Another important kind of scepticism developed out of Bible studies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Exploring problems of ascertaining the correct text of Scripture and the status of Scripture as a source of truth, it raised many problems, some that became very important in creating doubts about religious positions.
After the beginning of printing there was a need to stabilize and codify texts that had come down through manuscript traditions. The most important for the overall society was, of course, the Bible. The many new manuscripts that became available to Western scholars in the Renaissance led to attempts to establish criteria for best texts and accurate texts. Erasmus’ edition of the New Testament in Greek, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, showed that the best scholarly examination of available manuscripts could raise questions about the source of key religious doctrines. Erasmus had omitted the proof texts about the doctrine of the Trinity and instead noted that this text did not appear in the earliest known manuscripts of the New Testament or in citations from the early Church Fathers. He did not publicly question whether the doctrine was, in fact, part of Scripture or whether it was true.
The Polyglot Bible project, sponsored by Cardinal Ximines, began in 1506 to publish the Hebrew and Greek texts of the New and Old Testament and the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome, as well as the Aramaic paraphrases. The cardinal spent much money getting as many manuscripts as he could in order to present the best text. When the problem of the proof text of the doctrine of the Trinity came up, he decided to keep to the traditional text without comment. One of the editors insisted on having a footnote explaining the problem. The cardinal decided against this since he thought it might raise difficulties in getting the finished project accepted. Instead he offered to have the editor publish a book explaining the problem of editing the text of the Bible. This work is one of the first serious statements of biblical criticism. Cardinal Ximines had thought of luring Erasmus to Spain to join in the project and to be a professor at the new University of Alcalá. Erasmus turned this down, but many young Spanish scholars adopted an Erasmian position beyond Erasmus, namely that they denied the doctrine of the Trinity. The Inquisition destroyed the religious movement, but the quarrel with the Erasmians helped launch an ongoing critical evaluation of the biblical text.
Humanistic scholars over the next century evaluated various manuscripts and sought to find standards for deciding what was the best or truest text. With regard to secular authors such as Plato, Aristotle, and others, it was not a life-and-death matter. If one had to make some alterations of the text on the basis of newly found manuscripts with regard to the Bible, this could become all-important. It was made even more important by the Calvinist insistence that the rule of faith was Scripture. If they were to hold this position they had to be absolutely sure of the text of Scripture. So all sorts of learned explorations went on into Hebrew and Greek materials, into the background of biblical texts, and into the history of reading and interpreting them among Jewish and Christian authors. The Hebrew text was published in Venice with some of the medieval Jewish commentaries in the margins. Included in this was the commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra, which was to become so important for Spinoza. By the mid–seventeenth century it was being claimed that there were seven thousand variants in the biblical text. There was disagreement about whether certain materials usually found in Scripture were, in fact, Apocrypha. The examination of the scholarly basis for saying a given text was Scripture and the theological implications of this spawned a radical form of Bible criticism. I will examine two peoples’ versions of this that had startling effects in the mid–seventeenth century and that heavily influenced Spinoza and Father Richard Simon in their scepticism about whether existing biblical texts could provide certain religious truths. These two hearty souls were Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) and Samuel Fisher (1605–65).
As already mentioned, from the time epistemological scepticism of the Sextus-Montaigne-Charron variety was first opposed, the claim was raised that doubts of such a fundamental character would lead to doubts about religion. Sceptics were charged with being atheists, although no one could produce an orthodox religious doctrine or belief that sceptics denied. The slam-bang attack of Garasse merely led to the strongest defense of Christian Pyrrhonism by the Jansenist leader Saint-Cyran.1
The critical problem was to come from another source, the application of scientific method to the Bible itself, originally for special religious purposes. The person who is credited with starting modern critical (and sceptical) Bible scholarship is Isaac La Peyrère. La Peyrère came to Paris in 1640, and became a secretary to the prince of Condé. La Peyrère became involved with leading thinkers of the period, including the nouveaux pyrrhoniens. He was close to Mersenne, Grotius, Gassendi, La Mothe Le Vayer, Patin, Boulliard, and Hobbes, as well as leading figures in the Lowlands such as Claude Saumaise of Leiden and Ole Worm and Thomas Bangius of Denmark.2
La Peyrère is often described as an atheist in the literature.3 Paul Kristeller and I have tried to show that the term “atheist” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is used pejoratively and does not really describe anybody’s position if the “atheists” were supposed to have denied God’s existence and the Judeo-Christian picture of the nature and destiny of man. Critical thinkers had varying interpretations and doubts about aspects of the truth of the overall religious story. But atheism as a denial of the existence of a God who is active in history and as a denial of the biblical account as the true picture of how history began and is progressing is a mid-seventeenth-century view that develops from La Peyrère’s heresies and his scepticism applied to religious materials.4
La Peyrère seems to have been far from an atheist when he developed his view. He came from a Calvinist family in Bordeaux, a family that was most likely from the New Christian Portuguese community. In his early life he got into trouble with the Calvinist synod. The documents are too vague to tell what doctrines he was supposed to have held then. He was accused of atheism and impiety, but in 1626 he was acquitted with the strong support of sixty pastors. By 1640 and 1641 he had written his two major works, Du Rappel des Juifs and Prae-Adamitae.5 Taking the works as a whole into consideration, in addition to related correspondence and the unpublished manuscripts, I think one has to come to the conclusion that La Peyrère held to an unusual messianic theology but not that he was an atheist. He was certainly an unbeliever in some of the key doctrines of Judaism or Christianity, but he was also a mystic believer in his own theology6 (derived in part from Guillaume Postel).7
Among La Peyrère’s many heretical theses (he later abjured over one hundred) were the claims that Moses did not write the Pentateuch; that we do not now possess an accurate text of the Bible; that there were men before Adam; that the Bible is only the history of the Jews, not the history of all mankind; that the Flood was only a local event in Palestine; that the world may have been going on for an indefinite period of time; that the only significant history is that of the Jews; that the history of the Jews began with Adam, and Jewish history is divided into three great periods: (1) the election of the Jews covering the period from Adam to Jesus; (2) the rejection of the Jews, covering the time from Jesus to the mid–seventeenth century; and (3) the recall of the Jews that is about to occur, that the Messiah expected by the Jews is about to appear, and finally that everybody will be saved no matter what they have believed.
