Gospel Harmonies and the Genres of Biblical Scholarship in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Early modern Gospel harmonies have received little attention and are mostly studied as poor precursors to modern synoptic criticism. This article reassesses the harmony's significance by reconstructing its development ca. 1500–1700, reaching two conclusions. First, it argues that Gospel harmonies acted as a touchstone for critical intellectual developments such as the rise of scientific chronology. Second, it argues that the harmony's transformation over this period, influenced by multiple overlapping disciplines, resulted in it becoming one of the most creative scholarly genres by the late seventeenth century. This interdisciplinarity was simultaneously the prime attraction of the harmony and the reason for its eighteenth-century decline.

INTRODUCTION

For a long time, early modern Gospel harmonies have been studied under the shadow of the great German textual critic Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745–1812) and the Synoptic Problem. Broadly speaking, the Synoptic Problem is concerned with how to understand the literary and historical relationships between the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all of which contain very similar—even overlapping—material, and yet often diverge in order, detail, and wording. The Synoptic Problem asks how and why this situation arose. Its importance lies in its potential to get behind the received texts of the Gospels: to establish their literary interdependence, compositional history, and possible shared sources. Historians and biblical scholars alike have traditionally identified the emergence of the Synoptic Problem with Griesbach's 1774 Greek synopsis, which they view in turn as inaugurating a modern, critical approach to Gospel scholarship that remains important to New Testament criticism to this day.¹

From this perspective, early modern Gospel harmonies appear as an awkward, problematic ancestor of a serious intellectual project: awkward because the methods they deploy appear so indiscriminate compared to the focused literary-critical analyses of modern synoptic criticism, and problematic because the assumptions guiding them seem so alien to the detached critical spirit of their Enlightenment successors. After all, unlike modern synoptic criticism, early modern harmonies tried to erase the discrepancies between the Gospels (including John) and smooth over their differences. As such, many old studies of Gospel harmonies (as well as some recent ones) have posited a sharp discontinuity between early modern harmonists and scholars from Griesbach onward, so that the success of later synoptic criticism relies on rejecting most of its premodern inheritance. These studies have criticized early modern harmonies principally for their belief in the possibility of establishing from the Gospels an accurate chronology of Jesus's life, as well as the confidence in the historicity of the Gospel narratives implied by this pursuit and the textual dismemberment necessary to achieve it.²

Recently an alternative view has arisen, which claims more continuity between early modern and post-Enlightenment approaches.³ However, even these studies suffer from difficulties, perhaps the foremost of which is their overwhelming focus on the harmonies of famous sixteenth-century Reformers.⁴ Such focus only reinforces the view of early modern Gospel harmonies as amateurish, unrefined creatures, treated experimentally and productively by the early Reformers before stagnating in the age of high orthodoxy. Indeed, even those accounts that do push into the seventeenth century judge early modern harmonies by criteria imported from the nineteenth century, such as their willingness to doubt the Evangelists’ inspiration and to compare pericopes with a literary sensibility.⁵

The result of this is that there is no account of early modern Gospel harmonies that takes them on their own terms rather than as poor precursors to Griesbach.⁶ This is important not least because, although neglected today, Gospel harmonies were one of the most popular genres in early modern Europe. They had patristic roots, a distinguished medieval precedent in the Monotessaron (1420) of Jean Gerson (1363–1429), and attracted foremost sixteenth-century thinkers across the confessional spectrum, from the bishop of Ghent, Cornelius Jansen (1510–76), to John Calvin (1509–64). In the seventeenth century, they appealed to glittering names within the history of scholarship, such as the English Hebraist John Lightfoot (1602–75); the French polymath Nicolas Toinard (1628–1706); the Oratorian philosopher-mathematician Bernard Lamy (1640–1715); as well as the theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736). Learned men who did not themselves produce Gospel harmonies admired and studied them, including famous early Enlightenment figures such as John Locke (1632–1704).⁷

However, to construct an adequate explanation for the harmony's preeminence, it is first necessary to discard two common assumptions that retain a strongly nineteenth-century and even modern flavor. The first is the distinction between a harmony and a synopsis, with harmonies synthesizing the Gospels into a single account, and synopses splitting them into parallel columns with similar verses juxtaposed.⁸ Early moderns did disagree over whether to present the texts of the Gospels as an integrated unit or to juxtapose them in columns, but saw this merely as one of many decisions to be made within the umbrella genre of the harmony, and did not use it to distinguish two separate endeavors.⁹ The second is the division of the genre into Augustinian and Osiandrian harmonies, with the former happy to synchronize slightly differing events, and the latter taking even minor disparities in description as indicative of a separate event.¹⁰ The question of how much significance to place on small discrepancies between otherwise similar pericopes was important for all harmonists, but this paradigm struggles to remain useful beyond the mid-sixteenth century, by which point there were far more diverse methodological pressures on Gospel harmonists.¹¹

By putting such assumptions aside and reconstructing the genre of the Gospel harmony as it was perceived in early modernity, this article seeks to return the genre to its rightful place in the history of biblical scholarship. In particular, the article will argue that by the middle of the seventeenth century, Gospel harmonies became one of the most exciting genres for ambitious scholars, edging out other learned disciplines (such as chronology) to take center stage in early modern intellectual culture. A more careful study of Gospel harmonies can therefore not only show why such a seemingly awkward genre attracted so many eminent advocates, but can also grant new insights into major intellectual shifts of the period.

A GENRE IN FLUX

At the start of the sixteenth century, the parameters of the Gospel harmony were set by two distinct but overlapping traditions. The first tradition came from Augustine, who had written his De consensu evangeliorum (On the harmony of the Gospels) to counter the criticisms of the Manichaeans, and as such was apologetic in his aims, intending to defend the Gospels from accusations of contradiction.¹² The second derived from Tatian's Diatessaron and evolved eventually into the medieval Vita Jesu (Life of Jesus) tradition: this aimed to present a simple and coherent narrative of Jesus's life, and was largely pedagogic and meditative in nature, designed to edify and uplift the souls of lay believers.¹³ Throughout the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth, a variety of harmonies were produced that remained within these molds. This can this be seen in, for instance, the German harmony of Lorenz Codomann (1529–90), published in 1568, which aimed both to defend against critiques of Christianity and strengthen the faith of the reader.¹⁴ Neither was this a trend limited to vernacular harmonies. Publishing in 1561 and 1572 respectively, Reinhard Lutz (fl. 1560s) and Alanus Copus (d. 1578) aimed their Latin harmonies at public-facing preachers and teachers, who might not have the resources or time to peruse large numbers of commentaries, but needed a concise account of Jesus's life to inform their sermons. Such harmonies were also intended for pious lay readers who were educated but too preoccupied by worldly, domestic affairs for deep scholarship.¹⁵ A similar motivation guided Paul Crell (1531–79), who based his unadorned harmony, first published in German and Latin in 1566, on the lectures of his teacher, Johannes Bugenhagen (1485–1558).¹⁶ Composing at roughly the same, Martin Chemnitz (1522–86) followed suit, outlining aims which revolved around an Augustinian defense of scripture against the “calumnies of the impious” combined with the devotional aim of enabling “pious minds” to meditate on the life of Jesus.¹⁷ Jean Buisson (ca. 1525–95), writing in 1575, neatly summarized the underlying pedagogical and pious purpose of such harmonies: “nothing could be more useful to Christians” than “perpetually to look and reflect upon the words and deeds, and thereafter the whole life, of our Lord Jesus, and to put it before themselves to imitate.”¹⁸ In other words, Gospel harmonies enabled the exemplary life, words, and deeds of Jesus not just to be admired, but to be emulated.

This purpose was also behind one often commented upon feature of early modern Gospel harmonies: their development of an apparatus of manicules and other paratextual features to enable the reader to follow the text in a multitude of fashions. This was an old feature of Gospel harmonies, reaching back beyond Gerson's Monotessaron, but most influential in early modernity was the harmony of Andreas Osiander (1498–1552), which used fifteen letters to denote which pericopes could be found in which Evangelists, a system that was copied and criticized by many scholars after him.¹⁹ Osiander expressly designed this system to enable the pious to read “with greater fruit,” a comment that only underlines the picture sketched thus far: in the sixteenth century, many Gospel harmonies, following in the footsteps of their medieval forebears, were conceived as teaching or devotional aids, as a way for learned scholars and theologians to serve the needs of those with less education, less time, or fewer resources than themselves.²⁰

This movement down the educational hierarchy in turn affected the content included in harmonies. As was appropriate for working preachers and lay believers, their annotations and commentaries often relied on patristic citations, limited themselves to answering only the most obvious exegetical questions, and refrained from excessive philological detail, preferring broad brushstrokes.²¹ They were chiefly concerned with establishing the internal order of the four Gospels’ narrations, by identifying and then distinguishing/synchronizing near-similar sayings and events, as well as through careful cross-reference and examination of the larger biblical narrative to help with tricky cases (e.g., to establish the precise Jewish feast mentioned in John 5:1). Looking at harmonies primarily in this tradition, and looking no further than ca. 1600, it is understandable why previous scholars identified the divide between Augustine's (synchronizing) and Osiander's (desynchronizing) approach to pericopes as the central issue in early modern harmonies: their purpose and expected audience required them only to address the most glaring repetitions and conflicts in the Evangelists’ presentation of Jesus's life, the sort of conflicts that confused or troublesome parishioners were most likely to inquire about.

