Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters, by Nicholas Hardy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017, xii+464 pp., US$105.00 (hardback), ISBN: 978 0 1987 1609 9 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critics and Skeptics in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters
Harvard Theological Review
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
New Blackfriars, 2011
Although the first-published of these books (hereafter Second Sophistic) is more formidably academic in presentation than the second (hereafter Martyr Bishop) this latter should not be seen as merely a popularisation of the first. The two books are, in fact, complementary. A reader of Martyr Bishop who wishes to test Brent's theory will need to come to grips with the detailed evidence set out in Second Sophistic, and the reader of Second Sophistic will gain from Martyr Bishop a clearer and, oddly enough, a fuller grasp of Brent's theory as a whole. The letters allegedly written by Ignatius of Antioch in the second century have kept scholars of early Christianity fascinated, occupied, vexed, and entertained for centuries. In the medieval West as many as sixteen letters were known including exchanges between Ignatius and John the Evangelist and between Ignatius and the mother of Jesus. Beneath these lay collections of up to thirteen letters, preserved in both Greek and Latin manuscripts, which in the seventeenth century were shown to be reducible to seven letters that had been known to Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, to which a late fourth century forger had added another six. The same forger had also reworked the seven letters known to Eusebius, adding passages to suggest that Ignatius, in the second century, was pushing the same (heretical) theological barrow that the forger was pushing two centuries later. Despite the confident judgement of The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church that the controversy about the authenticity of even the smaller core of seven letters known to Eusebius 'was virtually settled in [their] favour. .. by J. Pearson's Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii (1672)', the question has continued to be hotly debated. A good deal of the heat, now as in the seventeenth century, has been generated by the curious supposition that, if genuine, the Ignatian letters would in some way authenticate a tiered hierarchy of ministry and order. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§ 1593), for example, mis-translates Ignatius to the Trallians 3.1 to the effect that 'without the bishop, presbyters, and deacons, one cannot speak of the Church'. As Allen Brent points out, what this text means is that, without these three orders 'a Church cannot be summoned' (Second Sophistic, pp. 25-6, 196), which is not at all the same thing. Those coming to the study of these letters for the first time will have cause to be grateful to Brent for the excellent introduction he provides in the first and fifth chapters of Martyr Bishop to the controversies these letters have engendered. Brent has his own novel and intriguing explanation of the origin of the seven letters known to Eusebius. He thinks that they were indeed written by an early Christian who was taken as a prisoner from Antioch in Syria to Rome, there to be put to death by exposure to wild beasts. Brent is curiously vague about the date of this journey and martyrdom. The traditional date hovers between 107 and 115, but these are no more than guesses based upon Eusebius' guess that it happened within the reign of Trajan. Brent is confident that he has 'positioned
Escaping the Reformation in the Republic of Letters
Church History and Religious Culture, 2008
Recent scholarship has advanced paradoxical conclusions about the relationship between Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. While humanist techniques are considered to have played an instrumental role in the development, spread, and implementation of the Reformation, the humanist community is generally regarded as a supra-confessional “Republic of Letters.” This article addresses this paradox by looking at the religious language in Latin emblem books. These highly popular works emphasized a personal, intellectual spirituality, and expressed reservations against institutionalised religion. They have often been interpreted ideologically, as a humanistic, irenical response to the religious turmoil. When read in the context of the authors’ and readers’ practical interests, however, they reveal a more pragmatic strategy. Rather than promoting religious ideals, they used an a-confessional language to accommodate religious pluriformity. Examples of the reception by individual readers, e.g., in alba amicorum, further exemplify how confessional silence served as a communicative strategy in the Republic of Letters.
“Living, Active, Elusive: Toward a Theology of Textual Criticism,” JRT 12 (2018): 83-102
Although the doctrine of scripture is central to systematic theology, one aspect of Christian scripture is rarely engaged, namely, the ongoing presence of textual variants. And although the reconstruction of the earliest form of Christian scripture is the primary object of textual criticism, text critics have rarely given a theological rationale for their discipline. Across the disciplinary divide, this essay attempts a rapprochement. For systematic theology, the essay underscores the challenges of the variable, fluid text that is Christian scripture. For textual criticism, it calls attention to two useful theological concepts and retrieves the bivalent reading strategies of two premodern scholars, Origen and Augustine, who artfully blended theology and nascent textual criticism.
Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance Jerry H. Bentley
The Journal of Religion, 1986
London and the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris combined shelve about one-half of the total. This underlines the importance of bibliographic research in numerous libraries. One sometimes finds notable printings in obscure libraries very far from the places of publication. Another conclusion, with which this reviewer fully concurs, is that, while the cataloguing of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts is important and difficult workand is appreciated as suchproducing a comprehensive bibliography of sixteenth-century printings on an author or subject can be equally important and difficultbut is less recognized and appreciated. The Cranz-Schmitt volume is a very useful one that should facilitate and encourage further study of Renaissance AristoteHanism.