The order in which La Peyrère worked out his theology is not known, but apparently the pre-Adamite theory and the theory of the polygenetic origins of mankind were early ingredients. La Peyrère had his whole system of theology based on the assumption that there were men before Adam worked out by the time he became a functioning member of the libertins érudits in 1640 and 1641. He used scientific and historical evidence that he got from the others to buttress his case.8 It was this that triggered a genuine scepticism about religious knowledge.
Before turning to those efforts of La Peyrère that led to Spinoza and modern biblical criticism, I should like briefly to sketch what I believe to have been La Peyrère’s actual theology. The key point in his theological vision is the centrality of Jewish history in the world. The pre-Adamite theory, which I will show was worked out in terms of the biblical text, of pagan historical documents, and of contemporary anthropological data, is basically aimed at separating the pre-Adamites (who encompass everyone except Jews) from the Jews. The pre-Adamite world was a Hobbesian world—nasty, brutish, and short—with nothing of significance going on. When God created the first Jew, divine history begins. And although the Jews alone were the actors in this, the rest of mankind participated in this by “mystical imputation.” In the first stage of Jewish history—the election of the Jews, from Adam to Jesus—the Bible is, strictly speaking, just of Jewish events. Hence the Flood only took place in Palestine; the sun stood still just where Joshua was; and so on.
In the second stage of Jewish history, the Jews were rejected. From Jesus to the present, the Jews are no longer the bearers of divine history. The Gentiles have been grafted onto the Jewish stock.9 And now, at long last, the Jews are to be recalled. They will become Jewish Christians, will rebuild Palestine, and will be the court of the Jewish Messiah, who will rule the world with the king of France.10
From this brief sketch of La Peyrèrean theology one may be able to discern how his major heresies emerged. First, since other people who read the Bible did not see it as La Peyrère did, he had to challenge the Mosaic authorship and the accuracy of the text. (This is not the actual order in which he developed his points.) How do we know that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch? “It is so reported, but not believed by all. These Reasons made me believe that those Five Books are not the Originals, but copied out by another.”11 La Peyrère’s evidence, the basis for modern Bible criticism, was to point out the conflicts and repetitions in the text, notably the section that was supposedly written by Moses about the death of Moses. La Peyrère concluded, “I need not trouble the Reader much further to prove a thing in itself sufficiently evident, that the first Five Books of the Bible were not written by Moses, as is thought. Nor need any one wonder after this, when he reads many things confus’d and out of order, obscure, deficient, many things omitted and misplaced, when they shall consider with themselves that they are a heap of Copie confusedly taken.”12
As discussed earlier, Thomas Hobbes, in the Leviathan, is usually credited with being the first to deny the Mosaic authorship. The date of Hobbes’ text is 1651, ten years after La Peyrère had written his manuscript, and Hobbes is much more cautious, saying: “But though Moses did not compile those books entirely, and in the form that we have them, yet he wrote all that which he is there said to have written.”13
The significance of questioning the Mosaic authorship of the Bible for Judeo-Christianity is tremendous if it is taken seriously. First, the ultimate guarantee of revealed information is that it comes from Moses, who got it from God himself. If the link with Moses is broken, then a serious scepticism with regard to religious knowledge claims can ensue. If Moses is not the biblical author, then who was, and what authority did he have to ensure the veracity of what he reported?
The challenge to the authenticity of the biblical text has like sceptical results. If one doubts the authenticity of one passage, by what criterion does one justify accepting any other passage? La Peyrère asserted that the Bible was inaccurate in claiming Adam as the first man, and inaccurate in claiming that all people now on earth are descendants of the seven survivors of Noah’s Flood. La Peyrère based his charge of inauthenticity on internal evidence in the Bible, about people who are not descendants of Adam, such as Lilith and Cain’s wife; on the evidence of pagan history in relation to biblical history; and finally on the discoveries of people and cultures all over the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who appear to have no relation to the biblical world.14
This sort of internal inconsistency was known long before La Peyrère, including the fact that Moses could not have written about his own death. (The discovery is usually credited to Rabbi Aben Ezra of the twelfth century.) In 1632 Spinoza’s teacher, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, published the first volume of a work, The Conciliator, in which he took various alleged contradictory passages in Scripture and offered all sorts of ways in which one could reconcile the passage without raising any doubts about the Bible itself.15 What Menasseh was doing was typical of the rabbinical tradition as well as that of the Church Fathers. La Peyrère obviously did not want a way of harmonizing Scripture with his data. Rather, he wanted to raise a basic kind of religious scepticism about Scripture in order to justify his own religious views.