However, upon closer inspection, indications of a more distinctively post-Reformation trend become apparent. Already in Osiander and his major rival, Cornelius Jansen, there are hints of confessional motivations. For instance, Osiander's strong desynchronizing bent, as well as his insistence that all the Evangelists followed the correct order of time, stemmed from his desire to protect them from accusations of error, which he viewed as necessary to defend the authority of scripture and thereby the doctrine of sola scriptura.²² Viewed in this light, it is not surprising that Jansen, then a Catholic theologian in Leuven, and later the bishop of Ghent, mockingly countered Osiander's method.²³ But more indicative of the way Gospel harmonies would become confessionalized was a moment near the end of Jansen's account, when he insisted, pace Osiander, that Jesus's washing of his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper took place not at the beginning of the meal, but rather directly before the institution of the Eucharist, after the eating of the lamb.²⁴ As Jansen went on to argue, this order of events confirmed Catholic Eucharistic practice, as it demonstrated the spiritual cleanness required to receive the Eucharist. Catholic Gospel harmonies after Jansen continued to argue for this confessionalized order of events, and Protestants (following Osiander) refuted it in turn, with the theological overtones drawn out in increasing detail.²⁵

This kind of exegetical confessionalization, exploiting the opportunities offered by individual verses to score a point for some doctrinal or dogmatic debate, would be greatly extended by John Calvin (1509–64). Compared with his contemporaries working in the Vita Jesu tradition, Calvin was far less concerned with developing the piety of simple readers than with infusing Gospel harmonies with topics of controversial theology. At any given moment Calvin could be found not encouraging his readers to meditate on the life of Christ, but condemning the “folly of the papists” on matters from justification to baptismal practice to the observance of the Sabbath to purgatory to ecclesiology.²⁶ Where Jansen used his harmonization of the accounts of the Last Supper to offer support, incidentally, for one aspect of the Catholic communion, Calvin dedicated his discussion to rebutting every aspect of it, from transubstantiation to making the sign of the cross over the host to barring believers from drinking from the chalice.²⁷ This new intensification of focus was in turn linked to another change in Calvin's harmony: whereas men like Osiander and Jansen had organized their annotations by chapter, with each chapter focused on a discrete part of Jesus's life, Calvin keyed his annotations to specific words or phrases from scripture itself, bringing his work closer to the more scholarly-facing annotationes genre.²⁸

Calvin's harmony marked the beginning of the confessionalization of Gospel harmonies, after which harmonies were increasingly treated like controversial theological endeavors. This is apparent in, for instance, the strong Calvinist uproar against the expanded version of Osiander's harmony, published in 1565 by the then Lutheran Charles Dumoulin (1500–66).²⁹ It is at this point (the nascent polemicization of the harmony genre) that most studies conclude, but this is where things become exciting. For in the early 1570s another, very different field would become important to would-be harmonists: chronology, the discipline responsible for dating past events and structuring the timeline of history. However, in order to understand the changes undergone by harmonies from the 1570s on, it is necessary first to understand their relationship to chronology prior to this point, while the genre was still in flux and under the strong influence of pedagogical, devotional traditions.

Chronology, as Anthony Grafton has shown, was a central plank of early modern intellectual culture, and its findings had always been relevant to Gospel harmonies.³⁰ This relevance is epitomized in the case of the Passion. The Passion was, put simply, one of the most important theological and historical cruxes of early modern scholarship.³¹ It was also one of the most confusing. On the one hand, the basic outline of the Passion seemed clear: Jesus was crucified and died on Friday afternoon, with the Last Supper taking place the evening before (Matthew 27:61–28:1; Mark 15:21–47; Luke 23:44–56; John 19:31–37). The problem came in how to align these events with Passover. Passover took place on the evening of the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan and also marked the beginning of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which began with a high feast day, a day of no work, on 15 Nisan. Mark, Matthew, and Luke seemed to imply that the Last Supper was also the Passover seder, the meal at which the sacrificial Passover lambs were eaten on the evening of Thursday 14 Nisan, which meant that the Crucifixion must have happened on Friday 15 Nisan (Matthew 26:17–19; Mark 14:12–16; Luke 22:7–15). Several comments in John, however, indicated that he believed the Passover seder took place on the evening of the Friday on which Jesus was crucified, which would make the day of Jesus's death 14 Nisan, and would mean that the dinner he ate with his disciples the evening before (on 13 Nisan) was just an ordinary meal.

A series of other problems flowed from this discrepancy. For instance, if the synoptics were correct, how could the trial, Crucifixion, and burial of Jesus have taken place on 15 Nisan, a day of no work? Fortunately for harmonists, chronologers had long found an ingenious solution for this problem, using a feature of the Jewish calendar known as dehiyyot, or postponements. As early as the twelfth century, Rupert of Deutz (ca. 1075/80–ca. 1129) had argued that because 15 Nisan fell on a Friday—the day before the Sabbath—in the year of Jesus's death, the whole set of activities around Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread were postponed by a day, in order to avoid having two days in a row on which it was required to refrain from work (the high feast day on Friday followed by an ordinary Sabbath).³² Thus, recourse to the details of the Jewish calendar could eliminate the synoptic-John conflict: Jesus and his disciples must have celebrated Passover on the biblically mandated date of the evening of 14 Nisan, as the synoptics described, while the contemporary Jewish communities postponed it to 15 Nisan, explaining John's references to a celebration on the day of the Crucifixion.

There were a host of other possible solutions to the synoptic-John conflict inherited from the church fathers, but the postponement theory, backed by historical chronology, was by far the most popular among early sixteenth-century Gospel harmonists. Jansen briefly outlined the solution as found in Rupert of Deutz and noted admiringly how it enabled both Jesus and contemporary Jews to celebrate the Passover legitimately, the former following the time ordained “from the law of God,” the latter following the time from the “legitimate tradition of their forefathers.”³³ Calvin did the same, declaring that it was very well established that Jewish feast days were translated to the Sabbath should they fall on a Friday, to avoid having two continuous days of rest.³⁴ He even went a step further to affirm that the dehiyyot had been instituted after the Babylonian captivity and delivered by a heavenly oracle, therefore affirming their legitimacy for Jewish society—even if Jesus, given his mission to fulfil the Law, had returned to the biblical precept.³⁵

Thus, chronology offered a neat solution to one of the foremost problems faced by Gospel harmonists and yet, at this point in time, the detail expressed in such harmonies was a significant simplification, even a misrepresentation, of what chronologers had actually established. For as the expert chronologer Sebastian Münster (1488–1552) made clear in his 1527 work on the Hebrew calendar, the dehiyyot worked in a more complicated way than Calvin or Jansen had understood. Drawing piecemeal from the Babylonian Talmud and Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), Münster explained that the mandate that prohibited Passover from falling on a Friday was part of a larger set of rules designed to prevent Yom Kippur from falling on a Friday or a Sunday and Hoshanah Rabbah from falling on the Sabbath, both of which would have been problematic.³⁶ Furthermore, as Münster explained, the dehiyyot were not instituted on top of the calendar ad hoc as the feast arose (so that, e.g., the first day of Passover would be celebrated on 16 Nisan rather than 15 Nisan), but were incorporated into the Jewish calendar in advance by working out on which days the festivals were due to fall and then delaying Rosh Hashanah, the festival instituting the New Year, by a day or two in order to ensure that certain feasts never fell on certain days.³⁷ While Münster was happy to retain the dehiyyot as a solution for the Passion problem, his greater specification about the mechanics of how they interacted with the Jewish calendar did have one curious implication: in order to celebrate an un-postponed Passover, Jesus and his disciples would have had to have followed a different calendar from everyone else around them since the New Year.³⁸

That Gospel harmonists remained unconcerned by the greater level of specificity offered by specialized scholars like Münster and were content to refer to Rupert of Deutz's cruder outline is telling, especially given that Münster himself was hardly cutting-edge—the same details had been noted by Paul of Middelburg (1446–1534) and Paul of Burgos (1351–1435) before him.³⁹ Jansen was even aware of Paul of Burgos, but preferred to give Rupert's comments on the grounds that Paul's analysis was more prolix without adding value.⁴⁰ Calvin likely took his comment about the dehiyyot's divine revelation, which came originally from an eleventh-century petihah (an introductory text to a piyyut), from Münster, and yet despite this he did not see fit to incorporate any of Münster's more specific details about how the dehiyyot actually worked into his harmony.⁴¹ And many harmonists, especially those working in the pious-pedagogic tradition described above, did not even bother to engage with this problem at all, given that the internal order of key events matched (Last Supper followed by Crucifixion) and (presumably) lay readers and working preachers had little interest in the obscurities of the Jewish calendar. However, chronology in the sixteenth century was a dynamic, expanding, and fast-moving discipline, and its relevance to Gospel harmonies was not limited to the Passion but touched upon almost every other aspect of Jesus's life. And so, as chronologers across Europe began to test out the reach and power of their insights, Gospel harmonies were one of the first genres caught in their ripple effect.

