History of Christianity

by Emily Suzanne Clark

The Journal of Southern Religion (JSR) proudly introduces its first podcast. The JSR is the first scholarly journal devoted to the study of religion in the American South, and it is a fully peer-reviewed academic journal reflecting the best traditions of objective and critical scholarship. The JSR is published in its entirety online at jsr.fsu.edu, and we are currently working on revamping the site and will release the new site later this year. The new site will include a section for donations. We have been a free journal since our incarnation and would like to continue as such, and donations will help us do so and continue producing podcasts.

This inaugural podcast is a fantastic 20 minute conversation between JSR book review editor Art Remillard and historian/Religion in American History blogmeister Paul Harvey. The primary topic of conversation is Harvey’s new book Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South, including conversation regarding the book’s incarnation, Harvey’s other works, and the historiography of southern religion itself. Click here for the podcast, and check out our 2011 volume or any of our older volumes of JSR at the journal site. If you have any questions concerning the podcast or JSR more generally, feel free to contact JSR copy editor Emily Suzanne Clark at esc09@my.fsu.edu.

by Maria Doerfler

Perhaps it’s the time of year — the season wherein deadlines for new course proposals loom large in the mind of many educators — but I’m a sucker for new and creative ways of teaching students about … well, all manner of things, really, but religion and those aspects thereof that have some relevance to my field of late ancient Christianity in particular. As such, I was delighted to come across Times Union’s coverage of a new course offered in the University of Pennsylvania’s Religion Department.

The course offers students a shot at partial immersion into monastic practice. Taught by Justin T. McDaniel, an associate professor specializing in Buddhism and South East Asian studies, the course’s assignments are not papers or exams but students’ engaging in some of the classical practices of renunciation: segregation by gender, avoidance of caffeine and alcohol, abstention from the use of technology, from physical contact, from indulging in all manner of electronic communication, etc.

Such a course does not at first glance appear designed to become a crowd pleaser – in fact, one wonders how its proposal was first received by Penn’s Religion department! – but for me, as perhaps for many instructors of Early and Medieval Church History, its success comes as no surprise.

One of the most popular primary sources students in both Duke’s Department of Religion and Divinity School crack open tends to the Apophtegmata Patrum, the Lives of the Desert Fathers. Part of the appeal, of course, lies in students’ enjoyment of the short, pithy stories, each delivering a moral in under two pages, and as such a pleasant break from the dense arguments of Athanasius, Cyril & Co.

But the fascination goes deeper: The accounts of monastic lives are a spectacle. The Abbas and Ammas appear as many things in these stories – simpleminded sages, holy fools, ascetic superheroes, examples of extraordinary compassion and dangerous delusion – but most of all, as a student of mine observed recently, “they are so … different.” Renunciation is a foreign principle within much of contemporary society. This is true even for many of the young Protestants who flock to Divinity Schools, and who are as such amply acquainted with their own set of spiritual disciplines including, e.g., the modern-day vigil otherwise known as the “Jr. High Lock-In.”

Even as students and indeed Western readers of these and other ancient ascetic texts are attracted to the protagonists’ wisdom and discipline, so they are appalled, both by displays of blood and gore – the monk who digs out the corpse of his wife to remind himself that what stirs his passions is, in the last instance, nothing but rotting flesh –but also by what strikes many of them as the narcissism of monastic life. Where is the love of neighbor, many of my most seriously engaged students ask, when monks withdraw from family and society, sacrificing, as in some of the Egyptian narratives, their children literally as well as metaphorically, in order to battle demons and seek God in the stillness of the ever-present cell?

All these reactions come across loud and clear in the (concededly sparse and deployed for maximum journalistic effectiveness) quotations by students in Prof. McDaniels’s course. The benefit students derive from the course and motivations to persevere in light of the considerable complications it introduces into the lifestyle of 21^st-century young adults is, quite understandably, the enhanced capacity for self-discovery. When one of the students thus comments that the course “would give me a chance to really listen to myself and focus on my needs and feelings,” the understanding of renunciation as an essentially inner-focused set of practices, designed to uncover an authentic self – the path to which is an intrinsically worthwhile endeavor – is reminiscent of the egocentrism of world-renunciation that also strikes many readers of the Apophtegmata and other late ancient stories of ascetic achievement. The students in the Penn course, however, also attest to the other side of the coin, the ways in which renunciation seems to open its practitioners, both ancient and modern, to the other in empathy and compassion, as in the case of the nursing major who “hopes the class will help her become more observant and a better listener to her patients.” Despite the great gulf that separates 21^st century Ivy League students from the holy men and women of late antiquity, aspirations of being present to the inner voice so that one might be more present to the voices of those in need are perhaps a bond shared by both.