The evidence from pagan history had, of course, been known to the Jews and Christians of antiquity. They knew that the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Babylonians all claimed a history of far greater duration than biblical history. A party-line answer to all of this data was developed and is forcibly stated by St. Augustine and by Judah Ha-Levi, namely that all these cultures were lying about their claims to antiquity, and since they had not had the Revelation, they did not know what was really the case.16
Instead of taking this way out, La Peyrère coupled the pagan historical data with the new explorers’ data and argued that on the basis of all of this, the pre-Adamite hypothesis (denying a critical biblical claim) is the best way of reconciling Scripture with the known facts about mankind. The Mexicans and the Chinese have data that show that their histories antedate biblical history. The varieties of mankind posed a genuine question of whether they could all have a common ancestry in the seven survivors of the Flood. A polygenetic explanation would make more sense, according to La Peyrère. And not only would it reconcile the data with the Bible, it would also make it possible to convert the Chinese, the Mexicans, and so on, who know that their own history antedates the Bible.17
La Peyrère developed his sceptical case as a way of justifying his own messianic theory about the recall of the Jews and the arrival of the Jewish Messiah. He may not have realized the sceptical implications of what he was saying, though his friends claim they had pointed it out to him.18 After showing his manuscript to scholars in France, Holland, and Scandinavia and adding new evidence gleaned from his travels,19 he showed the work to Queen Christina of Sweden, who, after her abdication, was living in Brussels, next door to La Peyrère.20 The latter had gone to Brussels to make arrangements for a marriage between Christina and the prince of Condé, an arrangement that never came to fruition. (The plans broke down over who outranked whom.) Queen Christina liked the work very much, and either she told La Peyrère to get it published or she paid for the publication.21 La Peyrère went to Amsterdam, and his version of how the book got published is more comical, although probably less accurate. He said that it happened through no fault of his own. When he got to Amsterdam, he had to carry his manuscript around with him because he had no place to leave it. In Amsterdam, he said, “I fell into a crowd of Printers” who wanted to publish his work. Since the manuscript was bulky and he could not carry it everywhere he went but was afraid of losing it, La Peyrère said: “I found myself obliged because of this to avail myself of the kindness of the Amsterdam printers, and of the freedom I had for publishing the book.”22
The book came out and was immediately denounced in Holland, Belgium, and France. If La Peyrère did not see the sceptical implications of his theory, his critics did. The first condemnation came from the president and the Council of Holland and Zeeland on November 26,1655 (about two months after the book appeared); in it the Prae-Adamitae is charged with being scandalous, false, against God’s Word, and a danger to the state.23 In Namur, where La Peyrére was then living, the bishop on Christmas Day, 1655, had La Peyrère condemned in all of the churches in his diocese “as a Calvinist and as a Jew.”24 Within a year of the publication of the book at least a dozen answers were written, and an ever-growing list of “refutations” was produced during the ensuing century.25
The refutations, such as that of the Protestant minister from Groningen, Samuel Desmarets, stressed the fact that all of the authorities—Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant—disagreed with La Peyrére.26 (Desmarets also claimed there was a danger to society in La Peyrère’s views, because a sect of pre-Adamites had been found in Amsterdam. This claim about the sect has been repeated in later encyclopedias, although there is no evidence such a sect existed.)27
The authors of the first refutations were more shocked by La Peyrère’s rejection of the Word of God than by the sceptical implications of his views. But soon, especially after Spinoza’s use of La Peyrère’s Bible criticism, the sceptical side was clearly seen. Before then, the general of the Jesuits could tell La Peyrère that he, the general, and the pope laughed much when they read Prae-Adamitae.28 He told this to La Peyrère when the latter had come to Rome to recant his heresies in 1656–57. The overall tenor of most of the early refutations, from that of Grotius in 164329 onward, is to claim that La Peyrère’s views are a great danger to religion and are contrary to all the Church Fathers, all the doctors of theology of the Middle Ages, all of the present-day Christian scholars of all persuasions, and all of the rabbis from Talmudic times to the present. A few critics tried to spell out the kind of danger involved.
The great Bible scholar Richard Simon, who knew La Peyrère well and seemed to enjoy his company at the Oratory, in his correspondence with La Peyrère hardly seems shocked at the latter’s views. Simon casually mentioned in a letter of May 27,1670, “It seems to me that your reflections are going to ruin the Christian religion entirely.”30 A stronger claim was made by an unsympathetic reader, Sir Matthew Hale. He said that the belief that La Peyrère’s interpretations of the Bible “were true would necessarily not only weaken but overthrow the Authority and Infallibility of the Sacred Scriptures.”31 And the Catholic writer of theological encyclopedias, Louis Ellies-Du Pin, declared, “Of all of the paradoxes that have been advanced in our century [the seventeenth] there is no one, in my opinion with more temerity, nor more dangerous, than the opinion of those who have dared to deny that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch.”32 Ellies-Du Pin listed Hobbes, La Peyrère, Spinoza, and Richard Simon as those who hold this view.33 Ellies-Du Pin clearly saw the scepticism about revealed religion that would result and regarded this as the greatest sceptical menace of the time. On the other hand, the Protestant Bible scholar Louis Cappel (whom La Peyrère had consulted) insisted that if Scripture were not completely clear, then any interpretation was possible and total Pyrrhonism would result. And if the interpretation of Scripture was only a human one, then again complete scepticism follows.34
As I quoted from Thomas Paine in chapter 12, the alleged effects of doubting Mosaic authorship would be: “Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous book of stories, fables and traditionary or invented absurdities or downright lies.”35
A Jewish opponent of Paine, David Levi of London, made the point more strongly. As cited earlier in chapter 12, he argued that “if a Jew once calls in question the authenticity of any part of the Pentateuch, by observing that one part is authentic, i.e., was delivered by God to Moses, and that another part is not authentic, he is no longer accounted a Jew, i.e., a true believer,” and that every Jew is obliged “to believe that the whole law of five books… is from God,” delivered by him to Moses. Furthermore, Christians should be under the same constraints regarding the Old and New Testaments, for “if any part is but once proved spurious, a door will be opened for another and another without end.”36
It is hard to tell if La Peyrère realized the fantastic sceptical potential to his ideas. All his life was dedicated to expressing his messianic views. When in 1656 he was facing complete opposition from the scholarly and theological world, he hoped to sit out the storm in Belgium but instead was arrested by order of the archbishop of Malines. He languished in jail, and his powerful employer, the prince of Condé, was unable to get him released. It was suggested to La Peyrère that if he turned Catholic and offered to present an apology in person to Pope Alexander VII, he would be released.37 As an habile courtier he took the suggestion to heart and acted on it. He changed religions and went to Rome, where his friend, Queen Christina, had recently arrived as the most important convert of the time. La Peyrère reported that the pope greeted him warmly, saying, “Let us embrace this man who is before Adam.”38 Then La Peyrère was given scholarly help to prepare his retraction. On March 11, 1657, in the presence of Cardinals Barberini and Albizzi, he abjured on his knees before the pope.39