THE CHRONOLOGICAL TURN

One of the most important chronological issues to bear on Gospel harmonies, and indeed the issue that would first force harmonists to engage seriously with the discipline, was the question of the length of Jesus's public ministry. There were two interlocking ways scholars could approach this problem. The first was by counting the number of Passovers mentioned by the Evangelists as having occurred during this period. John, widely considered to be the most chronologically attentive writer, was particularly important for this endeavor, and depending on how John 5:1's reference to “a feast of the Jews” was interpreted, this count was either three (John 2:13, John 6:4, John 13:1) or four (John 2:13, John 5:1, John 6:4, John 13:1).⁴² The second was by working out where Jesus's baptism and death fell on the better-evidenced timelines of classical Roman and Greek history. This appeared tantalizingly possible thanks to the presence of highly suggestive chronological data in the New Testament. The first was in Luke 3:1–2, which identified the beginning of John's ministry (shortly after which Jesus was baptized) as occurring in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judah. The second was in the fact that Jesus's Passion came with three crucial pieces of calendrical and historical data: it occurred on 14/15 Nisan, the first month of the lunar Jewish ecclesiastical calendar; on a Friday; and before Pontius Pilate's term had ended.

These scatterings of astronomical, calendrical, and historical clues were catnip to early modern chronologers. The challenge was to align them in the same calendar so as to obtain a fixed date for each. Chronologers rose en masse to tackle this problem, and yet Gospel harmonists remained relatively unperturbed by their arguments, happy to follow their chosen patristic precedent for a three (Epiphanius) or four (Eusebius) Passover ministry, until one particular chronologer forced them to pay attention.

That chronologer was Gerhard Mercator (1512–94), and his innovation was twofold. First, Mercator made a radical revision to the timeline of Jesus's ministry. His chronological calculations, which relied on synchronizing events in biblical and classical history with a canon of dated eclipses taken from Ptolemy's Almagest, had persuaded him that the common calculation of the period from the fifteenth year of Tiberius (28–29 AD) to Valentinian I (364 AD) was one year too short.⁴³ This missing year suggestively combined with another problem early modern chronologers had faced, which was how to maintain Bede's traditional Crucifixion year of 34 AD, given that the most authoritative recent dating of Jesus's baptism, by Onofrio Panvinio (1529–68) in his analysis of the Fasti (official Roman chronicles), placed it in 30 AD.⁴⁴ Putting these pieces together, Mercator in 1569 advanced a novel idea: the missing extra year of history should be located in Jesus's public ministry, which therefore, contrary to all previous accounts, lasted just over four years and included five Passovers.

This revision had manifest implications for Gospel harmonists, and Mercator went a step further than other chronologers to highlight them. His chronology offered a brief “speculum harmoniae euangelicae” (mirror of a Gospel harmony), which shored up his chronological arguments by showing that they agreed with scripture.⁴⁵ In this speculum, Mercator offered a schematic overview of how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John might be aligned so as to produce a four-year ministry, even mimicking the multi-columnar layout of contemporary harmonies (albeit with paraphrases rather than full quotations), and highlighting in a concluding summary where his account differed from previous harmonies, such as that by Dumoulin.⁴⁶ As a direct intervention into Gospel harmonies, this was a bold move: it implicitly enveloped the whole genre as a subsidiary or secondary feature of chronology, the concluding act of that highly technical, complex pursuit. Yet it was an intervention that Mercator extended in 1592, when he turned his speculum into a fully fledged harmony. Here Mercator explained how he was unable to ignore the fact that previous harmonies rested on such poor chronological grounds and offered his own harmony as a model of chronological accuracy, the foremost manifestation of which was its integration of his five-Passover theory, a theory that he explained to his reader at length.⁴⁷

That Mercator's harmony functioned as a vehicle to further his chronological arguments already indicates a shift in the nature and audience of the Gospel harmony toward a learned, scholarly audience. This shift is exemplified by the fact that Mercator assumed his readers were familiar with his earlier chronology and referred them to it for the “mathematical and historical demonstration” of his timeline.⁴⁸ And yet by 1592, Mercator could afford to feel more confident about the encroachment of chronology into the arena of the harmonists, because another chronologer had made the same argument in an even more audacious fashion.

In 1583, Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609) published his great work of technical chronology, De Emendatione Temporum (On the correction of the times). Book 6 of this work was dedicated to outlining the times and ministry of Jesus and, even more so than Mercator, Scaliger used this outline to single out the Gospel harmonists’ approach to their field for merciless criticism. The harmonists were undeniably distinguished in doctrine and piety, but they had fallen short in a central aspect of their endeavor—chronology.⁴⁹ Just one example of this was in the length of Jesus's ministry: Scaliger (like Mercator) argued for the chronological necessity of a five-Passover ministry, and he had no qualms explaining how Gospel harmonists’ ignorance of this had resulted in severe misreadings of the evangelical narratives. In particular, it had forced them to squeeze the entirety of Matthew 4–14 into a single year (which Scaliger believed was narratologically implausible as well as chronologically impossible), whereas, so Scaliger argued, the events of Matthew 12–14 constituted a year in their own right, and ought to be placed between the activities of John 5 and 6.⁵⁰

Thus, following up on this criticism, Scaliger's chronology carefully outlined the key events, scriptural witnesses, and chronological details of each year of Jesus's life, dating each according to the Jewish annus mundi; the years from the accession of Tiberius counted in both Jewish and Roman fashion; and in his own Julian period, the 7,980 year calendrical cycle which combined the twenty-eight-year solar cycle, the nineteen-year lunar cycle, and the fifteen-year indiction cycle.⁵¹ But Scaliger was not content to stop here. Looking over the history of Gospel harmonies, Scaliger systematically picked out their most knotty difficulties, and offered innovative solutions to them.

One such knot was the meaning of the “second-first Sabbath” (ἐν σαββάτῳ δευτεροπρώτῳ) on which Jesus and his disciples plucked the ears of corn in Luke 6:1. The meaning of this strange term (now considered to be a corruption) had long caused confusion among scholars, with Erasmus even recounting Jerome's tale that Gregory of Nazianzus, upon being asked about the meaning of the term, had deflected with a joke to avoid answering.⁵² Scaliger, however, thought he had penetrated the mystery. He noted that the second day of Passover (16 Nisan) began the counting of the Omer, the seven weeks until Shavuot: thus, he claimed, all the weeks in this period had been numbered “from the second day of Passover” (ἀπὸ τῆς δευτέρας πάσχατος). Week 1 of the Omer count was therefore colloquially known as “the first week from the second day,” a bulky descriptor that was abbreviated to the “second-first week” (ἑβδομὰς δευτερόπρωτος), thus making the “second-first” Sabbath the Sabbath that fell within this week.⁵³ Scaliger was unclear where he sourced this idea from, although he later implied it came from his observation that contemporary Jews used a roughly analogous expression: it could also have been inspired by a phrase used by Josephus.⁵⁴ In any case, his was an imaginative and clever new solution to an old problem, which subsequent scholars cited with admiration, even if not always agreement.⁵⁵

