SCRIPTURE AND SCHOLARSHIP IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND To my grand parents, Sarah & Leonard Hessayon and in memory of Manfred & Karla Selby Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England Edited by ARIEL HESSAYON Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK NICHOLAS KEENE Royal Holloway, University of London, UK © Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Gower House Suite 420 Croft Road 101 Cherry Street Aldershot Burlington, VT 05401-4405 Hampshire GU11 3HR USA England Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Scripture and scholarship in early modern england 1. Bible – Criticism, interpretation, etc. – England – History – 17th century 2. Biblical scholars – England – History – 17th century 3. England – Intellectual life – 17th century 4. England – Religion – 17th century I. Hessayon, Ariel II. Keene, Nicholas 220.6'7'0942'09032 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scripture and scholarship in early modern England / edited by Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene. p. cm. ISBN 0-7546-3893-6 (alk. paper) 1. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc.—History. 2. England—Church history. I. Hessayon, Ariel. II. Keene, Nicholas. BS500.S37 2006 220'.0942—dc22 2005021015 ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-3893-3 ISBN-10: 0-7546-3893-6 Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall. Contents Notes on Contributors viii Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene 1 Og King of Bashan, Enoch and the Books of Enoch: Extra- Canonical Texts and Interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4 5 Ariel Hessayon 2 The Genesis Narrative in the Circle of Robert Hooke and Francis Lodwick 41 William Poole 3 Moral Tales at the Hearth: Jephthah’s Daughter in the Seventeenth Century 58 Nicholas Cranfield 4 English Scholarship and the Greek Text of the Old Testament, 1620–1720: The Impact of Codex Alexandrinus 74 Scott Mandelbrote 5 ‘A Two-Edged Sword’: Biblical Criticism and the New Testament Canon in Early Modern England 94 Nicholas Keene 6 ‘To us there is but one God, the Father’: Antitrinitarian Textual Criticism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England 116 Stephen D. Snobelen 7 Friendly Criticism: Richard Simon, John Locke, Isaac Newton and the Johannine Comma 137 Rob Iliffe vi Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England 8 Thomas Beverley and the ‘Late Great Revolution’: English Apocalyptic Expectation in the Late Seventeenth Century 158 Warren Johnston 9 The Ghost in the Marble: Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying (1647) and Its Readers 176 Nicholas McDowell 10 Iconisms, Enthusiasm and Origen: Henry More Reads the Bible 192 Sarah Hutton 11 ‘Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Holy Scriptures’: Biblical Criticism, Clerical Learning and Lay Readers, c. 1650–1720 208 Justin Champion 12 ‘I resolved to give an account of most of the persons mentioned in the Bible’: Pierre Bayle and the Prophet David in English Biblical Culture 231 Alex Barber Afterword: The Word Became Flawed 248 John Morrill Index 253 Notes on Contributors Ariel Hessayon is Lecturer in Early Modern History at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of several articles on seventeenth-century prophets and mystics, as well as ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (Ashgate, 2007). His next book will be called ‘Beastly fury and extreme violence’: A cultural history of football (Hambledon & London). William Poole is Fellow and Tutor in English at New College, Oxford. His research interests are in Milton Studies, seventeenth-century scientific writing, heterodoxy and heresy, and manuscript culture. He has written a monograph, Milton and the Idea of the Fall (Cambridge University Press, 2005), edited Francis Lodwick’s A Country Not Named (Tempe, 2005), and published many articles on early modern literature and intellectual history. He also co-directs the AHRB-funded project ‘Language-planning and free-thinking in late seventeenth-century England’, hosted by CRASSH in the University of Cambridge (2004–07). Nicholas Cranfield studied Art History at the University of Florence and Modern History and Theology in Britain, and was a Fellow of Selwyn College in Cambridge. His doctoral research centred on the variety of theological opinions of episcopacy current in early seventeenth-century England (1603–45). He continues to write on seventeenth-century culture, the spread of Anglicanism, into both America and the Pacific (in the nineteenth century) and is an arts correspondent for theChurch Times. He is currently working on a project to understand the effect of twentieth-century Christian art on liturgical space. He is a member of the Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches (Southwark) and a Director of The South London Church Fund & Diocesan Board of Finance. Scott Mandelbrote is an Official Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is also an Isaac Newton Trust Lecturer in the History Faculty, Cambridge University. His publications include The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple (Oxford, 1998), written with Jim Bennett, and Footprints of the Lion: Isaac Newton at Work (Cambridge, 2001). He is one of the editorial directors of the Newton Project. Nicholas Keene is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, having completed his doctoral thesis there on scriptural erudition and print culture in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England. He is viii Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England currently preparing an edition of the correspondence of the French biblical critic Richard Simon. Stephen D. Snobelen is an Assistant Professor at King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia and Adjunct Professor at Dalhousie University, Halifax. He has published on Newton’s theology and prophecy, Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia, the Newtonians William Whiston and Samuel Clarke, the popularization of science, John Locke’s religious views, nineteenth-century prophetic interpretation and nineteenth-century pre-Adamism. He is on the editorial board of the Newton Project. Rob Iliffe has published a number of articles on early modern history and the history of science, and is completing a book on the significance of Isaac Newton’s religious views for his scientific work (forthcoming, Yale University Press). He is the editor of the journal History of Science and an editorial director of the Newton Project. Warren Johnston is a sessional lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan and at St Peter’s College in Muenster, Saskatchewan. His research centres on political and religious thought in later seventeenth-century England. His articles on Anglican and on nonconformist apocalyptic interpretation have recently appeared in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and the Canadian Journal of History. His article ‘Revelation and the Revolution of 1688–89’ appeared in 2005 in The Historical Journal. He is currently preparing a book on apocalyptic thought in Restoration England. Nicholas McDowell is Lecturer in Renaissance Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630–60 (Oxford University Press, 2003), and the editor, with Nigel Smith, of Seventeenth-Century Radicals (Broadview Press, forthcoming). Currently he is completing a monograph on literary patronage and political allegiance in the English Civil War and editing The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes for the Oxford Complete Works of John Milton. Sarah Hutton’s research interests include early modern intellectual history, Neoplatonism, and women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has edited and co-edited volumes on Platonism and the English imagination, mysticism and mechanism, women in medicine and science, two treatises of Ralph Cudworth, the correspondence of Anne Conway and friends, and the life of Henry More. Justin Champion has published widely on early modern political and religious ideas, attacks on the Church of England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the life and thought of John Toland – including a critical edition of Toland’s Nazarenus (1718). His ongoing project is the history of the cultural crisis in the early eighteenth century. His next book will be a history of biblical criticism between 1580 and 1750 called Prophecying the Word. Notes on Contributors ix Alex Barber is currently a research student at Royal Holloway, University of London. His thesis is on the religious and political context of print culture in late seventeenth and early-eighteenth century England. His other interests centre on Pierre Bayle and the English republic of letters. John Morrill is Professor of British and Irish History at the University of Cambridge and Deputy Director of its Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. He has written extensively about early modern political, social and religious history, including six essays on Oliver Cromwell (as well as a 30,000 word life in the New Dictionary of National Biography). Acknowledgements The idea for this collection grew out of some conversations Nick and I had a few years ago. Since then we have run up a number of debts. First and foremost, we would like to thank our contributors for delivering their articles – most of them fairly promptly! We would also like to thank the staff of the various libraries and institutions that provided assistance to all those who have contributed to this volume, notably the British Library, Cambridge University Library and the Bodleian Library. This publication has been made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research.