Interpreting Ancient Israelite History, Prophecy, and Law. John H. Hayes
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been superior to philosophers.”87 The difference between scholasticism and humanism in the Renaissance period has been described in the following terms: “By proliferating abstractions and superfluous distinctions, scholastic philosophy had lost contact with concrete reality. It had cut men off from meaning, hence from their own humanity. Valla’s philosophy, on the other hand, emphasized precisely these standards—concreteness, utility, and humanity . . . Indeed, a return to reality may be taken as the slogan of Valla’s entire philosophy.”88
The quest or return to reality was not only the source of the humanistic or historical revolution of the Renaissance but also the basis for the scientific revolution that has its roots in the same period.89 Science had to overcome the legacy of Aristotelian scholasticism. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the scientific revolution, which reached a climax in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for all aspects of life including biblical studies, although Butterfield seems to have been successful in this regard: “Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.”90 Mechanics and astronomy were the first scientific disciplines to develop.
These new approaches to reality were concerned with questions of explanation and causation in both natural and human orders. The way was opened for a view of the world that operated according to ‘natural law’ even if that law be understood as the will of God. The historical implication of such a view is enormous: humans can understand past events as analogous to present events. Human, climatic, geographical, and other factors could be viewed as causal elements in historical events both past and present. This rise of explanation in historical studies marked a significant development in historiography.
“In medieval historical writing there are explanations of an extremely specific kind, in terms of the motives of individuals; there are also explanations of an extremely general kind, in terms of the hand of God in history, or the decay of the world; but middle-range explanations are lacking.”91 These “middle-range explanations”—what today we would call sociological, economic, geographical, and climatic considerations—have their beginnings in the Renaissance.92
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which in many ways represents merely a radical and religious application of Renaissance principles and aims, made at least four significant contributions that were ultimately of great importance in the history of Hebrew historiography.
First of all, the reformers placed the Bible at the center of the theological enterprise. Sola scriptura was the keynote of the Reformation.93 In emphasizing the Bible as the rule and norm of faith, the reformers stressed a literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Luther wrote:
The Holy Spirit is the plainest writer and speaker in heaven and earth, and therefore His words cannot have more than one, and that the very simplest, sense, which we call the literal, ordinary, natural sense.
All heresies and error in Scripture have not arisen out of the simple words of Scripture . . . All error arises out of paying no regard to the plain words and, by fabricated inferences and figures of speech, concocting arbitrary interpretations in one’s own brain.
In the literal sense there is life, comfort, strength, learning, and art. Other interpretations, however appealing, are the work of fools.
In addition to an emphasis on the literal reading of Scripture, the reformers argued that Scripture is its own interpreter. Luther declared: “Scripture itself by itself is the most unequivocal, the most accessible, the most comprehensible authority, itself its own interpreter, attesting, judging, illuminating all things.”94
This emphasis upon a literal reading of the Scriptures, which had earlier been stressed in Judaism over against a christocentric reading of the Old Testament, did not immediately produce any critical-historical approach to the Bible. Even Luther retained a prophetic-christocentric attitude towards the Old Testament. The idea of the divine inspiration of Scripture or the Bible as the word of God halted the reformers short of any really critical approach, although Luther relegated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix in his New Testament translation primarily because of theological reasons, which he buttressed with an appeal to the dispute over these documents in the early church.95 Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s Claris scripturae sacrae (1567), one of the first handbooks on biblical hermeneutics, is representative of Protestantism’s stress on the importance of the literal or grammatical sense, but warns that there are no contradictions in Scripture and that exegesis must be in agreement with faith.96 This emphasis on the literal reading of the biblical materials was ultimately to make literary-critical analysis not only possible but also necessary.
A second contribution of the reformers was an iconoclastic attitude towards tradition. This phenomenon was widely current in many circles during the times as previous examples have shown. The reformers sought to restore the purity of the church and return to the origins; components and traditions that appeared to have intervened extraneously could be repudiated. Such attitudes, however, fostered a sense of criticism although it was much easier to be critical of post-biblical than biblical traditions. An example of a significant critique of an ancient and venerated tradition is represented by Carolus Sigonius who challenged the traditional Jewish view of the origin of the synagogue. An expert on Greek and Roman institutions, Sigonius, in his De republica Hebraeorum libri VII (1583), argued as follows regarding the antiquity of the synagogue:
The origin of the synagogue is by no means an old one. We find, indeed, no mention of it [in Scripture] either in the history of the Judges or in the history of the Kings. If it is at all admissible to venture a conjecture in this kind of antiquity, I would surmise that synagogues were first erected in the Babylonian exile for the purpose that those who have been deprived of the temple of Jerusalem, where they used to pray and teach, would have a certain place similar to the temple, in which they could assemble and perform the same kind of service.97
Many concepts, positions, and traditions, however, were taken over uncritically by the reformers. Both Luther and Melanchthon accepted the four monarchies approach to world history. The Frenchman Jean Bodin, in his Method for the Easy Understanding of Histories (1566), thus sensed he was breaking new ground when he included an essay on the “refutation of those who postulate four monarchies and the golden age.”
A third contribution of the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation can be seen in the fact that the history of the church became a dominant issue in the struggles within the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historiography was a major weapon in both arsenals. Protestants argued that the teachings of Jesus and the faith of the primitive church had become distorted by the hierarchy of the church. (They differed among themselves as to the precise date at which the apostasy began.) Catholics sought to prove that the church at the time was the true successor of primitive Christianity and that the church was basically the same as it had always been. Luther and Calvin’s writings reflect the general Protestant view of church history,98 although Luther wrote in the introduction to Robert Barnes’s Vitae Romanorurn pontificum (1535) that it was a wonderful delight and the greatest joy to see that history, as well as Scripture, could be used to attack the papacy. In Eusebian fashion, historians on both sides turned again to the extensive study and employment of documents, to even a greater extent than many humanist historians, who, especially in Italy, were more interested in literary form than documentation, being strongly influenced by the rhetorical tradition.99 The greatest monuments to this historical controversy are the thirteen-volume Historia ecclesiae Christi (1559–74) produced by the Magdeburg Centuriators, under the leadership of Matthias Flacius, and the twelve-volume rejoinder, Annales ecclesiastici, by Caesar Baronius.100 As a result of this use of historiography as a battlefield, ecclesiastical history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries displayed a greater erudition, a more minute analysis of sources, and a more historiographic sophistication than secular history. Unfortunately none of this energy and insight was applied to the study of Israelite and Judean history, although the issue established history as an important element in religious controversy.
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