But the greatest of Scaliger's contributions and the centerpiece of book 6 was his solution to the problem of the Passion. Scaliger roundly dismissed all previous solutions to this problem, including the postponement theory, as mere variations on the old Greek Orthodox solution that Jesus anticipated the Jewish Passover.⁵⁶ Scaliger began his own solution by breaking apart Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which had become synchronous in modern times but which were originally two separate festivals with two separate starts. So in the time of Jesus, he argued, the first full day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread was 14 Nisan and was an ordinary day, whereas the first full day of Passover was 15 Nisan, and was a High Holy Day of no work.⁵⁷ Next, he emphasized that in fact Jesus's Crucifixion had taken place not on the first full day of Passover (15 Nisan), but on the first day of Unleavened Bread (14 Nisan). Jewish days, it was well known, ran from evening to evening, but Scaliger insisted that each day properly began with evening, followed by morning: this meant that the Last Supper and the Passover Seder, both of which took place on the evening of 14 Nisan, could in fact take place on the same day as and yet nevertheless be before the Crucifixion on the morning of 14 Nisan.⁵⁸ To explain John's references to a πάσχα (pascha) after the Crucifixion, Scaliger explained that a second sacrifice, of two young bulls and a ram (Numbers 28:27), was offered on the evening of 15 Nisan, immediately after the Crucifixion. Unlike the Passover seder, this second sacrifice and subsequent meal took place in the Temple, not private homes (hence the need to avoid defilement as described in John 18:28). Moreover, that this second sacrifice could legitimately be called a πάσχα (pascha, as in John 13:1), just like the Passover seder on the fourteenth, could be shown by examining the term πάσχα (פסח in Hebrew) in its original biblical and rabbinic settings, where (Scaliger argued) it had a far more flexible usage than contemporary commentators understood.⁵⁹

This solution, as Scaliger proudly outlined, neatly resolved the issues that had plagued previous accounts, such as how Jesus's trial and Crucifixion could have happened on a holy day of no work.⁶⁰ It also entirely sidestepped the question of the postponements, since moving the first day of Passover to the Sabbath meant that the postponement rules were irrelevant.⁶¹ But in some ways even more important than the conclusions Scaliger came to were the moves he made in doing so. For in making these arguments Scaliger did not just criticize Gospel harmonists for their neglect of chronology: he also criticized them for their neglect of the Jewish texts essential to unravelling the knots in the Gospels. These texts were not limited to better-known works and authors such as the Talmud or Maimonides: even genres such as the Azharot, liturgical poems, offered key insights for the history of the Gospels and “anyone who ignores these works because they think that they are useless for understanding what happens in the Gospels, will squander oil and labour.”⁶² In the broader context of book 6, this appeared not just as a critique of the conclusions of Gospel harmonists, but rather an attack on the very nature of the genre.

Here, Scaliger consolidated the greatest issues that lay beneath the harmonies (the second-first Sabbath, the length of Jesus's ministry, the events of the Passion) and showed comprehensively how only the challenging, deeply technical tools of chronology and philology could resolve them. This was an implicit argument for a drastically different vision of the aims, audiences, and expertise of a would-be harmonist than that which had prevailed hitherto. In Scaliger's eyes, the role of the harmonist was not to be a friendly teacher assisting preachers and lay readers: the questions the genre addressed were too complex and too important for that, and the largely literary techniques of earlier harmonists were inadequate to answer them. The harmonist should instead, much like Scaliger himself, be a polymathic scholar working at the height of his powers; if harmonists failed to reach this standard, whether by ignorance or contempt for Jewish rituals, then they deserved the criticism that Scaliger was happy to dish out.⁶³

Scaliger was forced to back down from many aspects of this account in the second edition of his De Emendatione Temporum, perhaps the most notable concession of which was that, having been confronted with errors in his calculation of the year of Jesus’s Crucifixion, Scaliger could no longer hold his version of the Passion together, and had to resort (evidently frustrated) to invoking the postponement theory he had so assiduously avoided earlier.⁶⁴ And yet these retractions did not shake Scaliger's conviction that Gospel harmonists were fundamentally mistaken in their approach to the genre, even if he was more polite in expressing it.⁶⁵ Furthermore, those novel aspects of his account which had survived the previous eleven years of criticism, such as his interpretation of the second-first Sabbath, he paraded in his prolegomena with an unrestrained confidence.⁶⁶

Mercator and Scaliger's intervention into Gospel harmonies contributed to a significant change in the genre. This change can be seen not just in the production of deeply chronologically derived Latin harmonies such as Mercator's, mentioned above, but even in vernacular harmonies such as that produced in 1589 by Heinrich Bünting (1545–1606). Bünting today is famed as the writer of a heavily eclipse-focused, astronomical chronology based on the 1551 Prutenic Tables of Erasmus Reinhold (1511–53), and yet only one year beforehand he had preempted much of this technical work in nothing less than a Gospel harmony.⁶⁷ Despite being written in the vernacular, this text could not have been further from the devotional aims of earlier vernacular harmonists like Codomann. Bünting explicitly characterized his readers as “Theologi und Mathematici” (theologians and mathematicians), and offered them a detailed overview of the historical calendars for the year of Jesus's birth, the first year after his birth, and each year of his preaching ministry, fully marked up in classical astronomical notation (with which he assumed his reader was familiar).⁶⁸

Just as revealing is the harmony of Georg Calixtus (1586–1656), delivered as lectures at the University of Helmstedt in 1618 and published by his students in 1624.⁶⁹ By this point in the early seventeenth century, harmonizing lectures on the Evangelists did not follow the model of Bugenhagen, sticking to internalist comparisons: instead, Calixtus delved without hesitation into the thorniest issues covered by Scaliger, arguing passionately for a five-Passover ministry and citing him almost verbatim on the interpretation of the “second-first” Sabbath, as well as for many other points.⁷⁰ This shift in genre was even tacitly acknowledged in the fact that readers of Calixtus were warned not to try to address such technical issues if they wished to deliver public, popular homilies on Jesus's life. The audience of the written genre of the Gospel harmony and of the public sermon on the Vita Jesu could no longer be assumed to overlap.⁷¹

One of the most striking indications of the late sixteenth-century transformation of Gospel harmonies lies in the fact that earlier harmonists such as Codomann did not lack the skills necessary to produce something in the vein of Bünting or Mercator. Codomann's 1572 Supputatio (Computation), for instance, was a milestone of scientific chronology. Even Osiander had the requisite interests; it was after all he who had advised his son-in-law, Johann Funck (1518–66), to base his chronology on Ptolemy's astronomy.⁷² But at the time these men wrote, the genre of the harmony was not the appropriate vehicle for such scholarship: it took the critiques of Mercator and Scaliger to turn it into one. Moreover, this change was so sudden and compelling that some men who had published in the early sixteenth-century wave of pious harmonies felt the need to update their harmonies to meet the genre's new standards. Jansen, for instance, who in 1549 had dismissed the technicalities of Paul of Burgos's explanation of the dehiyyot as pointlessly prolix, would cite him in 1572 (three years after Mercator made his first intervention) at greater length even than Münster.⁷³

It is important to note that this shift did not necessarily mean that the nascent confessionalization of the genre as evident in Calvin and others died down. As has been shown elsewhere, chronology was a deeply confessionalized practice, and even monuments of scholarship such as Scaliger's De Emendatione Temporum were fraught with theological significance.⁷⁴ If anything, as will be shown later on, this polemical undertone was one of the features that made such fields so exciting. But for now, it can be concluded that while the meditative, pedagogic tradition inherited from the harmonies’ medieval forebears remained strong throughout the period, a different vision of the genre had emerged by the close of the century. Chronologers such as Mercator made undisguised ingressions into the territory of harmonists, and after Scaliger's chronological magnum opus singled the genre out for particular criticism, it underwent a chronological turn and a new kind of harmony was born. It is this kind of scholarly, learned harmony—not the kind by Osiander, Chemnitz, or Calvin—that would attract such attention and excitement throughout the remainder of the period.

THE ASCENT OF THE GOSPEL HARMONY

Even by the early seventeenth century, there were limits to the scope of the harmony. First, harmonists had really taken up only the chronological threads of Scaliger's work, even despite the fact that Scaliger's emphasis was just as much on the necessity of intensive philological investigation, particularly from Hebrew and Jewish sources. Second, the work done in harmonies was still derivative: either an application of one's own chronological studies (as in Mercator and Bünting's case) or an unquestioning adoption of someone else's (as in Calixtus's case).