All that being said, the aim of Prof. McDaniel’s course is not, or not primarily, instructing students in the finer points of the history of Christian monasticism. Nevertheless, more than one friend of mine in the field of Patristics has declared himself tempted by such an “immersive” approach – and for a few moments I, too, felt inspired to convert my classroom into a temporary coenobium and encourage my students to listen to the recitation of Augustine’s Praeceptum And yet, upon further consideration, the approach, for all its strengths, does not seem optimally suited to the teaching of church history.

First and most practically, speaking as a late ancient historian whose work centers around the fourth and fifth centuries, “monasticism” is a category that covers far more ground than most contemporary students, even those familiar with traditions that acknowledge a monastic vocation for some of their adherents, realize. Ancient Christians renounced the world for the monastery for many reasons, and in many instances their aim was no doubt mundane rather than wholly spiritual: Augustine of Hippo, e.g., acknowledges candidly that many of the North African brothers joined up to alleviate their grave poverty, in the hopes of securing their next meal, however limited, and place to sleep, however modest. On the other end of the economic scale, material wealth could be translated into spiritual caché, lending its bearers a different kind of prominence, but nevertheless ensuring them privileges befitting their rank.

Moreover, renunciation in late antiquity did not by necessity involve the monastic community, but could be practiced anywhere from the homes of elite Roman widows to the wilds of Syria and North Africa, where itinerant monks begged for their livings from Christians of a less ascetic stripe. Local and regional differences furthermore lent a distinctive character to communities from Rabbula’s Edessa to Martin’s Tours. Individual monasteries, too, while proudly advertising the undifferentiated treatment enjoyed by all members, did not by this principle undo the habits of mind and body that late ancient Roman culture had cultivated. Jerome, for example, boasts that the Jerusalem women’s monastery administered by his friend Paula did not allow young noblewomen to keep with them the slave who had attended them from childhood, lest they fall back into worldly habits of mind or grieve for what they had left behind. By the same token, however, there was no prohibition of such women enjoying the services of a new maidservant.

The sheer complexity – merely hinted at here, but admirably expressed in, e.g., the works of Elizabeth A. Clark, David Hunter, and Susanna Elm, to name just a few – of ascetic motivation and expression in this, as in many other eras, limits the level of experiential access for contemporary students and readers. Practically speaking, few schools might endorse students experimenting with itinerancy, sleeping in the campus’s shrubbery and panhandling for burgers at the local cafeteria, as part of the curriculum. More pressingly, perhaps, even if such experiences could be re-created or appropriately “translated” into exercises meaningful for 21st century students, from the perspective of a church historian, the practices might do more to veil than to reveal their underlying late ancient or medieval realities. This, then, brings me to my second, and admittedly somewhat more ephemeral point: Simply put, part of historians’ task, if we are addressing ourselves to an audience other than our professional peers, is to acquaint others with past cultures without reducing those cultures to slightly faded carbon copies of our own. In other words, at one extreme of the pedagogical spectrum, the past remains not only (in the famous words of L.P. Hartley) a foreign country where people do things differently, but one hidden behind iron curtains, for which writers and instructors can issue no passports, and which students can never hope to approach – except, perhaps, by peering over the borders with a sense of bafflement that anyone might deem to live in such a way. On the other end of the spectrum, however, lies the danger of facile comprehensibility, the subsuming of another time or place or people by one’s own – the kind of intellectual imperialism that J.Z. Smith has so eloquently shown up in the study of “world religions.”

Sometimes the latter effect is the result of particularly good teaching, combined with an audience of particularly engaged students: I am reminded of a comment by a very bright young man who had recently completed a study of Plato’s Theatetus and observed that Socrates & Co. were engaged in much the same kind of effort as his own colleagues in the liberal arts. Well, yes – but also: no. Inasmuch as students are able to leave a course with a sense of “been there, done that” about any historical practice, whether trebuchet-building or ascetic renunciation, the course has, perhaps, crossed the line from making history grasp-able to making it liable to domestication.

