Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity

The Renaissance Bible Today

Hannah Crawforth, Russ Leo, Hannah Crawforth, Russ Leo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000385137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Religious Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In 1994, Debora K. Shuger published her field-changing study, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity. Shuger's book offers a wide-reaching and intellectually ambitious exploration of the centrality of the inter-connected discourses of literature and theology in the period. Throughout, Shuger troubles prevailing assumptions about religion and its purview by expanding the archive of "religious writing" far beyond the devotional poetry and prose that had so long been the province of literary history.

Shuger deftly traces the connections between biblical scholarship and the histories of politics, nations and peoples, languages, and law, as well as to the most important literary forms of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance: tragedy (ancient and modern), "mythology, " and the genres of affective devotion that depict Christ's inestimable suffering. The Renaissance Bible discovers how early modern readers rendered the worlds of Scripture intelligible, even palpable, and how they located themselves and their endeavors in a history they shared with classical and biblical antecedents alike.

The essays collected here lay bare the extraordinary powers and resources of The Renaissance Bible, with contributions by leading scholars of early modernity: Anthony Grafton, Brian Cummings, Russ Leo, Beth Quitslund, and Achsah Guibbory.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Reformation.

Some Early Citizens of the Respublica Litterarum Sacrarum: Christian Scholars and the Masorah Before 1550

ANTHONY GRAFTON

Traditional accounts of the development of Christian biblical scholarship in the sixteenth century have rightly emphasized the role played by Elijah Levita and his Massoreth ha-Massoreth, which traced the evolution of the Hebrew text of the Bible. Elijah argued that the Masoretes, Jewish grammarians of the first millennium CE, had devised the vowel points and accents found in the Hebrew text and recorded the variant readings that appeared in its textual apparatus. In fact, the Syntagma of the English scholar Robert Wakefield, printed in 1534, brought together a wide range of relevant material from Jewish and Christian sources, explained it expertly and defended the accuracy of the Hebrew text. Informed discussion of the Hebrew text in Christian scholarship began long before Elijah’s book appeared.

In 1994, Debora Shuger reminded the world of scholarship of an intellectual revolution – one that had taken place 400 years before. In the sixteenth century, she told readers of The Renaissance Bible, new forms of biblical scholarship took shape. Humanists applied to the New, and then to the Old, Testament the philological tools that they had honed on the Latin and Greek classics. This project began – as scholars had always insisted – in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when Lorenzo Valla and Desiderius Erasmus used the Greek text of the Vulgate to criticize the Latin Vulgate. But it took decades to assemble the new tools needed to study the Greek and Hebrew Bibles as scholars had long studied the Greek and Latin classics: “by 1600 biblical scholars were cultivating terra incognita. Sixteenth-century humanists slowly assembled an exegetic infrastructure, publishing Hebrew grammars and the basic texts of ancient lexicography, translating rabbinic commentaries, editing the early Church Fathers, and inaugurating the study of inscriptions, coinage, and chronology.”¹ The work of excavation and building went slowly, but it had seismic consequences. Though late Renaissance biblical scholars were pious men who believed in both confessional dogmas and historical miracles, they began to transform the biblical text into a product, and a record, of history – a transformation that would in its turn have a deep impact in the realms of literature and art.

The new biblical scholarship could serve many ends, from preserving dogma – as it did in the hands of Beza – to unraveling “the seamless fabric of typological time.”² It was itself a product of history: a set of new ways of reading Scripture that were brought into being by many scholars over generations. Shuger agreed with the few scholars who had previously plowed this rich landscape that the humanists owed little to medieval exegetes – even those, like Nicholas of Lyra, who had enriched their commentaries with rabbinical learning. But she also insisted, against most of her predecessors, that Valla and Erasmus were not the only revolutionaries involved. In the teeth of a scholarly world that distrusted intellectual history and ignored the history of scholarship, Shuger insisted, cogently and urgently, that such forgotten projects as the Antwerp Polyglot Bible had reshaped the understanding of the Bible.

The Renaissance Bible announced – and helped to inspire – a revolution of its own. Intellectual history has revived, over the last quarter century, in the United States, Great Britain, and Continental Europe. And none of its subfields has expanded more vertiginously than the history of scholarship – especially Christian scholarship, from Biblical exegesis to ecclesiastical history. Recent scholarship has enriched and even transformed our understanding of the ways of Renaissance scholars: has shown us, for example, that many of them saw typology as a form of literal interpretation, rather than as in conflict with it.³ Yet many areas still await cultivation. This paper, a slender tributary to Shuger’s great river, examines one of them: the way in which biblical humanists began to study their ancient and late antique counterparts, the scholars who preserved, but also changed, the biblical texts before the surviving Greek and Hebrew manuscripts were copied. The humanists knew that ancient scholars in Alexandria had worked on the text of Homer and that Varro and others had tried to establish the canon and correct the texts of Latin literature. They were also aware that Origen, Pamphilus, Eusebius, and Jerome had applied the tools developed by pagan scholars to the text of the Bible. Those who studied the Hebrew Bible, as many did, were well acquainted with traditions about the Masoretes, the dynasties of learned scribes who copied the Hebrew Bible in ancient Palestine and Babylon between the seventh and tenth centuries CE.⁴ But what did all this mean? Were these accounts of ancient scholars merely anecdotal? How much did the humanists know – how much could they hope to know – about the efforts of their ancient predecessors?⁵