This is why a second major turn in the genre must be identified with the piecemeal publication of the harmony of the English Hebraist John Lightfoot. Lightfoot began, in 1644, by acknowledging the great shifts that had taken place in Gospel harmonies since Scaliger and offering an extensive set of chronological prolegomena covering issues such as the year and timing of Jesus's birth, relying mostly on the work of the late Elizabethan chronologer, Hebraist Hugh Broughton (1549–1612).⁷⁵ Indeed, the chronological specialization of the harmony by this point is perhaps nowhere clearer than in Lightfoot's description, early in his work, of the functioning and nature of the Jewish calendar, including a full table covering each month of the Jewish year with notes to indicate the placements of festivals, the order of sacerdotal courses (mishmarot) from Jehoiarib to Maaziah, the cycles of parashiyot (Torah readings) corresponding to each week of each month, as well as an explanation of how these differed depending on whether the year was a normal one or (as was necessary given that Jewish months were lunar) an “Intercalary, or Bissextile” (leap) year.⁷⁶ This sort of detailed information, Lightfoot explained, was essential given that “the Reader . . . will have frequent occasion in his reading of the Evangelists, to have his eye upon the passing of the yeere of the Jews.”⁷⁷

This degree of chronological detail already illustrates the new priorities of the genre and its audience: the reader of a Gospel harmony, in English, was now anticipated to need frequent access to an overview of the whole historic Jewish calendar just to make progress through the “sacred History of the Gospell.” However, Lightfoot went a step further than this to take up, with unprecedented focus, the second set of skills advocated by Scaliger: in his words, “to give some account and Story of the State and Customes of the Jewes in these times.”⁷⁸

What this meant in practice becomes clear even upon a brief perusal of Lightfoot's harmony, which is densely packed with quotations, translations, and references to an enormous range of Jewish exegetes, scholars, and texts. Often, Lightfoot's aims were simply to use these sources to give the reader an insight into the historical world behind the text, such as when he deploys Rashi (1040–1105) and Maimonides to explain the constitution, location, and hierarchy of the Sanhedrin—ostensibly purely to illuminate Luke 2:46, “in the temple sitting in the midst of the Doctors.”⁷⁹ At other times, Lightfoot's work was more exploratory and tentative, such as in his discussion of whether the expression in Matthew 3:17, “a voyce from heaven” could be derived from the Talmudic use of the term bat kol (lit. “daughter of a voice”), which designated the means by which divine revelation manifested in the time of the Second Temple.⁸⁰

Such tendencies were amplified in the subsequent parts of his harmony. One of the longest annotations in the second part (1647) is an extended digression on John 1:21, when the Jerusalem priests ask John if he is Elijah. In order to explain the reasons why the priests would ask such a question, Lightfoot translated an impressive range of sources into English, from the well-known thirteenth-century commentary of Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides/Ralbag, 1288–1344) on Kings, to the Synagoga Judaica (Jewish synagogue, 1603) of the Swiss Hebraist Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629), to a lesser-known seventeenth-century commentary on the early prophets by the Syrian rabbi Samuel ben Abraham Laniado (d. 1605).⁸¹ And although Lightfoot was dismissive of the Jewish “opinion of the coming of Elias” and worried about trying his reader's patience, he continued this same level of philological density, mostly from Jewish sources, throughout the rest of his harmony.⁸²

By the time Lightfoot published a second version of his harmony in 1655, such anxieties had disappeared and he spoke with confidence about his purpose: to clear “some of the most conspicuous difficulties” of the Gospels from “Talmudicall collections,” since there were “multitudes of passages not possibly to be explained, but from these Records.”⁸³ By this point, the Gospel harmony was no longer simply a vehicle to present the advances made in other fields. Instead, Lightfoot offered his harmony as the best place to test out and defend the value of his unprecedentedly focused studies in Jewish texts for New Testament scholarship. His preface not only made this point at length, but even gave an example of the value of such studies, using the old chestnut of the meaning of the tricky transliterated Aramaic word ῥακά in Matthew 5:22.⁸⁴ Drawing on texts from Maimonides to the Midrash Tanhuma to the Talmud, Lightfoot not only sketched out the full semantic range of ῥακά (which he interpreted as a scornful nickname), but also contextualized Matthew's comments thoroughly within the context of rabbinic law and punishment.⁸⁵

Just as in the case of Scaliger, none of the above meant that Lightfoot was not invested in weaponizing his philological insights for theological causes. Lightfoot happily showed at length how, for example, the Septuagint and Hebraic background of δικαιώματα (ordinances) in Luke 1:6 undermined the “Romanist” notion of justification; or how rabbinic attitudes to marriage and virginity meant it was unlikely that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus.⁸⁶ The point rather is to note that, before Lightfoot, the Gospel harmony had followed in the footsteps of scholarly innovation, absorbing but not actively contributing to the advances of disciplines like chronology. But with the publication of Lightfoot's three-part harmony, the genre staked its claim as a vehicle for experimental, ambitious, and interdisciplinary research—even when written, as Lightfoot's was, in the vernacular.

One reason the harmony could attract such work was thanks to its fruitfully ambiguous status between the genres of the commentary, the chronology, and the ecclesiastical history. Throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the harmony absorbed methods and influences from each of these genres, and yet without being bound to some of their more arduous generic conventions, and while retaining their potential to be used as a vessel for controversial theology. Scholars could deal with the most interesting and important challenges presented in each discipline (the length of Jesus's ministry; the timing of the Passion; the meaning of difficult terms like ῥακά) and switch rapidly from establishing the date beginning the Babylonian Captivity to reconstructing the history of Sanhedrin presidency in the time of Herod—yet such diversity was still given a coherent shape and structure by the project's underlying purpose to sketch out the life (or, as in Lightfoot's hands, the entire ancient Jewish world) of Jesus.⁸⁷

The way in which the Gospel harmony absorbed a variety of disciplines also meant that it had the potential to become a highly productive genre, a genre which could, by bringing together a medley of diverse texts and tools, act as a catalyst for the creation of new ideas and even new fields of study. In the case of Lightfoot, the process of writing his (never finished) Gospel harmony played a crucial role in developing the basic concerns and methods of his now far more famous work, the multivolumed Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae (Hebrew and Talmudic hours, 1658–74; posthumously to 1678). This is evident not just from the overlap in content of these works, or from Lightfoot's prefatory methodological remarks as described above, but also from the fact that Lightfoot's harmony was littered with references to the multitude of alternative illustrations he could offer from Jewish literature, all of which he then eventually did offer from 1658 onward.⁸⁸ It was through his harmony that Lightfoot realized the need for a more comprehensive, focused (and Latin) demonstration of the approach he had begun to try out, with increasing conviction, from 1644 to 1655.

From the mid-seventeenth century on, then, I would identify a second shift in the nature of the harmony: its acceptance as an interdisciplinary genre with the potential to showcase a scholar at his best. The harmonies of men like the German theologian Christoph Althofer (1606–60) began with technical discussions of the mixed Hellenic-Hebraic style of the New Testament writers, and offered their readers dizzying references to famous scholars, as well as showing off their philological prowess with detailed discussions of (for instance) the etymology of contested terms like μάννα.⁸⁹

Even some vernacular harmonies, like that written by Samuel Cradock (ca. 1621–1706) in English in 1668, gained a surprisingly dense scholarly apparatus, hemmed in with Latin quotations from great names like Claude Saumaise (1588–1653), Buxtorf, Scaliger, Valentin Schindler (1543–1604), Ralph Cudworth (1617–88), and Henry Hammond (1605–60), and including an overview of issues such as the “method and order” of the Passover seder “in use among the Jews, as they are delivered to us by their own Writers.”⁹⁰ Offering a survey essay on the possibility of making a harmony of the whole Bible, Samuel Torshel (1605–50) acknowledged the immense range of disciplines with which harmonizers had to be familiar, including the writers of “ecclesiasticall Chronology, such as are versed in Rabbinicall and Talmudique learning,” as well as those who “have studied the Iewish laws and Rites” and “Scripture Antiquities.”⁹¹ This was no casual work of devotion but a ruthless scholarly endeavor to be attempted only by the best and bravest of scholars, men who could not only master but potentially even surpass great scholars like John Selden (1584–1654). Indeed, Lightfoot, introducing the second part of his Gospel harmony alongside his chronological harmony of the Old Testament, referred anxiously to Torshel's words in the preface to his reader, wondering if his task were not fitter for Selden, “the Learnedst man upon the earth,” or James Ussher (1581–1656), “the magazine of all manner of Literature and knowledge.”⁹²

All this is not to say that the older trend of devotional harmonies described at the beginning of this article disappeared: such works were regularly produced throughout the century, in Latin as well as in the vernacular, by Catholic as well as Protestant authors.⁹³ However, their authors increasingly showed an awareness that more was expected from them at this point. Antoine Arnauld (1612–94), for instance, writing in 1653, spent several pages outlining recent scholarship on the date of Herod's death, Jesus’ birth, and the length of his preaching ministry, with references to Scaliger, Panvinio, Cesar Baronius (1538–1607), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), before apologizing for being “sparing” on these erudite matters and for centering instead a pious, devotional mode of reading.⁹⁴ Prothasius Henriet (d. 1688), writing seven years later, explicitly outlined his purpose of building faith and enlarging the heart of the reader, yet nevertheless added an extensive index of the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic names mentioned in the Evangelists, as well as their ancient historical regions.⁹⁵ By the mid-seventeenth century, the longstanding pious-pedagogic approach to the Gospel harmony was no longer hegemonic, and those authors who wished to return to its older aims felt the need to defend their now outmoded view of the genre.