That is not to say that courses like the one offered at Penn are not valuable dialogue partners for historians, and I know of more than one colleague for whom the article provided a provocative conversation starter for her students. Perhaps more importantly, students who have learned in the course of ascetic practice to attend to the voices of their peers, likely also have the facility of listening to voices from other eras – of becoming excellent readers of texts, in other words, as well as compassionate listeners. What more, really, can one ask of budding historians?

by Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin

How has Christianity shaped American culture?

This is one of the questions that we try to answer in our recent book, American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity. Featuring 22 essays written by a distinguished group of scholars, the book explores both the powerful influence of Christianity on American culture and the multiple forms of Christian expression in the United States. By focusing on the plurality of American “Christianities,” we hope to show that the diversity of American Christianities and the power of the Christian presence in American history are factors that need to be considered together. Even though American Christians have disagreed sharply over both theology and practice, there is hardly a feature of American life—including politics, foreign policy, literature, science, sexuality, gender, race, violence, pacifism, warfare, the media, and capitalism—that has not been influenced by some aspect of the Christian tradition.

At first blush, diversity of belief and collective social influence might not seem to go together. One might more readily suppose that a single, unified message would have greater social influence than a diverse, frequently contentious argument. But, a half-century ago, the American cultural historian R. W. B. Lewis explained how diversity and debate can powerfully shape a culture. Every culture, Lewis proposed, seems gradually “to produce its own determining debate over the ideas that preoccupy it: salvation, the order of nature, money, power, sex, the machine, and the like.”[i] From Lewis’s perspective, a culture achieved its characteristic form not so much through the ascendancy of one particular set of convictions as through debate about the meaning of these preoccupying ideas. American Christians have never been completely unified in their opinions, but their debates have revolved around a set of common issues that have never lost their potency: for example, the possibility of moral progress and the meaning of America’s claim to be a “city on a hill.”

Christians have infused American society with an extensive repertoire of stories, symbols, and ethical ideals that have been among the defining terms of American cultural debate. Over time, Americans have drawn selectively from this repertoire, combined its themes with economic and political values, and mobilized (or resisted) social reforms around the potency of its symbols. For centuries, for example, Americans have debated over whether the story of Eve’s sin in the Garden of Eden means that women should be subordinate to men, and they have debated just as fiercely about what it means to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Many contested issues and questions in American politics—including freedom of conscience, the limits of institutional authority, and the sanctity of human life—have drawn their energy from longstanding controversies within the Christian tradition.

Despite their disagreements, American Christians have created informal coalitions with one another that have deeply influenced the nation’s identity. In the nineteenth century, for example, Protestant denominations put aside their theological differences in order to support Sunday laws and Prohibition, and more recently, Mormons, Catholics, and evangelical Protestants have been willing to overlook longstanding antipathies in order to join forces against abortion and same-sex marriage. Even if Christians have been too occupied with their own internal debates to recognize it, they have always occupied a privileged place in the nation, and they have often used their collective power to create or to resist change.

Dominance and diversity—these are not words that are usually associated, but in the case of American Christianity they belong together. A Christian accent frequently inflects American political debate, advocacy for social reform, and proposals for the renewal of public education, even when that accent is unrecognized or unacknowledged. As a result, the sizeable diversity of Christianity in America is not neatly contained under the steeples of its churches or the governing bodies of its denominations but has, in addition, extended out into other sectors of society. If Americans do not always recognize the Christian influence on their culture, it is because its omnipresence has made it virtually invisible.

This essay is adapted from the Introduction to American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), ed. Catherine A. Brekus and W. Clark Gilpin.

by Christopher D. Cantwell, Newberry Library

John Henry Barrows, Meeting of the World's Parliament of Religions, 1893 World's Fair. (1893).

The history of Christianity in America has always been one of a faith in relation. From the moment that Christopher Columbus first gazed in wonderment at the Arawak Indians who swam miles out to sea to meet his fleet—a fleet staffed with both Catholic and Jewish seafarers—American Christianity has been shaped by its encounters with other religious traditions. Imperial agendas entailing the economic, territorial, and spiritual conquest of religious others propelled the New World’s colonization; throughout the nineteenth century, the religious cacophony of the new nation’s burgeoning cities drove the social development and built environment of increasingly urban churchgoers; and the decidedly interfaith crucible of consumer capitalism forged the more recent adaptations of Christian communities to mass media and popular culture. Indeed, the history of American Christianity is in many ways a history of its intimate connections to a wide spectrum of religious traditions and communities.