His recantation reeks of insincerity. La Peyrère blamed his pre-Adamite theory on his Calvinist upbringing. Calvinists only accept the authority of reason, inner spirit, or the reading of Scripture. La Peyrère insisted that as long as he was a Calvinist, he had to accept the pre-Adamite theory, since it agreed better with right reason, the natural sense of Scripture, and his individual conscience.40 His opponents declared that his interpretation was in opposition to that of all the rabbis, all the Church Fathers, and all the doctors of theology. But the opposition did not present any other evidence against his theory—no arguments or scriptural texts.41 Then, La Peyrère said, to judge if he were right, or if his opponents were, it was necessary to find some authority or judge. (La Peyrère was operating within the struggle between the Catholics and the Calvinists over the rule of faith.) Who besides the pope could be this authority or judge? “His wish shall be my reason and my law.”42 La Peyrère then declared that he was willing to abjure the pre-Adamite theory and his many other heresies, although he also kept insisting that there was nothing contrary to reason or Scripture in his former views. If the pope said his views were false, then La Peyrère would abjure the views. But he also claimed, while “accepting” the pope’s condemnation of his views, that his pre-Adamite theory and what it entailed provided an excellent means of reconciling ancient pagan history with biblical history.43 His theory also allowed for the origins of the diverse peoples found all over the world. In fact, La Peyrère said after his abjuration that his pre-Adamite theory was like the Copernican theory. It did not alter any facts in the world. It just changed how they were evaluated.44
As I shall show, La Peyrère apparently did not change his views but remained sceptical about the Bible to the end of his life. What he remained steadfast about was his messianism. In his Lettre à Philotime after explaining why he was disowning his Calvinist views, he then expounded again the messianic vision of Du Rappel des Juifs, insisting that the time would not be far off before the Jews and Christians would come together. This time, however, he claimed this great event would be brought about not by the king of France but by his new friend Pope Alexander VII. Pope Alexander would complete what Alexander the Great started, presumably bringing all mankind together. Using kabbalistic interpretations, he found more reasons why Alexander VII was the chosen instrument of God. This work ends with a marvelous picture of all of the great things that will happen when the Jews are converted and the Jews and Christians join together.45
The pope was apparently sufficiently impressed by La Peyrère’s abjuration and apology that he offered him a benefice to stay in Rome.46 La Peyrère, probably wisely, chose instead to go back to Paris and to his master, the prince of Condé. He became Condé’s librarian as well as a lay brother in a seminary of the Oratorians near Paris. In the monastic retreat we are told that La Peyrère spent most of his time studying the Bible, seeking more ammunition for his pre-Adamite theory and reworking his Du Rappel des Juifs.47 He published some works on his conversion, a letter to the Comte de Suze urging him to convert to Catholicism, and a book on Iceland that he had written much earlier.48 Privately he discussed his theories and sought for some way of publishing them. His friends recognized that his head was always full of the pre-Adamite theory.49
The greatest Bible scholar of the period, Father Richard Simon, was a fellow Oratorian and knew La Peyrère very well. Simon and La Peyrère discussed some of the latter’s bizarre theories by letter and in person. In a letter giving La Peyrère’s biography, Simon wrote that all that La Peyrère did in his religious retreat was to read the text of the Bible in order to fortify certain visions he had about the coming of a new Messiah who would reestablish the Jewish nation in Jerusalem.50 Simon’s letters to La Peyrère in 1670 indicate that the latter was constantly on the lookout for more evidence for the pre-Adamite theory. He found that Maimonides mentioned a group, the Sabeans, who claimed that Adam had parents and came from India. He found a story that Adam died of gout, and gout is a hereditary disease. He found a kabbalistic claim that Adam had a teacher, and a Moslem one that there were a couple of people before Adam. Simon had to straighten him out about what this information was worth.51
La Peyrère tried to get his views across to the public by writing the footnotes to Michel de Marolles’ French translation of the Bible. In the early parts of Genesis La Peyrère put notes to all of the passages that indicated there were people before Adam. But to his first long note on the matter he added: “This opinion is always rejected, although those who want to establish it do not at all undertake to do so against the authority of the Holy Scripture, to which they render all the respect that is due them. But the Church having judged otherwise, they submit themselves to its decrees, and to the views of all the Church Fathers.”52 Nonetheless, La Peyrère continued with his notes, getting in his point that the Flood was just a local event, that not all of the people of the world could be survivors of the Flood, and so on. Each time La Peyrère made his point, he added that he accepted the orthodox view. In spite of his cautious formulation, the work was suppressed before the printing was completed. All that remains is the translation and notes up to Leviticus 23.53
In 1670–71 La Peyrère put together a new version of Du Rappel des Juifs that he hoped to get published. He sent it to Richard Simon, who told him that the work could not possibly be published, in part because it contained the pre-Adamite theory, and in part because it contained a theory of two Messiahs, which would be rejected by Jews and Christians and would “completely destroy the Christian religion.”54 After such frank advice La Peyrère changed the manuscript and sent it to the censor, who rejected it and refused to give his permission for publication.55 La Peyrère rewrote the manuscript again in 1673 but still could not budge the censor. The author made one colossal concession. He gave up the pre-Adamite theory while holding on to his messianic views about the recall of the Jews, indicating that the latter was more important to him than the former.56
La Peyrère died in early 1676. Richard Simon said that La Peyrère had not done anything in the Oratory that would make any one question the purity of his religion. On the other hand, another friend of La Peyrère, Jean François Morin du Sandat, wrote Pierre Bayle that La Peyrère was very slightly papist but very full of his idea of the pre-Adamites, which he discussed with his friends secretly up to his death. Morin concluded his report by saying “La Peyrère was the best person, the sweetest, who tranquilly believed very few things.”57 Simon heard that La Peyrère, on his deathbed, was pressed to retract his pre-Adamite and messianic theories but avoided doing so, and finally uttered the words from the letter to St. Jude, “Hi quaecunque ignorant blasphement.”58
After La Peyrère died one of his friends wrote as his epitaph:
Here lies La Peyrère, that good Israelite,
Huguenot, Catholic, finally Pre-Adamite
Four religions pleased him at the same time
And his indifference was so uncommon
That after eighty years, and he had to make a choice
The Good Man departed and did not choose any of them.59
La Peyrère’s influence was very great. Refutations of his views kept coming out for another hundred years. Aspects of his views were taken up by some hardy souls, and some of his views were espoused by those trying to justify racism in the New World.60 One could list a very disparate group, from Richard Simon, Spinoza, and Vico61 to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anthropologists62 to Napoleon Bonaparte63 to a Professor Alexander Winchell in America, who in 1880 wrote a work entitled Pre-Adamites or a Demonstration of the Existence of Man before Adam, with photographs of some pre-Adamites.64 I have assessed La Peyrère’s influence in detail elsewhere.65 Here I shall just show his role in inspiring and developing religious scepticism. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Thomas Smyth said: “When, however, in modern times, infidelity sought to erect its dominion upon the ruins of Christianity, Voltaire, Rousseau, Peyrère, and their followers introduced the theory of an original diversity of human races, in order thereby to overthrow the truth and inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures.”66
