BIBLIA AMERICANA America’S First Bible Commentary
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Cotton Mather BIBLIA AMERICANA America’s First Bible Commentary A Synoptic Commentary on the Old and New Testaments Volume 1 GENESIS Edited, with an Introduction and Annotations, by Reiner Smolinski Mohr Siebeck Baker Academic Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2010. Used by permission. Table of Contents Acknowledgments . IX List of Illustrations . XVII List of Abbreviations . XIX Par t 1: Edit or ’s Intr oduction Section 1: “Biblia Americana”: America’s First Bible Commentary 3 Section 2: “Biblia Americana” in the Context of Early Enlightenment Science . 77 Section 3: Cotton Mather: Theologian,Exegete, Controversialist 113 Works Cited in Sections 1–3 . 175 Section 4: Note on the Text and Editorial Principles . 191 Par t 2: The Text The OLD TESTAMENT, in the Order of the History . 213 The NEW TESTAMENT, in the true Order of the History . 242 The Introduction . 269 The ldO Testament . 277 Genesis. Chap. 1. 302 Genesis. Chap. 1. 307 Genesis. Chap. 2. 420 Genesis. Chap. 3. 477 Genesis. Chap. 4. 510 Genesis. Chap. 5. 533 Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2010. Used by permission. XIV Table of Contents Genesis. Chap. 6. 579 Genesis. Chap. 7. 625 Genesis. Chap. 8. 641 Genesis. Chap. 9. 667 Genesis. Chap. 10. 693 Genesis. Chap. 11. 805 Genesis. Chap. 12. 838 Genesis. Chap. 13. 884 Genesis. Chap. 14. 886 Genesis. Chap. 15. 909 Genesis. Chap. 16. 919 Genesis. Chap. 17. 922 Genesis. Chap. 18. 943 Genesis. Chap. 19. 952 Genesis. Chap. 20. 961 Genesis. Chap. 21. 965 Genesis. Chap. 22. 992 Genesis. Chap. 23. 998 Genesis. Chap. 24. 1001 Genesis. Chap. 25. 1004 Genesis. Chap. 26. 1010 Genesis. Chap. 27. 1011 Genesis. Chap. 28. 1016 Genesis. Chap. 29. 1024 Genesis. Chap. 30. 1028 Genesis. Chap. 31. 1040 Genesis. Chap. 32. 1049 Genesis. Chap. 33. 1055 Genesis. Chap. 34. 1057 Genesis. Chap. 35. 1058 Genesis. Chap. 36. 1072 Genesis. Chap. 37. 1075 Genesis. Chap. 38. 1080 Genesis. Chap. 39. 1085 Genesis. Chap. 40. 1087 Genesis. Chap. 41. 1089 Genesis. Chap. 42. 1093 Genesis. Chap. 43. 1097 Genesis. Chap. 44. 1099 Genesis. Chap. 45. 1103 Genesis. Chap. 46. 1106 Genesis. Chap. 47. 1110 Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2010. Used by permission. Table of Contents XV Genesis. Chap. 48. 1115 Genesis. Chap. 49. 1118 Genesis. Chap. 50. 1148 Appendix A: Cancellations . 1157 Appendix B: Silent Deletions . 1163 Bibliography . 1165 Primary Works . 1165 Secondary Works . 1236 Index of Biblical Passages . 1247 General Index . 1285 Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2010. Used by permission. Section 3 Cotton Mather: Theologian, xegete,E Controversialist During the early modern era, the cosmological and philosophical revolu- tions precipitated by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza not only challenged the traditional biblical cosmology, but also called into question the integrity of the scriptural texts and the harmony of the two testaments. Of course, for the majority of ordinary believers, the Good Book remained the Word of God. In the Protestant camp, the scientific revolution caused many academic theologians to reappraise the Bible in terms of a new hyper-literalism, as a quasi-scientific source of knowledge and storehouse of literal facts that could be held to the new standards of empiricism. The more radical minds of the period, however, began to push for a separation of science and religion as two distinct fieldsof human inquiry, because the Bible seemed to address moral, not mathematical truths. For them, Galileo’s famous observation that the Bible taught believers about divine redemption, not about the laws of physics, rang all too true. This dramatic qualification of the Bible’s mandate, however, could not but impact other claims that were equally invested in the authenticity of the Bible, in textual transmission, and verbal inspiration. To those who believed that every word in the Holy Scriptures was divinely dictated, the very idea of research into such matters was shocking. If the seal of God’s imprimatur were broken, how was Truth to be certified? If the Word turned out to be more human than divine, what was to become of faith in a transcendent God? The rise of biblical criticism in the seventeenth century thus contributed to eroding the authority of the Bible. In turn, the subversion of divine authority went hand in hand with the elevation of human reason, with confidence in man’s judgment, and with his emancipation from dependence on tradition. Biblical criticism therefore lies at the root of what is called the En- lightenment and the evolution of modernity in Western culture. It is still widely believed that modern biblical criticism was an invention of radical German theologians of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Johann David Michaelis (1717–91),Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91), Johann Gottfried Eich- horn (1752–1827), Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860), David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), and Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918)are generally cited as the main representatives of German “Higher Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2010. Used by permission. 