Despite its enduring influence, however, Christianity’s historical interdependence with America’s religious diversity has only recently received robust scholarly attention. Though a trailblazer in developing the field of American religious history, our own Society, as its name suggests, emerged from a historiography that privileged the theological development and institutional dynamics of the nation’s denominations. Even the more recent scholarly interest in devotional practice over ecclesiastical thought has tended to emphasize the internal specificities of a particular community’s lived religion over the points of religious contact those practices produce. But over the last few years, scholars are increasingly becoming attuned to the ways in which the history of American Christianity is braided with the histories of many religious traditions. Tisa Wenger’s fine study of the Pueblo Dance controversy, in which multiple religious, communities collided to define the contours of American religious history, immediately comes to mind. And as W. Clark Gilpin has already noted on the blog, the history of American Christianities—with an emphasis on the plural—compels us to consider multiple perspectives, methods, themes, and traditions in our teaching and research.

It is in this spirit of integrating the history of America’s religious diversity into the teaching and research of American Christianity that the Dr. William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture at the Newberry Library in Chicago is pleased to announce “Out of Many: Religious Pluralism in America.” An NEH Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges Program, “Out of Many” will bring teams of community college faculty to the Newberry to participate in seminars with scholars in the field, and conduct research in the library’s collections to design new curriculum that integrates the study of religious pluralism into humanities classrooms. At the project’s conclusion, the Newberry will launch a website that will bring together multiple resources, including digitized material from the library’s collections, on teaching religious pluralism in American history.

The program is limited to community college faculty, as a cohort of scholars who often have interest in the study of religion but not the opportunity to teach it. The Newberry is currently accepting applications from teams of 2-4 faculty members from the same community college campus or system, and applications are due March 23. For more information, including participating scholars and application procedures, please see the project’s landing page. I hope this program will be of interest to many Church History members.

by Euan Cameron

We are all familiar with the expression “be careful what you wish for”. The phrase has become a staple of journalistic headlines and even rap lyrics. When we aim for what we think is a clearly defined goal, dramatic unexpected consequences may follow.

This essay suggests that the quest for ever more precise religious scholarship ended up by causing a crisis of uncertainty – entirely against the expectations and the wishes of those who began that quest. In the Reformation, scholar-theologians laid massive expectations on the text of Scripture to direct, authenticate and justify their conclusions. They believed that Scripture, by the action of the Holy Spirit, authenticated itself, independent of any institution. That implied, however, that the text of Scripture had to be established with the greatest possible exactitude. Consequently, reformers relied upon ‘sacred philology’ to purify and clarify the text.

Renaissance humanists had already begun to apply techniques of textual editing to the Bible. The first step was to restore access to the Scriptures in the original languages, and in the ancient paraphrases (the Targums and others) conserved in the Semitic languages of the Near East. The great Polyglot Bible of Alcalà, completed around 1520, was only the first of four scholarly polyglot editions of Scripture: those of Antwerp, Paris and London appeared between c.1570 and c.1658.

These ruinously expensive scholarly tours de force allowed a few very, very learned readers to compare the insights of translators and redactors of Old and New Testament from past centuries. They included not just Hebrew and Greek editions but Aramaic paraphrases, variant Latin translations, and versions of the sacred texts in Arabic, Persian and Samaritan Hebrew.

Yet this scholarly enterprise could not quite hide the fact that the manuscripts used, which purported to contain the “original” texts of Scripture, were far from perfect. The Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts dated from late in the first millennium CE: no earlier copies were known until the 20^th century. More perplexing still was the Greek New Testament. The convenient study edition in the early 16^th century was not the Alcalà Polyglot, but the much more readily available Greek and Latin of Erasmus, first issued in 1516 and revised several times thereafter.