La Peyrère’s role in causing further doubts about the Bible came about primarily through his influence on Richard Simon and on Spinoza. Simon knew La Peyrère well in the years when he was working on his Critical History of the Old Testament (first published in 1678).67 With a far greater knowledge of the documents, the languages they were written in, the history of the Jews, of the early churches, and of other Near Eastern sects, Simon began using all of this material as a club against the Calvinists, who professed to gain their religious truth from the Bible alone. Simon raised all sorts of sceptical difficulties about ascertaining the origins of the biblical text, the authenticity of the present text, and the meaning of this text. In part, Simon raised a genuine historical Pyrrhonism about the Bible that would apply to any other document as well. In his defense against the outcries about his books, Simon insisted that he believed the real biblical text to be divinely inspired, but he just did not know which of the present-day versions is so inspired. Simon also held that the biblical text could not be by Moses, and most probably was written down over a long period of time, probably an eight-hundred-year time span. Since then it has been copied and added to, and all sorts of errors, glosses, variants, and so on, have crept in. For Simon the task of critical scholarship is to try to separate the divine message from the human accretions and variations. Simon’s work revealed the overwhelming epistemological and historical difficulties in disentangling the human from the divine dimension. Although Simon did not share either La Peyrère’s messianism or Spinoza’s naturalism, and although Simon did seem to believe that there really was a divine message, his efforts greatly helped to transform the study of religion into a secular subject. His Bible scholarship helped spawn the scientific study of the Bible. When his scholarship was combined with a scepticism about religious knowledge and with Spinozistic naturalism, then disbelief in traditional religion followed.68
Of La Peyrère’s contemporaries, the one whom he seems to have influenced the most is Spinoza. Spinoza owned the Prae-Adamitae69 and used portions of it in the Tractatus-Theologico-Politicus.70 La Peyrère was in Amsterdam for six months in 1655 shortly before Spinoza’s excommunication from the Amsterdam Synagogue. No evidence has yet turned up that they met.71 (Very little is known about Spinoza in this period.) Spinoza’s teacher Menasseh ben Israel very much admired La Peyrère’s Du Rappel des Juifs and in a work written in February 1655 listed the author of that work as one of the very few who knew that the Messiah was coming imminently.72 A document written by Menasseh’s friend Paul Felgenhauer indicates that both he and Menasseh had read La Peyrère’s Prae-Adamitae prior to its publication and Felgenhauer wanted Menasseh’s help in arranging a public disputation with La Peyrère.73 There is no evidence that the disputation took place, but both Menasseh and Felgenhauer wrote refutations of Prae-Adamitae.74 All of this shows that La Peyrère’s theories were known and opposed by a leader of the Amsterdam Jewish community.75
The first condemnation of Prae-Adamitae was in Holland. In view of the number of condemnations and refutations that took place in 1655–56, La Peyrère, by the time he was arrested, must have been one of the most notorious authors in Europe. And it would seem likely that a young intellectual rebel like Spinoza would have been interested in finding out what all the fuss was about.
What makes this seem much more probable is the discovery made by the late I. S. Révah concerning Spinoza’s excommunication. Révah found that three people were charged with heresy in the same week in Amsterdam: Spinoza, Juan de Prado, and Daniel Ribera, who were all friends.76 Prado was ten years older than Spinoza, and Ribera a contemporary. Prado had apparently become an irreligious freethinker before he left Spain for Holland. He had written a work, of which no copy has been found, claiming that the law of Nature takes precedence over the law of Moses. (Two refutations of this work by Isaac Orobio de Castro exist, from which one can tell what Prado’s claims were.)77 Records of the charges and investigation of Prado and Ribera have survived, but not of those against Spinoza. Prado used themes from La Peyrère, namely his claim that the world was eternal and that human history is older than Jewish history. Prado’s evidence for the latter was one of La Peyrère’s points that Chinese history is at least ten thousand years old.78 Orobio de Castro, in one of his answers to Prado, challenges him with suffering from the madness of those who affirm that although it is true that God created the universe, this creation took place thousands and thousands of years ago and not at the period that we believe on the basis of the Bible.79
Theses of La Peyrère appear to have been involved in the excommunication. Spinoza wrote a reply to the excommunication. The reply grew and finally became the Tractatus. There he used material from La Peyrère to make out his challenge to the Bible. So La Peyrère may well have directly influenced Spinoza from the time of the excommunication onward. However, as has been indicated, La Peyrère remained a believer in his strange kind of messianism. Spinoza (and Prado), we learn from a Spanish spy who was with them at a theological discussion club in 1658–59, held that “God exists but only philosophically.”80 The rest of Spinoza’s career was the working-out of the implications of that claim, while also developing a total scepticism of the Academic variety against traditional religion.
Another figure who raised important critical questions about the biblical text was the Quaker Samuel Fisher. Both Fisher and Spinoza published major works of biblical criticism, Fisher in 1660 and Spinoza in 1670, raising many of the same fundamental points about whether the text of the Bible that now existed was the same as the original, and about whether we could find God’s message in human artifacts like Torah scrolls, manuscripts, and printed editions of Scripture. Spinoza’s biblical criticism has been much studied, both for its content and its influence. Fisher has hardly been noticed outside of Quaker circles, where he figured as an odd character in early Quaker history. Only Christopher Hill has given him some recognition for his views and has called him the most radical Bible critic of the seventeenth century.81
A comparison of Fisher’s views with Spinoza’s is interesting, to see how the same forceful points arose in two quite different contexts. The comparison may be of more significance when one realizes that Spinoza and Fisher probably knew each other personally and that they could have directly influenced one another, even though Fisher published his massive work only in English and Spinoza published his ten years later in Latin. (The original was probably in Spanish or Portuguese.)82
Fisher was the only early Quaker who was an Oxford graduate. He had studied Hebrew, became a Baptist minister, and then in 1654 was converted to Quakerism by John Stubbs and William Caton. In the late summer of 1656 he tried to speak in Parliament against the persecution of the Quakers and was thrown out. He then decided to witness his faith by going off to try to convert the pope and the sultan.83
It has not been realized that on this quixotic and apparently unsuccessful journey, Fisher stopped in Holland for several months and was a very active member of the Quaker mission there set up to convert the Jews. Caton and Stubbs, who had converted Fisher, were leading figures in the Quaker mission in Holland. Reports by the Mother of the Quakers, Margaret Fell, at her home, Swarthmoor, indicate that because Fisher knew Hebrew, he took the leading role in arguing with the Jews. He attended services and then carried on discussions with Jews in their homes for hours afterward.84
