and actuality of history. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch Hebraist Coccejus thus defends his rabbinic studies on the grounds that the Talmud supplies "confirmation of the account in the Gospels, where there is abundant mention of Jewish custom, law and traditions."[115] Cultural analysis manages its diverse and strange materials by granting them the plausibility of free-standing form and perspectival space. Yet, as has long been recognized, the mutual entailments of authenticity and estrangement generate the central problematic of Renaissance humanism. The "legal structuralism" of late Renaissance exegesis links this hermeneutic—this mode of handling diversity—to the legal crisis that dominates the respublica litterarum in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[116]
Law occupies the troubled center of the Renaissance episteme because the past traditionally bears the character of law; it is binding precedent. This understanding of history suffuses the ideological struggles of the Renaissance and consequently its scholarship. Antiquarian erudition is political knowledge and the narrative legitimation of power. The whole point of Coke's ancient constitution or Baronius's Annales depends on the legal, normative force of historical antecedents—the vetustissimus mos . But legal historiography, by treating law as a cultural code, operated precisely to remove its deontological authority; the past can be analyzed in terms of law, but it is not a law for us . Law thus presents the same ambiguity as
Grotius's veil: it is simultaneously a manifestation of divine reason and a cultural artifact.
Law is the characteristic discipline of the late Renaissance, in much the same way that logic is the characteristic discipline of the Middle Ages: it leaves its mark on other fields of inquiry. Law was of course a specialized field but it was also part of the erudite encyclios paideia ; Donald Kelley thus notes that during the Renaissance "the study of law, mainly civil law, provided a major source—perhaps the major source—of secular, higher education for European society as a whole."[117] A considerable number of Renaissance exegetes had legal training. Grotius and Selden were prominent jurists; Scaliger and Junius studied with Cujas; Beza, Drusius, Heinsius, and Calvin had brushes with the law—generally, then as now, under parental duress. By the late seventeenth century the undergraduate arts curriculum at Oxford frequently required Justinian's Institutes as part of the moral and political knowledge essential for "an accomplished gentleman."[118]
More important, the duplex sensus of law, its character as both a normative and empirical science, structures the production of knowledge. The characteristic fields of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scholarship locate themselves around this legal dialectic: Coke's ancient constitution, Hooker's laws of ecclesiastical polity, Hotman's study of feudal tenures, the research undertaken by the Society of Antiquaries, the emergent disciplines of international law and medieval customary law, the revival of Thomist and neo-Stoic theories of the jus naturale , and Daille's study of the Church Fathers. Even outside history and legal studies, one observes the same tendency to view precedent as simultaneously normative and alien. The tension in humanist poetic between the Classical subtext and its rewriting—between the mimetic imperative and the sensitivity to historical distance—is the literary manifestation of the historico-legal problematic that shapes Renaissance inquiry.[119] The Poetices libri septem of the elder Scaliger, with its unresolved mixture of antiquarian erudition and prescriptive legislation, is an utterly typical product. The Renaissance is also the early modern period; rebirth and rupture exist simultaneously.
As these examples indicate, the pursuit of cultural and textual law leads back to the ancient and medieval sources of Renaissance civilization. Contemporary rewritings of the Renaissance have emphasized the role of imperialism in the production of knowledge. However, colonialist discourse in this period lacks a "clear and exclusive Europe/exotic dichotomy"; it tends rather to assimilate the New World peoples to the traditional bricolage of the Wunderkammer or invariant categories of human nature.[120] While the museum, with its systematic organization of knowledge, may
have been, as Steven Mullaney suggests, the successor of the Wunderkammer 's heterogeneous exotica, one did not evolve from the other.[121] Most museums (until recently) housed the creations of dead, white, Indo-European males, not the Wunderkammer 's tribal artifacts. The systematic study of culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does not reflect on tribal peoples: it analyzes its own progenitors and founding texts. The other, the object of cultural investigation, is also one's ancestor.[122] Humanist scholarship, struggling to "blaze a path through pseudepigrapha and textual errors back to the early, incorrupt church" and Classical civilization, [123] is a search for one's real parents, a philological romance. But its own methodology, designed to retrieve the exemplary past from the ravages of time, unearthed alien cultures fixed in time. Yet although unfamiliar, the rediscovered visage remained the face (and law) of the father, remained the matrix of early modern identity. The estrangement of the past did not destroy the longing for it.
Erasmus's Ciceronianus , which insists on the essential rupture between Classical and Renaissance civilization, closes with the curious confession of Erasmus's love for Horace based on a "secret affinity of minds" that obliterates historical distance: "the very thing that delights the reader especially [is] to discover from the language [of the ancient authors] the feelings, the characteristics, the judgment, and the ability of the writer as well as if one had known him for years."[124] The sharp sense of separation from the past intensifies the pleasures of intimacy—like finding an old friend in a strange city.
The duplicity of the ancestral past during the Renaissance—its double status as mirror and other—constituted it as the site of ideological crisis and therefore also of knowledge. The Renaissance disciplines struggled with the ancestor who is at once normative and unfamiliar, exemplar and foreigner, origin and alien. The respublica litterarum was shaped by the tension between the exemplarity and alteriority of its own origins, not the post-Romantic tension between culture and nature—although maybe "tension" is the wrong word, since it implies an achieved polarization, whereas the distinctive characteristic of the Renaissance episteme lies in its imperfect differentiation of essentialist and historicist method, in the failure to polarize the deontological and empirical senses of law: Grotius's veil again.
We need to grasp this failure not as confusion but as enabling a specific form of knowledge, a form most fully realized at the intersection of legal, historical, and biblical studies—the point of maximal exemplarity and maximal estrangement ... the bloody sacrifice of Christ.