Erasmus had limited Greek texts at his disposal – at first he had no absolutely complete manuscript of the New Testament. Those which he had were medieval Byzantine copies. Yet Erasmus’s New Testament, after multiple revisions, underlay Protestant Greek Bibles of the early modern period. The scholar-publisher Robert Estienne revised it several times in the 1550s in Paris and Geneva (coincidentally introducing verse numbering into the New Testament for the first time in 1551). Théodore de Bèze, Calvin’s disciple and successor at Geneva, performed further editorial work. By the 1630s this composite edition became known as the ‘received text’ or textus receptus of the Christian New Testament. It acquired (and still holds in some circles) a quasi-canonical status despite being inconsistent with many early authorities.

By the 19^th century, many scholars acknowledged that tinkering with this ‘received text’ was pointless: a complete new edition would be needed, based on the earliest surviving manuscripts and on quotations in Patristic authorities. Karl Lachmann argued in 1831 that the textus receptus should be ‘received’ by no-one. As Constantin von Tischendorff wrote in the tract published as When Were Our Gospels Written? (1866) “we have at last hit upon a better plan … which is to set aside this textus receptus altogether, and to construct a fresh text, derived immediately from the most ancient and authoritative sources. In this way only can we secure a textapproximating as closely as possible to that which came from the Apostles.”

The work of Tischendorff, Westcott and Hort, Nestle and Aland, and many others would yield us the Greek New Testament in the version used today. However, in the meantime scholars had adjusted to the insurmountable difficulties of establishing a single, canonical, “perfect” text of Scripture. Editing Scripture came to mean collecting, sorting, and classifying divergent readings. In 1707 John Mill published an edition of the New Testament containing some 30,000 variants. Mill also urged that the “harder” reading, the one which seemed problematic or even at times absurd, was more likely to be ancient than the smoother and more comfortable one. The sacred text should be sought in an inherently perplexing and difficult form. The scholar should identify the densest critical thickets of difficulty, and try to pick through to the most ancient readings.

Given that Protestantism had laid such emphasis on the authority of self-interpreting and self-authenticating scripture, this was not good news. Biblical scholars, who were supposedly intended to restore and preserve the text of Scripture for the theologians to work on, seemed instead to be telling people how difficult it was to be sure what the sacred text actually said! A series of scandalous books in the 17^th century made the situation more troubling. Louis Cappel (1585-1658) Professor of Hebrew in the French reformed academy at Saumur, echoed the theories of the Jewish philologist Elias Levita (1469-1549). He reasoned that the vowel points in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scripture were not authentic but very late, around a thousand years later than the archaic text to which they had been added. Losing the vowel points meant that much reading of Hebrew Scripture became a matter of interpretation rather than certainty.

In the later 17^th century two other authors, neither a Protestant, added fuel to the fires. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) argued that, on the internal evidence of the Hebrew Bible itself, it must represent a post-exilic compilation of mostly anonymous or pseudonymous authorities. The French Oratorian Priest Richard Simon (1638-1712) refuted Protestant claims about the sole authority of Scripture, by pointing out that the text had undergone innumerable redactions and transformations. One must either believe that all editorial interventions since Scripture was written were also divinely inspired; or, one must credit the Catholic Church with supernatural authority in conserving and interpreting it.

Frontispiece to Mill's New Testament, 1707

This accumulation of scholarly questions affected the work of dogmatic theologians. Scripture could no longer confer the absolute certainty that the confessional debates of the age demanded. One might question, in truth, whether the minutely detailed dogmatic questions that occupied the energies of the framers of the Lutheran Formula of Concord, or the delegates to the Synod of Dort or the Westminster Assembly of Divines, could ever have been answered conclusively from any scriptural text – despite the entrenched habit of voluminous proof-texting which typically accompanied these enterprises and their Catholic rivals. In response to the skeptics about Scripture and the hesitations of the textual critics, some 17^th-century dogmatic Protestant theologians formulated and laid greater stress on the dogma of ‘scriptural inerrancy’.

In the Formula of Consensus of the Swiss Churches of 1675, the first articles proclaimed that Hebrew Scripture as preserved in the traditional text was infallibly accurate and reliable, and explicitly refuted those who had tried to bring it into doubt by comparison with other antique Semitic-language editions. Over time this approach became formalized as the doctrine that Scripture, correctly conserved and faithfully interpreted, was literally inerrant in all its parts. The principle survives in some conservative Protestant movements – though inerrancy is sometimes attributed to the hypothetical “autograph” text rather than any one of the surviving variants. (Whether it would be attributed to the lost letters of Paul, alluded to but not conserved in the canon, is an interesting question.)