Fisher had been asked by Margaret Fell before he left for the Continent to translate two of her pamphlets into Hebrew. One was a letter to Menasseh ben Israel (who was then in London), asking him to lead his people to convert, and the other A Loving Salutation to the Seed of Abraham, a conversionist tract.85 For reasons that are not explained in the correspondence, Fisher did not succeed in making the translations, and the job was turned over to an ex-Jew, who was apparently young Spinoza.86 Spinoza met the Quaker leader William Ames shortly after his excommunication and seems to have become involved with the Quakers; he took on the translation task.87 Caton’s letters to Margaret Fell describe the progress of the translations.88 The letter to Menasseh was translated from Ames’ Dutch translation into Hebrew but not printed. Fisher took it with him on his trip to Rome and Constantinople.89 The second translation, also done from Dutch into Hebrew, because the translator did not know English, was published and distributed in 1658 and republished in London in 1660.90 It is probably Spinoza’s earliest publication and the only text we have that indicates the level of his knowledge of Hebrew. Appended to the translation is a two-page exhortation by Fisher urging the Jews to convert. The text does not exist in English and is written in Fisher’s inimitable style—one run-on sentence with many digressions.91
Thus Spinoza and Fisher were apparently working on the same project, the Hebrew translation of Margaret Fell’s pamphlets, and were involved in the same publication. The number of Quakers in Amsterdam was quite small.92 Fisher was the only one who knew Hebrew. He and the other Quakers were probably interested in Spinoza as a potential convert, because of his break with the synagogue. So there are good reasons to suspect that Spinoza and Fisher knew each other. Fisher also was arguing with the very people who had excommunicated Spinoza. They could have communicated in Hebrew or Latin. Fisher probably knew Dutch, if he was able to argue with Jews for hours and hours, or he may have known Spanish, if he was planning to travel all over Europe and the Middle East. The Collegiants, the group Spinoza moved in with after the excommunication, had Spanish-speaking members. Adam Boreel, their leader, an Oxford graduate and a Hebraist as well, learned Portuguese and Spanish in order to communicate easily with the leading Jewish scholars.93 Boreel was much involved with the Quakers and may have provided all of the linguistic skills needed for communication between Fisher and Spinoza.
No matter how much or how little they communicated while Fisher was in Holland, they did come to some very similar views about the Bible and raised many of the same points Fisher published in his work shortly after his return from Rome and Constantinople. In 1660 his work, Rusticus Ad Academicios, in Exercitationibus Expostulatoriis, Apologeticus Quatuor. The Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies: or, the Country Correcting the University and Clergy, and (not without good cause) Contesting for the Truth, Against the Nursing Mothers, and their Children was published.94 The work is 939 pages long, deliberately written in English to debunk the purported scholarship of the leading Protestant theologians. Fisher’s chief opponents were Thomas Danson, a leading Nonconformist scholar from Oxford, a Hebraist, and John Owen, the vice-chancellor of Oxford and one of the most important Puritan theologians. Fisher took as the central thesis to be opposed the Protestant view that faith should be based on Scripture.
If it could be shown that existing texts of Scripture were altered, corrupted, variable, then there would be no basis for faith in the written word, and people would be led to see that faith was based on the Light or the Spirit, through which the Word was understood. Fisher’s antiscripturalism and scepticism with regard to Scripture was an attack on the position formulated by the Puritans at the Westminster conference and argued for in works like John Owen’s book The Reason of Faith, or An Answer unto that Enquiry, Wherefore we believe the Scripture to be the Word of God. With the Causes and Nature of that Faith wherewith we do so. Wherein the Grounds whereon the Holy Scripture is believed to Be the Word of God with Faith Divine and Supernatural are declared and vindicated.95
The issue Fisher was addressing himself to was actively being debated between Catholics and Protestants, and among various Protestant theologians. It had been a matter of vital concern from Calvin onward, and was critical for Calvinists in England, Holland, and France in the midcentury.96 Fisher saw the Quaker position being lumped by Protestants with that of the Catholics and the Jews in that they all regarded something other than Scripture as being essential and authoritative (a pontiff and/or tradition). So Fisher’s case is presented as a kind of antiscripturalism that avoids both the authoritarianism of the Church of Rome and the extrabiblical traditionalism of the Jews.97
To get down to the business at hand, Fisher started off posing the basic claim of Owen—that it is absolutely necessary that the present text of the Hebrew and Greek transcriptions of Scripture be “entire to every Tittle, as at first giving out, without and loss, so strictly, that if it be not so, but it appear to have been altered by Ablation or Addition of the Points by Tyberians, cessatum est.”98 All is lost, and there is no certain text of God’s Word, if anything has been changed or altered in the Hebrew or Greek texts that we have.99 To counter this, Fisher raised a host of problems about the history of God’s Word. We possess Scriptures, writings, that have been transcribed over and over again. Is the Word of God these copies of copies of copies by fallible human beings or is it something apart that these copies are trying to state? The copies have a history. They come into existence and they perish. They are graven images. Is God’s Word identical with these copies? Does his Word depend on these copies? If all of the copies disappeared would God’s Word disappear?100
More technically, if we look into what is known about the copies—we have the internal information in Scripture, Jewish and Christian claims made outside of Scripture, and the collection of scriptural manuscripts that have come down to us, with their historical fortuna—we find several reasons for believing there have been alterations or changes. Among these are that it does not seem possible that Moses is the author of all of Deuteronomy, there seem to have been other books from which Scripture as we knew it evolved, the language of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, has changed since biblical times, at least in the addition of vowels in the Hebrew and iota subscripts in the Greek, and there seems to be nothing in Scripture that determines the canon of Scripture. The decision as to what works are canonical was apparently made by rabbis and church leaders independently. They chose from a larger body of available documents and arrived at the present corpus.
If all of these points are sound, then we have lots of reasons for suspecting the text has altered over the centuries, and not just the early centuries. After all, the text was under the command of the corrupt Roman Catholic Church and the stiff-necked unenlightened Jews for over a thousand years. Why should we believe they accurately copied every item from preceding perfect texts?
Fisher’s case is both epistemological and historical. Epistemologically he sought to show that God’s Word is not identical with Scripture. The latter is a physical entity written by a human being at some time and place. The former is a supernatural message that exists independently and apart from any human effort to record and preserve it. Scripture is the Word writ. But the Word exists, whether writ by humans or not in God’s world. And, in view of the colossal difference between God’s Word and a human copy, there is an extremely difficult problem to resolve, namely is the copy an exact statement of the original? If not, then relying on the copy can be dangerous spiritually and misleading morally.