114 Editor’s Introduction Criticism” which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, would seep into English and American seminaries and lead to the great division between theological liberalism and a programmatically anti-modernist literalism. While German Higher Criticism certainly took the philosophical and historical analy- sis of the Bible to a whole new level of sophistication and radicalism, the origins of this method lie in seventeenth-century England, France, and the Nether- lands – long before the German rationalists began to dominate the discipline.1 When James I acceded to the throne of England in 1603, no one seriously doubted (or dared to question) the authority of the Bible as the Word of God, the divine inspiration of its prophets, their supernatural visions, dreams, and voices. When the last of the reigning Stuarts was laid to rest in 1714, the Good Book, in the eyes of a growing number of fair-minded scholars, had irrevoca- bly lost its epistemological infallibility. Textual variants, lacunae, repetitions, interpolations, and anachronisms signified to the foremost scholars of the age that textual origin and transmission was anything but certain or trustworthy, that the Bible’s verbatim inspiration and divine dictation were simply pious myth, that revelation’s exclusive object was obedience to God, not disclosure of rational knowledge about nature. The Mosaic Hexameron, once believed to be a scientifically unassailable account of what had happened a mere six thousand years ago, by the beginning of the eighteenth century seemed little more than an abridged allegory adapted to the needs of an ignorant audience best managed by tales of wonder and miracles that aimed at enforcing law and order on a fractious people. If at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Moses was still held to be the author of the Pentateuch, by century’s end, the Mosaic authorship could no longer be maintained without serious qualification. Thefollowers of Spinoza now argued that the Hebrew lawgiver wrote little more than the tables of the law and ordinances; remainder of the Pentateuch was of considerably later origin.2 The credibility of the New Testament faired hardly better. At the beginning of James I’s reign, theologians were still convinced that the Holy Spirit had dictated every word of the New Testament to the Apostles and Evangelists. By the time Queen Anne was laid to rest, radical Deists claimed that the New Testament texts had been manipulated by competing sects and that the canon was the result of factional strife, which by the time of the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) had barred from canonization more books than it actually retained.3 1 See especially K. Scholder’s Birth of Modern Critical Theology (17–85), H. Frei’s TheEclipse of Biblical Narrative (17–154), H. G. Reventlow’s Authority of the Bible (194–334), G. Reedy, S. J., The Bible and Reason (1985), R. E. Brown’s Jonathan Edwards and the Bible (esp. chs. 2, 4–5), J. Sheehan’s The Enlightenment Bible (27–117),and D. Sorkin’s Religious Enlightenment (1–22). 2 The scribe Ezra (5th-c. BCE) either rewrote the lost books from memory after the Baby- lonian captivity (2 Esdras 14:21–22) or compiled and adapted the surviving fragments to be edited and updated by later generations of public writers. 3 Among the principal seventeenth-century skeptics are the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, (Leviathan [London, 1651], part III, chs. 33, 37); the French critic Isaac La Peyrère Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, © 2010. Used by permission. Section 3: Cotton Mather: Theologian, xegete,E Controversialist 115 It is safe to say that the hermeneutical revolution in the wake of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), of Isaac La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae (1655), and especially of Benedict Spinoza’s Tractatus Philosophico-Politicus (1670) seriously ruptured the Bible’s hitherto impregnable status as the Divine Oracle of God.4 Theologians on both sides of the English Channel lashed out in pious rage at these latest manifestations of atheism; yet try as they might, no individual or concerted effort could impede the subversive critique of the scriptures once the followers of Hobbes, of La Peyrère, and of Spinoza had begun to infiltrate the marketplace of ideas. Terms of derision became the favorite smear by which orthodox clergymen tried to rein in their colleagues who followed Hob- bes, Spinoza, and Deism.