The most eminent late Renaissance philologists, Isaac Casaubon and Joseph Scaliger, saw the reconstruction of ancient “criticism” as a fundamental part of their effort to define what philology should mean and be in their own time.⁶ Casaubon even announced in 1600 that he had finished “a book on criticism, written with the highest precision.”⁷ This claim actually represented the sort of triumph of optimism over experience with which all scholars are familiar. Casaubon had clearly thought hard about the subject and made notes about it, which are preserved in Bodleian MS Casaubon 60 and elsewhere. He may well have been ready to write, counting more, as he often did, on his extraordinary memory than on the excerpts in his copybooks. But he never recorded any systematic treatment of the subject.⁸

Casaubon planned that his study would include treatments not only of the textual criticism of Aristarchus and other Hellenistic scholars and their Latin successors, but also of that of the Masoretes. In the preface to his commentary on Athenaeus, where he first mentioned the work, Casaubon adapted an oft-quoted remark of Rabbi Akiba (d. 135 CE) about tradition to highlight the importance of this subject: “The scholars among the Hebrews make clear the necessity of this study with their proverb, as true as it is elegant, that criticism is the fence of the divine law.”⁹ His notes on criticism included brief extracts on Jewish criticism.¹⁰ And when he tried to explain to the Leiden scholar Petrus Scriverius why he found it hard to finish the treatise on criticism, he noted that the subject was delicate because it dealt with the character of Sacred Scripture – clear evidence that he saw the project as unified and believed that he could not complete it without providing a full treatment of the Masoretic evidence.¹¹ Casaubon, like many others, saw the ancient world not in the neo-classical tones of a later generation, but as a mosaic of societies in frequent, if imperfect, contact with one another. To study ancient criticism, in his view, one had to work through the Jewish material and compare it with that from Greece and Rome.

Early in 1603, Casaubon wrote an unexpectedly generous letter to the Catholic scholar Jean Porthaise, a Cordelier and polemicist who had evidently asked for advice about the Hebrew Bible. “The Criticism of the Hebrews,” Casaubon explained, “which they call the Masorah, is a wholly divine thing. The Rabbis generally use the very elegant term ‘Fence for the law’ for it, as you clearly know, for I see that you have learned to work out in this gymnasium.” He then made clear his own general view of the Masorah and indentified the modern source on which it rested:

The Jewish Masters offer varied explanations for the origins of the Masorah. You have seen, I believe, what Elijah Levita wrote on this matter in the preface to his Massoreth ha-Massoreth. That most learned and judicious man clearly had the right opinion on this matter, though what he wrote was not perfectly correct. For in the end he seems to come back to the opinion of those who hold that the Authors of the sacred books also passed on the Masorah, which is not only false, but also absurd. And it is patently clear from Elijah’s own words that he saw this: but nothing is harder than either to recognize or to reject a mistake which has become established. It is certainly true that Moses was not the author of the Ketiv and Qere, and it is absurd to think that the matters taught in that art go back to the authors themselves. More plausible is the opinion of those rabbis who ascribe the invention of the Ketiv and Qere to that profoundly wise scribe of the law, Ezra. For as Elijah rightly argues, there was hardly any need for correctors to work on the writings of the more recent prophets. I think that this opinion is either true, or close to the truth, and that Ezra, or others around his time, created the Criticism of the Hebrews. Afterwards, the most learned members of the Jewish schools treated it. For just as we read that the Greeks had schools of philosophers and grammarians, so also there were schools, and, as it were, families of the Masoretes. For the synagogues that remained in the East followed the major author of this form of learning, Jacob, son of Nephtali. Those who returned to the West and their fatherland cite Aaron, son of Asher. And so this form of study was divided into two sects, so to speak, Ben Naftali and Ben Asher. Those who think that the Masorah shows the corruption of the divinely inspired books of Scripture make themselves guilty of a great crime. In fact, this art attests to the certainty and accuracy of the divine word. If God grants, someday I will prove this with a very precise commentary.¹²

This letter seems cryptic, but it is revealing in several ways. Casaubon makes clear that he has derived much of his knowledge of Masoretic tradition from a modern work of scholarship by a Jew: the third preface to Elijah Levita’s Massoreth ha-Massoreth (Tradition of the Tradition). And though he does not quite summarize the book, he touches on its main points. Elijah’s tightly focused study of the Masorah, the apparatus of vowels, accents, and other annotations that surrounded Hebrew Bibles, was published first in Venice in Hebrew, in 1538, and then, with a partial translation by Sebastian Münster, in Basel in 1539.¹³ The very existence of this substantial and accessible work, which appeared just after Erasmus, Luther, Tyndale, and Calvin, in their different ways, had made the authority of the biblical text a central problem for scholars and theologians across Europe – explains why Casaubon writes as if he and the recipient of his letter already share considerable knowledge of the subjet and its implications. Elijah, after all, had laid out the evidence that survived in the margins of the Hebrew Bible and elsewhere for the transmission of the Hebrew text. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, the Masoretes, Jewish grammarians based in the schools of Palestine, had supplied the biblical text with vocalization, directions for cantiallation, and a massive marginal apparatus, concise to the point of being cryptic, which discussed textual details. The Masoretes had not agreed on every detail. In the tenth century, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher and ben Naphthali had led the two leading schools, both based in the city of Tiberias, but they had used the same methods and arrived at a basic consensus. The Aramaic terms Ketiv and Qere, for example, appeared in their marginal commentaries. Literally, they meant “as is written” and “read,” and their purpose was to provide directions for reading the text of the Hebrew Bible aloud. The received text could not be changed. But the Masoretes also believed that there weere passages that could not be read as they stood. No one could read the name of God, YHWH, aloud in any circumstances. Some parallel passages disagreed, and in some cases a more euphemistic phrasin...