The book draws to a close by assessing how far, by the end of the seventeenth century, the ‘limits of erudition’ were on the verge of being transcended. This chapter focuses in particular on the ways in which Louis Cappel and Richard Simon attempted to alter how their contemporaries construed the relationship between Scripture, scholarship, and given confessional positions. The book concludes by presenting a new interpretation of the significance of Simon’s work.

The book opens by setting out the vital import of erudition in early modern Europe, when it was believed historical knowledge would confirm and illuminate religious truth. It explains how, in this context, the Bible came to be a subject of particularly fraught investigation owing to the way in which different versions of the text in different languages became associated with different confessional groups. The Introduction presents the work’s novel conceptual framework that draws on techniques and approaches associated with the history of knowledge and the social history of ideas to reconstruct the processes involved in creating knowledge about the Old Testament in post-Reformation Europe.

By no means has it always been the case that European readers have always believed, as did Voltaire, that the main purpose of Herodotus’ Histories was to tell the story of the clash of eastern and western ‘civilizations’.Indeed, from at least the later seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, the first four books of the Histories were widely used by Christian scholars to verify sacred history with profane data.For this very large scholarly faction, Herodotus offered the earliest, and most checkable, ‘oriental’ facts, useful in combatting rationalist and pyrrhonist arguments about the untrustworthiness of ancient histories that could not be otherwise verified.Only in the later nineteenth century, when decipherments and excavations began to provide more direct and concrete testimony of the probable historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible did Herodotus begin to lose his function as, in the words of one eighteenth-century Jesuit advocate, ‘historian of the Hebrew people, without knowing it’.

The purpose of this introductory sketch is to offer a biographical frame that helps the reader to place the articles in this companion in their historical context. The overview of Grotius’ life contains the most important chronological facts, publications and professional occupations that gave shape to his personal, political and scholarly career. Special attention is paid to his research in the fields of law, philology, ecclesiastical politics and exegesis. Much of the information gathered here is to be found in Henk Nellen, Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). A lifelong struggle for peace in Church and State (Leiden: Brill, 2014), but in order to avoid falling back into a downright summary of this biography some new material has been included. The story of Grotius’ eventful life is told along lines offered by a triptych of friendships that determined his scholarly efforts to a large extent: he successively kept close relations with Daniel Heinsius, who rivalled with him in many literary activities, Gerardus Joannes Vossius who assisted him in realizing his political-theological objectives, and Denis Pétau who advised him on his exegetical works. A succinct description of Grotius’ Nachleben serves to show that long after his death his theological works attracted an international readership and enjoyed an acclaim that is comparable to the one he attained in the fields of natural law and international law.

The Conclusion takes up the afterlife of the understandings of the Bible’s relationship to history consolidated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It does this by exploring the writings of modern biblical scholar David C. Parker, arguing that they reveal how these contingent understandings and their political implications have become naturalized, and how theological integrations of the Bible’s divine and historical dimensions have become obscured. The Conclusion proceeds to consider how this evacuation of theological depth is at the heart of the story this book has sought to tell. Rather than see the history of the Bible simply as the battleground between transcendent and immanent accounts, the Conclusion underscores the need to address the larger theological and metaphysical frameworks in which forms of biblical transcendence and immanence are articulated. The Conclusion ends by highlighting how the book has shown that theologically and metaphysically thin conceptions of Scripture have been mobilized in the service of newly atomized ways of thinking about and ordering human life.