Volume 5, Issue 2

The Christian discourse of the literal and spiritual senses in the Bible was, in the long eighteenth century, no less tied to perceptions of Jewish interpretive abilities than it had been previously. However, rather than linking Jews with literalism, in many cases the early modern version of this discourse associated Jews with allegory. By touching upon three moments in the reception history of the Bible in the eighteenth century, this article exhibits the entanglement of religious identity and biblical allegory characteristic of this context. The English Newtonian, William Whiston, fervently resisted allegorical interpretations of the Bible in favor of scientific and literal explanations, and blamed Jewish manuscript corruption for any confusion of meaning. Johan Kemper was a convert whose recruitment to Uppsala University reveals an appetite on the part of university and governmental authorities for rabbinic and kabbalistic interpretive methods and their application to Christian texts. Finally, the German Jewish intellectual Moses Mendelssohn responded to challenges facing the Jewish community by combining traditional rabbinic approaches and early modern philosophy in defense of a multivocal reading of biblical texts. Furthermore, Mendelssohn’s insistence on the particularity of biblical symbols, that they are not universally accessible, informed his vision for religious pluralism. Each of these figures illuminates not only the thorny plight of biblical allegory in modernity, but also the ever-present barriers and passageways between Judaism and Christianity as they manifested during the European Enlightenment.

In spite of Ireland’s rich and complex religious history, the influence of the Old Testament in the shaping of the island is often overlooked. This study traces the use and reception of the Old Testament in Ireland through the centuries, focusing on stories of transmission, translation, and unexpected influence. In early Christian and medieval Ireland, the transmission of the Old Testament in diverse contexts points to an important role for the Old Testament in relation to social formation and notions of Irish history. Moving to early modern Ireland, the story of the translation of the Old Testament into Irish demonstrates how this collection contributed to contested issues of identity in this highly-charged era. Finally, we encounter stories of unexpected influence relating to Ireland and the Old Testament in James Ussher and John Nelson Darby. In both cases, ideas concerning the Old Testament that took shape in Ireland would go on to have impact on a global scale, even if this subsequent influence was a matter of accidence. Taken together, it is argued that the Old Testament has played a much more prominent role in the shaping of the social, cultural, and religious landscape of Ireland than is often assumed.

The paper raises the question of functioning of Biblical tradition in modern culture in the perspective of the history of ideas. Referring to the postsecular interpretation of the Modernity, the research is based on Biblical paraphrases in Bulgarian literature of the interwar period, which are perceived as a testimony of the search for a worldview. The aim is to show how a situation of ideological turmoil accompanied by experiences of social crisis leads to utilizing a Gnostic worldview. The phenomenon is seen in a broader context as an illustration of transmission of ideas within the Western culture and religious thought.

This article examines conceptions of the Bible in early seventeenth-century England by discussing four instances of antagonism toward the Bible. In 1601/2, a group of papists rent and scattered the Bible and the prayer book in their parish church. In 1602, Katherine Brettergh suffered from a crisis of faith, during which she repeatedly threw her Bible away. Also in 1602, the young boy Thomas Harrison, possessed by the devil, snatched books of the Bible from anyone around him and tore them apart. Around the same time, in Christopher Marlowe’s play about Faustus, Doctor Faustus vowed to burn Scripture. In all four cases, views and emotions regarding the Bible were expressed by violent gestures. What is common to these unrelated episodes is an assumption that the Bible was somehow powerful; that the Bible was not simply Holy Scripture but rather a forceful and efficacious book. In the article I analyse this sense of forcefulness in the Bible. Historians are now paying more attention to the Protestant material Bible and the ways the book was employed as quasi-magical object. The article extends this focus on Bible and power to new directions. I examine notions of power in the Bible, expressed by people on the religious margins – some Catholics, a few Godly, one sorcerer – and I examine the attribution of power to Scripture without clearly distinguishing between textual (referential) and material (magical) uses.

The exegesis of the burning bush theophany set forth in Eusebius of Caesarea’s Prophetic Extracts and Proof of the Gospel adds a distinctive and original voice to the rich chorus of Jewish and Christian interpreters of Exodus 3. Eusebius posits a disjunction between the visual and the auditory aspects of the theophany – the angel appears, the Lord speaks – and departs from the mainstream of Jewish and Christian tradition by depicting Moses as a spiritual neophyte whose attunement to God ranks much lower than that of the patriarchs of old. Even though scholars point to the overall anti-Jewish context of this exegesis, it is difficult to find satisfactory terms of comparison for some of its details. It appears, therefore, that Eusebius’ understudied Prophetic Extracts and Proof of the Gospel offer a surprisingly original interpretation that should enrich the scholarly account of the Wirkungsgeschichte of the famous burning bush episode.

The “place of God” is an oxymoron, implying a spatial confinement of the transcendent deity. Gregory of Nyssa calls it “the greatest paradox of all.” It is a biblical image, applied above all to the tabernacle/temple, which inspired a long afterlife of fruitful reflection in both Jewish and Christian traditions. This paper focusses on the interpretations of the “place of God” in the writings of the fourth century theologians Gregory of Nyssa and Evagrius of Pontus. They take different biblical verses as their starting points, both from the Exodus narrative of Moses’ experiences on Mount Sinai – a narrative which was to prove crucial for the development of the Christian mystical tradition. Gregory takes his cue from LXX Exodus 33:21 – “Look, a place is near me. You shall stand on the rock” – and develops an argument for divine infinity. He correlates this with the relentless nature of the Exodus narrative and Moses’ insatiable desire. Evagrius is inspired by LXX Exodus 24:10 – “and they saw the place, there where the God of Israel stood” – and takes the sapphire blue colour of heaven to represent pure prayer. He talks of the human mind ( nous ) as a temple of the Holy Trinity. A close examination of their interpretations illustrates what Steven Katz calls “the fertile interconnection between theology, exegesis, and mystical experience.” They have not simply started with preconceived schemes into which they have slotted scriptural proof texts, but genuinely wrestled with biblical texts. In the new theological context of the fourth century, they have produced fresh exegeses. Evagrius chooses between different Greek translations; Gregory notices a discrepancy in the scriptural record. They do not explain away or smooth over the contradictions and difficulties of the biblical text, but work with them creatively, capitalising on the paradoxes, to generate imagery worthy of the unfathomable God. Unlike Gregory’s highlighting of the darkness in Exodus 20:21, which led, via Pseudo-Dionysius, to the medieval “cloud of unknowing,” these interpretations of the “place of God” have not passed into the bloodstream of the Western mystical tradition. But they amply illustrate the crucial role of biblical exegesis in the development of Christian mystical theology.