THE HEYDAY OF THE GOSPEL HARMONY

By about the 1660s, the Gospel harmony was what might be called an apex genre: it rested on top of a large number of other disciplines, eclectically mixing their most exciting features and generating in turn new, impressive endeavors, such as the Horae Hebraicae. Harmonies became the hot genre for brilliant, ambitious polymaths, just as chronology had been in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, and it was partly this prestige and dynamism that accorded the genre such prominence among the outputs of seventeenth-century scholars.

The notion of an apex genre is best exemplified by the harmony of Nicholas Toinard, which he worked on throughout the 1660s and 1670s. Within this work, Toinard entirely reimagined the structure and mise-en-page of the harmony to enable it to reflect more perfectly its newly ambitious, scholarly nature. In Toinard's harmony, each page was headed with detailed rows of chronological data specifying the era, period, and epoch in which the Gospel events took place, including the “Constantinopolitan era” (the Eastern Orthodox Church's Byzantine calendar, based on the Septuagint); Scaliger's Julian period; the Jewish annus mundi; the biblical sabbatical and jubilee years; the Julian Calendar; the Dionysian era; and the names of the sitting Roman consuls, as well as the years from important events such as the accession of various Roman emperors, the prefects and procurators of Roman Judaea, and more.⁹⁶

Underlying these neatly presented eras lay a mass of difficult intellectual labor: for example, Toinard explained in detail how, in order to establish the correct year of creation, he first had to reconcile the twenty-year discrepancy between the two major chronologers of his age, Denis Pétau (1583–1652) and James Ussher.⁹⁷ Toinard's skills were not limited to chronology, however: as he explained in the preface, his harmony also bore the fruit of his text-critical labors, as he had discovered errors in the commonly cited verse divisions of Stephanus's 1624 New Testament, and so had to correct these in order to cite the Greek text in his harmony.⁹⁸ Expertise in classical scholarship and history was also required: Toinard synchronized a range of events in Roman history with the events described in his harmony, even down to relatively tangential incidents such as the timing of the adultery of Julia the Elder, daughter of Augustine and wife of Tiberius.⁹⁹ Toinard also went out of his way to harmonize the Gospel narratives with important historical witnesses such as Josephus, devoting some time, for instance, to explaining why Josephus identified the husband of Herodias as Herod, when the Gospel of Mark identified him as Phillipus.¹⁰⁰

Although complete proofs of Toinard's harmony were available in 1678, it was only printed in larger numbers posthumously in 1707. And while the core of the harmony printed in 1707 was the same as that which Toinard circulated in 1678 (including its elaborate mise-en-page), the extensive notes taken from Toinard's manuscripts and suffixed (following his instructions) by his friends to the 1707 edition only further underlined the extent of the scholarly labor—across chronology, classical history, text criticism, and philology—underpinning the work.¹⁰¹

The crowning jewel of Toinard's harmony, however, was his account of the Passion. Toinard dedicated the years 1661–62 to studying this topic, and in the process became convinced that it was impossible for Jesus and his disciples to have celebrated Passover on the night of the Last Supper, whether at the same time as the Jewish community or before them as a rejection of the dehiyyot.¹⁰² Instead, Toinard returned to the Greek patristic argument that Jesus had celebrated the Last Supper as an ordinary meal on the evening of Thursday 13 Nisan, and that the Crucifixion took place on 14 Nisan at exactly the same time as the Passover, specifically at the precise moment that Jesus's type, the paschal lamb, was eaten.¹⁰³

This was a surprising conclusion. Almost no Western European had embraced the Greek interpretation of the Passion for centuries, largely because it enabled Jesus to have used leavened bread in instituting the Last Supper, a major point of controversy between the Eastern Orthodox and Western churches.¹⁰⁴ Yet despite its old outlines, Toinard's conclusion rested on some novel arguments and assumptions. First, Toinard had accepted the modern chronological consensus that the Passion had taken place on 3 April 33 AD.¹⁰⁵ Next, he had used the Philolaic tables of Kepler and Ismaël Boulliau (1605–94) to calculate that the moment of astronomical lunar conjunction (syzygy) immediately preceding this date would have occurred in Jerusalem on Thursday, March 19 about an hour after midday.¹⁰⁶ Finally, he tried to establish the earliest time after this conjunction at which the new moon would become visible to the human eye, because this would be the point at which the witnesses waiting in the countryside could have seen the new moon and reported it to the beit din (rabbinical court), who could then declare Rosh Hashanah. Toinard worked out that the earliest moment of visibility did not occur until Friday, March 20, which meant that the day consecrated as 1 Nisan would have begun on Friday evening, at the start of the Sabbath (March 21). This meant that 14 Nisan in that year must also have been a Friday, meaning that the Passover seder took place on Friday evening, and the Last Supper took place the evening before, on 13 Nisan. Thus, there was no way for Jesus to celebrate the Passover seder at the same time as the Last Supper and still celebrate it legitimately, since the Jewish community observed the true, biblically ordained date.

However, this chronological argument was not all, for Toinard's argument also rested on a second assumption: that the Passover was only legitimate if sacrificed in the Temple of Jerusalem with the general consent of the people. Thus, the whole premise of the postponement theory—that Jesus could somehow celebrate a legitimate Passover seder with just himself and his disciples—was fundamentally flawed and contrary to Passover rites as set out in Jewish law.¹⁰⁷ Toinard did not explicitly unpack the evidence behind this assumption, but it was a position that had been gaining ground among the foremost Hebraists of the 1630s and 1640s, largely on the basis of more careful readings of the Mishnah Pesahim and Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, and which had deterred more careful scholars like Johannes Cloppenburg (1592–1652), Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), and Lightfoot from accepting the postponement theory.¹⁰⁸

The only question, then, lay in how Toinard's revamped Greek Passion account could avoid the use of leavened bread in the Last Supper, given that this now occurred the day before Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Toinard tried to get around this point by arguing that while unleavened bread was required by precept from the evening ending 14 Nisan, in practice this meant leaven had to be eliminated from houses by the start of 14 Nisan. Thus, all of the time-consuming preparations for the feast (such as the search for leaven, the cooking of the matzah, etc.) must have taken place on the thirteenth, and so Jesus would not have disrupted these proceedings by using leavened bread in the Last Supper.¹⁰⁹

Toinard's revision of the Passion was radical, cutting against the grain of centuries of consensus that Jesus had, in some sense, celebrated the Passover at the time of the Last Supper. Although not widely disseminated until 1707, his ideas gained admirers among those who read them, with Boulliau so impressed that he suppressed his own planned treatise on the Passover and Last Supper to avoid being proven wrong.¹¹⁰ Toinard's arguments were particularly appealing to Catholic scholars because they neatly avoided the longstanding discomfort many Catholics felt with the way in which the postponement theory had Jesus (at best) breaking from contemporary ecclesiastical consensus about the date of a major festival or (at worst, following Münster) breaking from the entire ecclesiastical calendar from the New Year on. The Jesuit Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) was the first to raise this problem; it was taken up by Cardinal Baronius, and these men started up a long line of Catholics who argued for the celebration of the Jewish Passover and the Last Supper simultaneously on the evening of Thursday 14 Nisan.¹¹¹ It is not hard to guess the reason for this Catholic discomfort: as Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) gleefully pointed out against Baronius, the idea of Jesus rejecting cumulative ecclesiastical tradition for the sake of a return to scripture worked nicely to defend all sorts of Protestant doctrines.¹¹²

However, Toinard's work also attracted admirers beyond his Catholic correspondents. John Locke was enraptured with Toinard's harmony, continually pestering him to publish it properly and stating that no other work was “so useful to me in reading and understanding the Gospel.”¹¹³ Locke's interest was not limited to Toinard, but rather encompassed the whole genre of the harmony: he took extensive notes from Toinard as well as from the other famous harmony of the day, that of Lightfoot, in his journal; suggested emendations to Toinard's proofs; and even partially transplanted the schema of Toinard's harmonization into his Reasonableness of Christianity (1695).¹¹⁴ Locke was also convinced that Toinard's harmony lay behind no less than the Critical History of the New Testament (1689) of Richard Simon (1638–1712), although he used the language of plagiarism rather than inspiration.¹¹⁵ By this point, the Gospel harmony (not the chronology) was the venue best suited for one's daring new exposition of the Passion, and it was the Gospel harmony that inspired and gave structure to the major intellectual endeavors of the day.

