Christian Theology Were Advanced by the French Millenarian, Isaac La Peyrère, in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century

CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Some of the most revolutionary ideas in biblical criticism and in Judeo- Christian theology were advanced by the French Millenarian, Isaac La Peyrère, in the middle of the seventeenth century. His questioning of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, of the authenticity of the present text of Scripture, and of the accuracy of Scripture with regard to its ac count of the history of mankind had tremendous effects on his contem poraries as well as thinkers of later times. He was regarded as perhaps the greatest heretic of the age, even worse than Spinoza, who took over some of his most challenging ideas. He was refuted over and over again by leading Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant theologians. Nonetheless some of his ideas gradually became a basic part of biblical scholarship, greatly influenced the development of anthropology, and affected Millenarian political history. However, the man who could contend that the Bible was not ac curate, that there were men before Adam, and that the Bible was only the account of Jewish history; who could shock the philosophical- theological world of his time, is hardly known today. He is remembered, if at all, as a footnote to the biblical criticism of Spinoza, Richard Simon and Jean Astruc, and as a footnote in the history of anthropology. He has been reduced to a small paragraph in encyclopedias which present him as the formulator of the pre-Adamite theory. Only in the last few years has there been a revival of interest in La Peyrère and his revolu tionary ideas. In the present volume I shall present an intellectual biography of the man, and place him in the history of the religious ideas of his predecessors, and trace his influence from the mid seventeenth century onward. In so doing I hope it will become clearer how certain aspects of the secular world view emerged from various Renaissance and Reforma tion speculations. Some of the challenges to the biblical world view of fered by La Peyrère, whether so intended or not, set the stage for understanding the world without reference to the supernatural. When La Peyrère expounded his views on the Bible and its real message, he based his interpretation on a series of radical challenges to the religious traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. First, La Peyrère denied that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch. Others, such as Rabbi Ibn Ezra in the Middle Ages, had raised the point that 2 CHAPTER ONE Moses could not have been the author of all of the Pentateuch (since part of it describes what happened after the death of Moses). La Peyrère's friend and contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, asserted that Moses wrote only those portions of the text directly attributed to him. La Peyrère went much further both in denying that Moses was the author of the work, or (and this may have been more seditious) that the scriptural text we now possess is completely accurate. La Peyrère pressed the data about in consistencies and variants among the multitude of biblical manuscripts in order to question whether there was then any copy of the book which we could really rely on for the exact statement of the Divine Message. This questioning of the authorship and the accuracy of the biblical texts subsequently opened the door to the development of modern biblical criticism. La Peyrère's friend and younger contemporary, Richard Simon, carried out a systematic examination of the Bible. Shortly after La Peyrère died, Simon published his results which have since served as the basis for the so-called 'Higher Criticism' of Scripture. What was considered La Peyrère's greatest heresy in his day, and throughout the next two centuries, was the startling thesis that there were men (and women) before Adam. La Peyrère offered internal evidence from the Bible, evidence from classical antiquity, and, more important for his time, from the Voyages of Discovery. Out of these three types of data, La Peyrère presented what he thought was a compelling case for a poly genetic account of human origins and development. Such data also pointed to an indefinite or infinite duration of the world. It also suggested that there were multiple sources of human beings and that many of these peoples had commenced their existence prior to the arrival of Adam. If that were the case, then the account of human history given in Genesis could only be a partial one. It does not tell us about the pre-Adamites, the people before Adam, but only about that part of mankind that descended from Adam and Eve and from the survivors of Noah's Flood. Noah's Flood, La Peyrère claimed, was only a local event in Palestine, and did not affect people in the rest of the world. The group which was inundated was the Jews. Hence, biblical history is not world history, but Jewish history. This idea plus the pre-Adamite theory seemed to La Peyrère's contemporaries to be the heretical core of his main book, arousing the most immediate criticism. And, in spite of the fact that pre- Adamism was to be attacked for a long time thereafter, La Peyrère's ver sion soon began to have some major consequences in the budding field of anthropology. It was quickly to be transformed into a justification for the racist exploitation of Africans and American Indians, among others. (There seems, unfortunately, to be a lingering trace of this element in some current racist theories.) .

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