Stepping back a little, a fascinating and unexpected outcome emerges from this whole process. A firewall was put in place between the biblical scholar and the systematic theologian. In the time of the early reformers, it would hardly have occurred to anyone that these two academic practices could be distinguished, let alone opposed to one another. The same theologians who wrote the summae of Reformation theology were also commentators and exegetes.Yet by the end of the 17^th century if not before, the foundations had been laid of our present academic specializations.

Biblical scholars focused on the immense technical difficulties of reconstructing the text. They tried to interpret it in the light of the historical and cultural settings in which it was written. Systematic theologians organized doctrines schematically according to the heads of doctrine. They undertook this task with some dependence on the catechisms and confessions of faith of their churches. The impulses of the biblical scholar and the theologian might overlap, for instance in the writing of pastoral commentaries: but their instincts had diverged – and continue to do so. The problems experienced in keeping our theological curriculum coherent for pastoral and ministerial needs lie deeply rooted in the legacy of the early modern period.

A related process separated the church historians from the biblical scholars. At the end of the Middle Ages and in the early Reformation, it was assumed that the chronology of the world recorded in the Hebrew Bible offered an accurate and trustworthy account of events, including the ages of the patriarchs. It was also assumed that history recorded in the Scriptures was older than that of classical Greek and Roman antiquity. The two narratives could, however, be integrated into one story – and needed to be, since classical historians filled in the gaps between the two Testaments. Biblical world history had a theological message. All monarchies, governments and peoples, whether of believers or unbelievers, were governed by the providential and judgmental reign of God. God raised up and deposed monarchies (especially the great ‘world monarchies’ which supposedly dominated the Mediterranean world in antiquity) and God’s judgment could be seen in their rise and fall.

From Lorenz Faust's _Anatomia Statuae Danielis_, 1585, depicting the giant statue from Nebuchanezzar's vision in Daniel 2.

Those were the big theological questions. Some writers linked biblical history to apocalyptic predictions. By reading the signs in scripture, one could discern how phases in the history of the world were leading towards the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment. The craft of biblical ‘chronology’, more technical and less profound, fused with this theological history. No-one before 1600 saw anything absurd in totting up the ages of the patriarchs, prophets and kings of Hebrew antiquity, to work out how old the world was at the time of its great events – especially those of salvation history. One could also calculate how many years had passed since creation to the then present day.

Biblical chronology or ‘supputation’ attracted some of the best theological minds of the era. The Hebrew Scriptures used for the Vulgate gave different dates for the ages of the patriarchs than those found in the Septuagint Greek translation (and therefore in Eusebius). Most medieval and early modern ‘supputators’ favoured the Hebrew numbering. Protestant computers of the age of the world such as Martin Luther and Heinrich Bullinger came up with a figure around 3970-3975 for the age of the world at the time of the birth of Christ. They then integrated the chronology of the ancient world with the prophecies of the Book of Daniel. These prophecies, specifically chapter 9:24-27, appeared to foretell the coming of the Messiah at the precise time (490 years after the alleged writing of the Book of Daniel) when Jesus entered on the final days of his earthly ministry. Thus they “proved” the relevance and reliability of Hebrew Scripture as a key to Christian revelation.

Scholars of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century did not know when to stop. They tried to accommodate, integrate and reconcile all the calendars of the antique civilizations then known. The fruits appeared in the fantastically elaborate, linguistically and culturally exotic work of Joseph Justus Scaliger, On the Emendation of Times (1583). After pages of intricate computation and argument, Scaliger estimated the date of Jesus’s nativity according to five different calendars, concluding that it took place in year 3948 since creation. After acid remarks about his rivals, Scaliger received a multi-volume rebuttal from the enormously learned French Jesuit Denis Petau (1583-1652) in the 1620s – 1630s.

By the mid-17^th century serious observers wondered whether one could ever achieve an accurate chronology of world history. If such prodigious erudition could not bring certainty, nothing could. Scholarship actually made the problem worse. In 1616 Pietro della Valle brought to Europe the first text of the Samaritan Pentateuch. This text, written in a form of Hebrew and therefore not to be dismissed as a translation, offered biblical chronologies which matched neither the Hebrew nor the Greek versions (they were shorter than both).