Indeed, the Gospel harmony would reach something like its peak around the same time as the productions of Locke and Simon, with the publication of the harmony of the French Oratorian and mathematician Bernard Lamy. Lamy had read Toinard's work in private and, much to Locke's dismay, implanted Toinard's whole revised account of the Passion into his own harmony, published in 1689 before Toinard could get to press. Lamy's harmony was in many ways (especially its mise-en-page), less innovative and older-fashioned than Toinard's, but at its core lay a series of dissertations fully devoted to explaining Toinard's account of the Passion and dispelling any potential objections to it. The Passion was the only issue in the entire harmony for which Lamy resorted to this dissertation model: even decisions which would later prove to be controversial (such as his identification of Mary Magdalene with Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus) did not receive such attention in his first edition. There was no ambiguity over what Lamy considered to be the most important question for Gospel harmonists in 1689.

Within these dissertations, Lamy was lighter than Toinard on the chronological arguments underpinning his account, but he covered in far more detail the philological and historical evidence supporting it. Using Maimonides and extracts from Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho, Lamy laid out as an axiom the idea that “the paschal lamb could not be properly sacrificed anywhere other than in the Temple at Jerusalem.”¹¹⁶ He even explained what would happen if there were too many lambs to be sacrificed on the altar in the relatively short period of time it was legally permissible to do so: they could be sacrificed instead in the atrium of the Temple, with their blood later sprinkled on the altar.¹¹⁷ Furthermore, a sacrifice at the Temple was not the only requirement: a legitimate Passover demanded the presence of both priests and “the whole multitude of Jews” to observe them. Since the atrium of the Temple could not fit so many people, they were divided into three congregations, each watching a different part of the sacrifice.¹¹⁸ Lamy cited the Talmud at length to make this point, bolstering his position with comments from Josephus to prove that a private Passover separate from the rest of the Jewish community could not be legitimate.¹¹⁹ One of the only witnesses who seemed to contradict this point was Philo, and thus Lamy went out of his way to undermine Philo's authority by describing his position as schismatic, followed only by the Egyptian Jews who were abhorred by the majority of law-abiding Jews.¹²⁰

Thus, Lamy brought one of the underlying assumptions behind Toinard's argument out into the open, cutting the postponement theory down at the root by rejecting any possibility of a valid Passover separate from the communal observance of contemporary Judaism. He performed much the same duty for Toinard's explanation as to why Jesus must have used unleavened bread at the Last Supper, despite it taking place a day before the feast that banned leaven. In this case, Lamy cited evidence from Maimonides, Johannes Buxtorf, the Talmud, and Isaac Alfasi (1013–1103) to show that the expurgation of leaven began at the end of 13 Nisan, effectively extending the Feast of Unleavened Bread by a day and meaning that leaven could not have been present during the Last Supper.¹²¹

Moreover, Lamy did not make such arguments without a broader confessional purpose. He highlighted throughout his account the typological benefit of his (Toinard's) harmonization: the Crucifixion of the true lamb, Jesus, could take place at the exact time as the sacrifice of the typical Passover lambs.¹²² Lamy even hinted at a way in which this new Passion account might be especially useful for Catholics: it might have “the ability to confute the heresies” of Protestants over the Eucharist.¹²³ Since the apostles did not eat the Jewish Passover, all of their rituals and words at the Last Supper could not be dismissed as merely symbolic or figurative, reflective of normal Passover customs. Instead, these words and rituals must have been independently meaningful, indicating that the apostles were in fact eating the true lamb (Jesus) truly sacrificed.¹²⁴ In his later works, Lamy would expound on this confessional advantage at length.¹²⁵

However, although Lamy presented his argument as a boon for Catholics, in order to reach it he had to make major concessions. First, his argument that, in practice, Jesus would not have used leavened bread at the Last Supper—even if, in theory, he could have—created a non-negligible vulnerability in Western arguments against the Eastern Orthodox use of fermented bread in the Eucharist. Second, Lamy's typological argumentation inverted the traditional chronological correspondences with which Catholics had argued for a corporeal sacrifice in the Eucharist. Historically, Catholics had tried to align the timing of the Jewish Passover sacrifice with the timing of the Last Supper to support an interpretation of the Eucharist as the institution of a new Christian sacrifice. Following Scaliger, on the other hand, Protestants had tried to align the Passover sacrifice with the Crucifixion, to support its interpretation as the unique sacrifice that abrogated all previous sacrifices.¹²⁶ Despite his insistence otherwise, Lamy's emphasis on the Passover's perfect alignment with the Crucifixion could be seen to play into Protestant hands, felling in one swoop decades of Catholic typological arguments for a corporeal sacrifice in the Eucharist. Finally, Lamy's account went against a long Catholic consensus that Jesus had celebrated Passover in some form in the year of his death, and it was not entirely clear, at the time Lamy published, what status this consensus held within ecclesiastical tradition.

These three points formed the core of the controversy over the Passion that enveloped Lamy's harmony immediately after its publication. Scholars like Jacques Piénud (d. 1703) openly declared that “the opinion of Father Lamy gives arms to contemporary Greeks” in debates over the type of bread used in the mass; men like Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637–98) made similar arguments.¹²⁷ Jean Hardouin (1646–1729) worried about the confessional implications of Lamy's severance of the Passover from the institution of the Eucharist, and Guillaume Bessin (1654–1726) wondered why Lamy had felt the need to undercut perfectly adequate Catholic answers to Reformed attacks on the real presence.¹²⁸ Paul Pezron (1639–1706) described the idea that Jesus ate the Passover with his disciples as a nearly unanimous opinion of the Church, ratified by the Council of Trent; Piénud and Edmond Rivière noted that some celebrated theologians, such as Nicolas Ysambert (ca. 1565/9–1642) of the Sorbonne, had long taught that any opinion to the contrary was a heresy.¹²⁹ As the objections mounted, Lamy found himself under increasing pressure. His harmony narrowly avoided censorship: Abel-Louis de Sainte-Marthe (1621–97), the general of the French Oratory, asked him to leave Paris, and Lamy spent at least the first three months at his new long-term residence, Rouen, devoting himself to forming chronological proofs of his account of the Passion.¹³⁰

Lamy himself claimed to be mystified as to why his ideas provoked such opposition, given that Toinard had wanted to publish (and had circulated) the same ideas for many years.¹³¹ From afar, Toinard eagerly kept up with the controversy, with Locke assuring him that he would rather see such arguments defended by Toinard than Lamy.¹³² But in fact the controversy was not especially surprising, given that an extremely similar controversy had arisen the last time some bold scholar printed a new and audacious theory of the Passion. Scaliger changed many aspects of his account of the Passion from 1583 to 1598, but one feature remained constant: Jesus's Crucifixion fell on 14 Nisan, the day of the true Passover sacrifice, with all the typological implications this entailed. Against Scaliger, a barrage of Roman Catholic theologians arose, determined to align the Passover sacrifice instead with the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper. It was in the fires of this controversy that Bellarmine, Baronius, and others steered the Catholic consensus away from the postponement theory and toward the same-day theory, setting the stage for the uproar over Lamy's work.¹³³ Furthermore, in the course of this debate, many of the same issues arose as would almost a century later: the confessional implications of the chronology of the Passion; the true timing and rituals of the Jewish Passover; the best way to counter Greek Orthodox eucharistic practice.

There were, however, several important differences between the late sixteenth-century and late seventeenth-century controversies over the Passion. First, the earlier controversy was inter- rather than intra-confessional. Second, the sixteenth-century debate had erupted largely due to the interaction between several different genres: chronology, controversial theology, and ecclesiastical history, with authors responding to each other incidentally in the course of other pursuits. By the late seventeenth century, broadly, the same controversy was instigated within the genre of the Gospel harmony alone, which absorbed all the hottest elements of those disciplines and acted as the focal point around which a fierce pamphlet war revolved. But third and perhaps most importantly, the late seventeenth-century controversy was not a mere reiteration of the earlier debate over Scaliger, but was, in a meaningful sense, more productive, spilling over into a range of issues gestured to a century earlier, but only fully explored after Lamy.