The epistemological problems involved in certifying the copy should lead to scepticism about whether the Word of God can be found, unless one has another access to it than the copy. As I have shown in various studies about the debates between the Catholics and the Protestants about the rule of faith, the anti-Protestant argument of people like François Veron and John Sergeant aimed at raising insoluble sceptical problems about how to find the true faith from Scripture. The Catholics insisted a rule of faith or a judge was needed to tell true faith from apparently true faith, and the pope and the councils provided such a judge. The Protestants contended that the Scripture is the rule of faith, and needs no fallible humans (the pope, the church elder, etc.) to interpret it.101 The Westminster Confession, set down at the beginning of the Puritan Revolution, had declared that God made his will known and that this was recorded in Holy Scripture. The authority of Scripture rests on the fact that God is the author. The text, in Hebrew and Greek, “being immediately inspired by God and by his singular care and Providence kept pure in all Ages are therefore Authentical.”102 Article 9 of the Westminster Confession insists that “the infallible rule of Interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself.”103
Various Catholics, like Veron, and radical Protestants challenged whether Scripture could provide such a guarantee of itself and its message, especially if Scripture as we know it is just ink marks on paper, presumably made by human printers or copyists. The ongoing battle about Scripture as the rule of faith from the early Counter-Reformation through the eighteenth century led to many serious polemics. The one that triggered Samuel Fisher’s 939-page response was John Owen’s Pro Sacris Scripturis adversus hujus temporis Fanaticos Exercitationes Apologetical Quatuor.104 Owen was defending Scripture as the true Word of God against atheists, pagans, Jews, Catholics, and fanatics called Quakers.105 Owen enlarged his defense of Scripture the next year in a work entitled Of the Divine Originall, Authority, Self-evidencing Light and Power of the Scriptures.106 After 1660, when Owen lost his post as vice-chancellor of Oxford and had no status because of his labors for the Puritan cause, he kept working on the epistemological basis of the Protestant scripturalism. His Reason of Faith is a fascinating attempt to justify this position. It carefully constructs a “justification” for taking Scripture as God’s Word and for it needing nothing other than itself to interpret it. Owen’s effort deserves independent examination to ascertain the extent to which he actually overcame the sceptical problems involved and the extent to which he exposed a scepticism that could not be overcome.107
Regardless of its merits, Fisher rebuffed Owen’s case both by challenging the alleged epistemological bridge between Scripture and God’s Word, and indicating that there were plenty of good historical reasons for questioning whether the documents known as Scripture could be seriously taken to be the unaltered Word of God rather than an accretion of human writings. Fisher’s epistemological case is interesting and has some resemblance to part of Spinoza’s argument. But the historical questions are strikingly novel for the time (1660) and contain much of the material that Spinoza used challenging the world of Jewish Bible interpreters.
It is not possible to do justice to Fisher’s 939 pages in a brief description of what he had to say. Mostly I will limit myself to dealing with the question of the Mosaic authorship, the claim that other books of the Bible existed that are now lost, or partially incorporated into the present text, the contention that Hebrew and Greek had changed in some respects since the first writing of the events in the Bible, and the claim that the decision as to what is canonical is not justified by the Bible itself.
As Fisher developed his case against John Owen, he insisted that he, Fisher, was not claiming that God’s Word ever changed but only that the human writing of it has.108 Transcribers, as humans, can make mistakes.109 Regardless of their possible errors, people who had no text, like Abel, Enoch, and Noah, seemed to know God’s Word.110 When Scripture came into existence, it was just a visible object, not a spiritual illumination, which may or may not correspond to God’s Word. The kinds of people who transcribe do not inspire confidence. In addition, the transcription raises some questions. Was there some divine message before Moses started writing things down?111 And was there no divine message received between Ezra and Jesus?112
The Mosaic Scripture raises a critical problem. Is it all by Moses, who presumably received it from God? Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère, and Spinoza all made much of this, and built on the discussion offered by the medieval Jewish authority Aben Ezra.113 Spinoza devoted pages to the matter, much of which goes over what Hobbes and La Peyrère had recently published.114 Fisher just has a marginal note, with no indication of any source of his query. He asked who wrote the end of Deuteronomy. Did Moses “write of his own Death and Burial and of Israel’s Mourning for him, after he was dead”?115 Spinoza insisted that this and much else in the account showed it was written after Moses’ death. Fisher just said that this indicated that some of Scripture was written after the recorded events by unnamed authors.
This small point immediately leads to a major one, namely who, if not Moses, decided what was Scripture, and what was mere human addition? Both Fisher and Spinoza, among others, listed titles of books mentioned in Scripture that are not included in the text.116 So some works of the period were lost or omitted. But why?
The problem of canonicity is crucial to defending the privileged status of Scripture and is made a crucial feature of the Westminster Confession, where the noncanonical books are dismissed as “not being of Divine inspiration” and having no more authority “than other humane writings.”117 Fisher pointed out that with regard to both the Old Testament and the New Testament the canonical issue is not treated inside the books. It rests on decisions made by a rabbinical council and an early church council. Supposedly, a Sanhedrin in Ezra’s day decided on the canon. But this is not written in the Bible. Josephus and the Talmud give other postbiblical accounts of what happened. Regardless of whether it happened in Ezra’s time or centuries later, was the decision, made by some group of human beings, infallible or even authoritative?118 Was it God or man who set up some alleged standards for distinguishing Scripture from Apocrypha? Then, answering his query, Fisher asserted:
Was it not meer Men in their Imaginations? Doth the Scripture, doth Spirit and the Apostles therein give any order for, or make any mention in the least of such a matter? Is it not meer man in his imagination, that hath taken upon him, according to the good or ill Conceit that he hath taken to him, of these or those respectively, to say… he will give Authority to the Scriptures. Is it not man in his proud mind that comes in with his sic volo, sic Jubeo, so I’ll have it, thus it shall be? Saying to the Books of Scriptures as God sayes to the Waves of the outward Ocean, hitherto shall ye come and no further. So many of the Prophets and Apostles writing shall be in the Authority, Nature, Use and Office of the Supream Determiner of all Truth forever; and all others, even such as are written by the same men, in the notion of the same spirit, shall be but as common mens Writings, and looked on afar off as Apocryphal, i.e. bidden or unknown Writings, that no such notice shall be taken of, as of the other.119
Fisher found it most curious that some works attributed to Ezra and St. Paul could be classified as apocryphal. He found it even more curious that only books in Hebrew or Greek could be canonical and that people who cannot read these languages “have no Canonical Scripture at all to read.”120
Fisher tried to make the canonical problem appear more ridiculous by asking: When did Scripture become canonical? Was it canonical when it consisted only of the Pentateuch? Was it canonical as it was being written? Later on, those who made the decision as to what was canonical did not have the original manuscripts but only human copies of same. So how could they decide from such data?121
The next crucial problem both Fisher and Spinoza deal with is whether the texts that have come down to us are accurate and unaltered. First, is the content the same, and second, does the historical transmission process allow for the introduction of errors?