When the best efforts of textual and historical critics failed so spectacularly, it became conceivable, if not yet acceptable, to suppose that the Scriptures were never intended as precise guides to religious doctrine or historical understanding. The eccentric French Huguenot Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676) achieved a succès de scandale in 1655 by claiming that Adam was not the first human being, only the first ancient Hebrew. Most scholars did not take him seriously at the time; but his notions fed more skeptical thinkers in the following century.

In the Protestant world, Christian belief and inquiry survived the disintegration of early modern certainties. Romantic theologians like Schleiermacher welcomed and embraced the detaching of the religious vision from claims about scientific realities. However, the disintegration of Christian learning into a range of distinct and sometimes competing truth-claims, nurtured in often separate intellectual guilds, made the life of the churches more difficult (as well, perhaps, as more authentic and realistic).

As historians we should inquire how this disintegration took place, since it regulates how we think and work today. The Reformation played a critical role, but not the role sometimes assigned to it. The Reformers did not believe in the breakdown of authority or the primacy of individual judgment. They assigned supreme authority to inspired Scripture: but they then laid an unbearable burden on critical study of the Scriptures. They championed scholarly techniques, which were fated to undermine rather than support such authority. The Reformation sponsored infinitely precise investigation into the sources of faith. Rather than establishing one secure ground for truth, such inquiry showed that the hoped-for certainty in doctrine and history could never be attained. Divine truth must always be discerned, if ever, through the messy and incoherent business of human affairs and human texts.

Scholarship had played a crucial part in this discovery. It had done so in spite of itself, and in this learning process its failures proved far more important than its successes. Be careful what you wish for.

by Patricia Appelbaum

I don’t know if any of you reads the hype that appears periodically about speech-recognition software, but please, don’t believe it. A few years ago I lost the ability to keyboard, and now I am stuck with Dragon NaturallySpeaking if I want to write. Permit me, if you will, a little rant — good-natured but frustrated. (First an explanation. Technically, I can keyboard, but if I do, I’ll be in for 24 hours of pain, and probably further injury as well. The problem seems to be tendon damage and chronic inflammation subsequent to a repetitive-stress injury. It’s not a made-up condition. Honest.)

There are a number of problems with the program. I’ve never gotten anywhere near the 99% accuracy that Dragon claims. It is slow – a pause of a couple of seconds before it responds to a command. So if I want to, say, scroll down a few pages, I have to say “page down” (pause), “page down” pause, “page down” …… Or if I’m moving between documents: “Next document” (pause ….. ). But worst of all, it is a nightmare for proper names and bibliography.

I was citing, for example, a mid-20th-century church historian called Ray Petry. When I pronounced the name, the program gave me “Petri.” I gave the command, “Correct that.” (Pause.) It showed me a correction list with “petri,” like the lab dish, and “Petrie,” like the old Dick Van Dyke Show, but no Petry. So I said, “Spell that.” (Pause.) When I dictated the spelling, I got “Peetry,” “Petery,” and other entertaining variations.

Finally the program and I were able to come to an agreement on spelling. At this point it was supposed to have “learned” that that particular pronunciaiton should generate the word “Petry.” But next time I used it, guess what happened? Multiply this by Geoffrey Gneuhs, Jaroslav Pelikan, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, and you’ll get an idea of what my day is like.

Also, the program doesn’t understand very well how the English language works. For words ending in -s, it apparently decides between possessive and plural on the basis of some statistical algorithm of frequency of occurrence, not on the basis of grammar or word order. And its algorithm seems to prefer the possessive, or should I say, the misplaced apostrophe. Which I then have to go back and correct. (Pause.) This is to say nothing of dialect. I spent fifteen minutes yesterday trying to teach it to distinguish “Ann” from “and” — they are quite different in my mid-Atlantic pronunciation. I’ve been through this before with “Annie” and “any.” (“Dear any,” it writes.)

Please don’t write in with helpful comments about what I’m doing wrong. I’ve followed all the instructions and have done as many upgrades as I can afford. This may be a good program for doctors or businesspeople, or for people who can make corrections by hand. But it is not good for academic writers with bad tendons.

And by the way — take good care of your hands.