Biblical Criticism In Early Modern Europe

This book explores the explosive social and political implications of Erasmus' philological work on the Greek New Testament.

This book explores the explosive social and political implications of Erasmus' philological work on the Greek New Testament. When Erasmus (1516) failed to find Greek manuscript evidence for the 'Johannine comma', long considered the clearest biblical evidence for the Trinity, he unwittingly opened a vicious debate over the nature of the bible, its relationship with doctrine, and the role of the state in regulating private belief.

This book explores the impact of biblical reading practices on scientific thought in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. It addresses the idea that the natural philosophers of the era forged their new sciences despite, rather than because of, the pervasive bible-centeredness of early modern thought.

This volume is the first to adopt systematically a comparative approach to the role of ancient texts and traditions in early modern scholarship, science, medicine, and theology. It offers a new method for understanding early modern knowledge.

This essay collection aims to bring together new comparative research studies on the place of the Bible in early modern Europe. It focuses on lay readings of the Bible, showing their central contribution to modernity, and interrogates established historical paradigms.

A study on the scientific dimension of Jewish intellectual history in the early modern world

The Dark Bible explores early modern England's interactions with difficult aspects of the Bible. For the early modern reader, although the Bible was understood to be perfect, sufficient, and transcendent (indeed, the Protestant Reformation required it), it was not always experienced as such.While traditional interpretive precepts, such as the claim that all dark passages could be read in the light of clear ones, were frequently recited by early modern commentators, their actual encounters with the darkness of the Bible suggest that writers, commentators, and translators were oftendeeply uncomfortable with the disjunction between what the Bible should be, and what it actually was.The Dark Bible investigates writers' and translators' attempts to explain, accommodate, circumvent, and repair problematic texts across a range of genres and contexts. It charts early modern English use of biblical scholarship in vernacular culture and investigates how vernacular writing in variousgenres could give voice to questioning and confused biblical interactions. The Dark Bible demonstrates that early modern writers and critics engaged extensively with the Bible's difficulties, attempting to circumvent and repair problematic texts, and otherwise reconcile the darkness of the Biblewith theories of the Bible's perfection and clarity.