On the first matter, if Hebrew (or Greek) orthography or vocabulary has changed since biblical times, then the present documents are not identical with whatever may have existed in Moses’ or Ezra’s time. Fisher had learned from various Jewish and Christian authorities, Elias Levita, Louis Cappel, Christian Ravius, and Buxtorf, that vowel markings did not exist in the original biblical Hebrew and were introduced either by Ezra or by the Massorites.122 Therefore the text has changed, either at Ezra’s time or at a later day, and we do not have an exact fixed text of God’s Word at present. So, according to Owen and his Calvinist allies, all revealed truth should be called in question.
If the latter addition of vowels and punctuation showed the scriptural text had changes in some respect, a greater source of problems and questions came from the variants among the existing texts. The Protestant Bible scholar Louis Cappel had compiled a list of thousands of variants in the Hebrew and Greek texts, a list that greatly impressed Isaac La Peyrère as well as Samuel Fisher. La Peyrère had used Cappel’s results to claim that no authentic text now existed, and that all that we had was a “heap of Copies confusedly taken.”123 Fisher pointed out that all of Owen’s certainty vanished when one realized the implications of the variants: “Everyone may see therefore what Certainty and Security ye are in, while ye stand on no Bottom but a broken Letter” with “the Uncertainty of your tattered Transcripts.”124
Fisher pointed out God never said in Scripture that he promised to preserve the copies of the originals. In fact, if one looks at what we know of the transcription process, it hardly inspires confidence about God preserving the text throughout the centuries of transcriptions. We do not know the character of every transcriber. Most of them were Jews, so can we trust them?125 Later on most of them were corrupt Catholic monks. Finally the transcribers became our printers. Since they make mistakes in present-day books, why not in older ones?126 If the press can be inaccurate, why not the pen also? Fisher had a field day indicating how errors and slips could have found their way into the text, how manuscripts moulder and change, how writers change what they see and hear, and so on. We have a text through at least one hundred hands, “through the hands of who knows what unskilful, careless, forgetful Scribes or Transcribers,” all of whom are fallible.127 The result is “a Bulk of Heterogenous Writings, compiled together by men taking what they could find of the several sorts writings that are therein, trussing them all up into one Touchestone, and… crouding them into a canon or standard for the trial of all spirits, doctrines, truths; and by them alone.”128 Neither Fisher nor Spinoza despaired over what was left, after one took full notice of the transcription problem, since neither rested his case on possessing the exact, original documents of God’s Revelation to man.
For Fisher it is the Law or Spirit, the Living Word of God and not the “transcribed, Translated, Interpreted, so, and in such a sense by some, [that] may be through Mis-transcription, Mis-translation, Mis-interpretation, be wrested as a Nose of Wax tomorrow if there are problems about the Hebrew letters and points.”129 The letter is but the instrument of the Light and Spirit; we can only tell if some letter is Scripture if we have the Light, the Living Word, the Spirit.130 (After all, Fisher pointed out, God sent his Son, not a writing.)131 The Word of God is in the Scripture but is not itself the Scripture.132 One has to know the Light to tell Scripture from non-Scripture, false prophets from true ones.133 This Light can be in Scripture, and in other sources. “God has sufficiently and savingly enlightened and improved all and every man everywhere, by such measure of that Grace of his, as may lead and inable them to act that Repentance which is to Life and Salvation.”134 “The Light within, not the bare letter without is that saving Means.”135 Fisher was universalistic enough to say (before his disciple William Penn brought Quakerism to America): “Is the Light in America then any more insufficient to lead its Followers to God, than the Light in Europe, Asia, Africa.”136
The Quakers were, at the time, being attacked as enthusiasts who were substituting private illumination for divine inspiration. Henry More, who was very much opposed to the Quakers, had said in his Enthusiasmus Triumphatus of 1656: “Enthusiasme is nothing else but a misconceit of being inspired. Now to be inspired, is to be moved in an extraordinary manner by the power or Spirit of God to act, speak or think what is holy, just and true. From hence it will be easily understood what Enthusiasme is, viz. A full, but false persuasion in a man that is inspired.”137 John Owen accused the Quakers of taking an internal private light as divine illumination, thus exhibiting enthusiasm, which is an uncertain basis for faith.
Fisher insisted that Quakers did not accept a private light but rather “the Common Light and Publick Spirit of God, which is one and the same in all.”138 “The Light within, and Spirit of God in the Conscience… is most certain, unchangeable, elementally the same.”139 Hence no subjective individual feeling is but set forth as the basis for faith, but presumably an illumination that all good or regenerated people will recognize and will then see is common to everyone in the same state. For Fisher the effect of finding God’s message, either in Scripture or by other means, was moral improvement. For Fisher one reaches the vision through spiritual refinement and devotion, not necessarily involving any intellectual process.
It is not clear how much influence Fisher had on mid-seventeenth-century discussions of the Bible. His book existed only in English and was never translated and is not discussed by major figures like Spinoza or Richard Simon. As indicated earlier, Fisher probably knew Spinoza in Amsterdam around 1657. Thereafter Fisher traveled south to Rome and stayed in Jewish communities in Germany and Italy. He went on to Constantinople and probably Jerusalem. We know nothing about whom he was in contact with, other than that he usually stayed with Jews. There is no evidence that he and Spinoza had any contact after 1657. It is possible that Fisher encountered La Peyrère in Rome, since he was there at the time that La Peyrère wrote his recantation. Fisher’s examination of the sceptical problems involved in ascertaining the true text of Scripture is more highly developed than that of La Peyrère. There is no evidence that they relied on each other’s work. It is curious that three major figures in biblical criticism coexisted in time and place in the 1650s. Problems raised by them played a great role in leading to scepticism with regard to religious knowledge.