One such issue was the antiquity of the Mishnah, the oldest compendium of oral Jewish law put into writing around the beginning of the third century CE. Since so much of the evidence behind Lamy's account of the Passover came from the Mishnah, some of his critics had tried to discredit his account by assigning the Mishnah a very late date of compilation, even well into the sixth century. Thus the controversy over Lamy's harmony rapidly evolved into an evaluation of historical witnesses to the Mishnah's compilation and the reliability of its redactor, Judah ha-Nasi.¹³⁴ Another issue concerned the manner in which first-century Jews counted the days from the new moon: Lamy, following Toinard, had argued that they counted the days from the new moon's first visible appearance in the sky, which was about a day or so after the precise moment of astronomical lunar conjunction, when the moon would be invisible. Hardouin and Bessin, however, argued that Jewish knowledge of astronomy, especially after the Babylonian captivity, was sophisticated enough that the Sanhedrin could have calculated the precise moment of syzygy and counted the days of their months instead from that point.¹³⁵ Since this moment was roughly a day before the moon's earliest visibility, even by Toinard and Lamy's own calculations this would have resulted in the Passover seder being perfectly synchronous with the Last Supper.

But the productivity of this second iteration of the debate was not merely limited to an unprecedentedly thorough exploration of particular historical and philological issues. Rather, the debate over Lamy's harmony was also a witness—and indeed, even a contributor—to the emergence of an important fissure in Catholic theology over the extent and status of tradition.¹³⁶ Against his manifold critics who referenced Ysambert and the Council of Trent, Lamy rejected the high view of tradition that decided even the smallest matters of philology and history on the basis of ecclesiastical consensus. In Lamy's eyes, the question of whether or not Jesus celebrated Passover should not be decided by the authority of tradition, since the value of tradition only pertained to points of faith, and this was not a point of faith.¹³⁷

Lamy's views on this matter arose directly from his vision of the history of the New Testament, and in particular his view of the Gospels as simple texts, intended to explain “only essential truths” to ordinary people, and therefore silent on matters pertaining to modern “difficulties of criticism.”¹³⁸ Tradition (in the form of councils, church fathers, etc.) had been essential to the process of confirming and elaborating these simple and essential truths, but everything else could and should be debated.¹³⁹ Thus, Lamy's argument about the limited purview of tradition was in effect also an argument for the inability of historical and philological scholarship per se to decide questions of dogma and doctrine. Truths such as the reality of the eucharistic sacrifice should not depend on the answer to historical questions such as whether or not Jesus ate the Jewish Passover before instituting the Eucharist, but solely on the unanimous consent of the church through the ages.¹⁴⁰ By engaging in such philological-historical argumentation with Protestants, Catholic theologians had made a grave error, for they had thereby already implicitly conceded precisely what they ought to be defending—that dogmatic and doctrinal decisions could not be drawn from history or philology but from tradition alone.

In other words, in the course of the controversy over his work, Lamy argued for a movement away from the paradigm of confessionalized erudition and scholarship that had dominated Europe since the Reformation. In his eyes, by conceding that matters of history and philology could have any role in determining theological debates, Catholics had already lost the war, even if they had won individual battles. This was very similar to the arguments made by Richard Simon around the same time, and so it is no surprise that Simon, despite disagreeing with Lamy's account of the Passion, agreed with him on this broader point regarding the role and purpose of tradition.¹⁴¹ Of course, Lamy strongly emphasized that he believed his historical account of the Passion could still win an argument in the mode of confessionalized erudition, but he did not think it should have to. Moreover, he was happy to yield previously unsurrenderable positions (such as the possibility of Greek Orthodox eucharistic practice being non-schismatic) should it transpire that they fell outside the bounds of what he believed tradition could uphold.¹⁴²

This, then, illustrates a further aspect of what it means for the Gospel harmony to be an apex genre: not only that it drew together a large number of different disciplines under its aegis; not only that it inspired innovative and boundary-stretching work as a result of this; not only that, for the same reason, it generated controversy and debate that had previously arisen from a medley of different genres; but also that these very factors make the harmony a particularly useful lens for gleaning insights into major intellectual shifts of the day. But it is also at this point in the story—the heyday of the harmony—that the beginning of genre's decline becomes apparent. Although it never lost its apologetic, polemical edge (even Griesbach had ulterior motives beyond pure literary criticism of the synoptics), the genre was slowly shorn from the myriad of disciplines sitting beneath it, the disciplines which, in the time of Toinard and Lamy, sustained it and enabled it to be one of the most exciting endeavors for ambitious scholars.¹⁴³

This development can already be seen in the 1699 harmony of Jean Le Clerc. Le Clerc's harmony reflected many features of the genre as it had evolved since the sixteenth century, such as its learned orientation and its chronological precision.¹⁴⁴ Yet Le Clerc also admitted that his work in these areas was purely derivative, and he showed significantly less interest in philological reconstruction from Hebrew and Jewish sources of the kind that had become so important since Lightfoot.¹⁴⁵ Instead, after his initial chronological overview, Le Clerc offered his readers two dissertations that each faced slightly different directions: first, a series of literary-critical canons outlining the principles behind his harmonization, and second, a dissertation on the authority of the Evangelists that was heavily reliant on the work of Grotius and influenced by (even though written against) Richard Simon's Critical History of the New Testament.¹⁴⁶ The first of these, which was more or less an application of the ideas of Le Clerc's 1697 Ars Critica to the issues faced by the Gospel harmonist, can be taken as one of the earliest indications of the literary reorientation that the genre would undergo in the time between Le Clerc and Griesbach: here one might find some hints as to the origins of the methodology of modern synoptic criticism. The second of these, a defense of the Evangelists’ authority, was superficially an old exercise in defending the Gospel's accuracy, but in practice was much closer to the new mode of textual or critical history as pioneered by Simon.¹⁴⁷

By the close of the seventeenth century, the mass of philological, historical, and chronological knowledge brought to bear on the harmonies before Le Clerc would increasingly be channeled elsewhere, into more focused, but also less polymathic genres. From this perspective, the harmony might well be described as a victim of the trend toward specialization and fragmentation discernible from about 1700 on: indeed, it is no coincidence that it is in the eighteenth century that the Gospel synopsis became broken off from the Gospel harmony as a separate literary endeavor. But crucially, as this article has argued, the early modern harmony should not be judged by its failure to squeeze into the shoes of its eighteenth-century counterparts. The eighteenth-century synopsis might have been a more systematic and focused critical project than its harmonizing predecessor, but it was also, in many ways, a more monolithic, narrower, and—because of this—less productive and intellectually ambitious genre.

CONCLUSION

The eighteenth-century fragmentation and attenuation of the Gospel harmony is just one reason why early modern harmonies should not be studied teleologically through the lens of Griesbach and synoptic criticism. The seventeenth-century harmony drew in and combined many different disciplines at once: this was what gave the harmony its scholarly power and appeal, and yet this was also by necessity one of the first features to be lost as the genre moved toward the pared-down literary model of Griesbach.

Indeed, one of the major aims of this article has been to demonstrate that the early modern harmony played an astonishingly productive and creative role in mid- to late seventeenth-century intellectual culture.¹⁴⁸ Thanks to the growth of the discipline of chronology and the uncompromising interventions of men like Mercator and Scaliger, the harmony evolved into a curiously hybrid creature by the mid-seventeenth century, hybrid not just in terms of its methods and concerns but also in the strange way it clung onto its devotional, lay-facing background, resulting every now and then in the publication in the vernacular of a mass of deeply learned, cutting edge, and highly abstruse research. This complex interplay of influences made the harmony one of the most fruitful genres of the period: sparking the production of entirely new endeavors such as Lightfoot's Horae Hebraicae; feeding into famous canonical works of scholarship such as Simon's Critical History; absorbing the time and energy of great philosophers such as Locke; as well as provoking extended reflections on diverse philological and historical issues such as the age of the Mishnah. It was thanks to the multifaceted demands of the harmony that some of the most impressive and imaginative studies of the ancient Jewish world at the time of Jesus were undertaken; it was due to the immense controversial potential of the genre that major fault lines of late seventeenth-century biblical scholarship were exposed and fought over.

These observations should already give some insight into the importance of the Gospel harmony in its own right for the development of early modern biblical criticism. But they might also point more generally toward a greater consideration of the importance of studies of genre per se for the history of scholarship, particularly with respect to the effect that genre could have in encouraging, restraining, or creating certain types of scholarship. By reconstructing the changing shape and fortunes of different genres, as well as tracking the emergence of the new genres and the death of outmoded ones, historians might end up with a much clearer sense of both continuity and discontinuity across the period than can be achieved by looking at the history of ideas and learned practices alone. After all, the Gospel harmony as it had evolved from Mercator to Lamy—polymathic, learned, deeply pious and hotly controversial—could never have survived much beyond the end of the seventeenth century, even though many of the ideas, learned practices, and polemical motives it encompassed could and indeed would continue to be influential well into the Enlightenment.