ideas.”79 The status of the Bible as the word of God exempted it from such treatment for the moment.
The literary legends about national origins and hagiographic legends about the saints were open to criticism by the humanists. Two examples will suffice. The Italian historian, Polydore Vergil, published a history of England in 1534 in which he took up the older attack on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s depiction of the Trojan Brutus as the founder of Britain. His basic argument rested on an appeal to the ancient sources: none of the ancient Roman authors and sources make any reference to this Brutus.80 In a short biography prefaced to his edition of Jerome’s works, Erasmus (in 1516) argued that many of the legendary traditions “contaminate the saints with their old wives’ tales, which are childish, ignorant, and absurd” and that the best source for knowledge about Jerome was the humandkind himself.
For who knew Jerome better than Jerome himself? Who expressed his ideas more faithfully? If Julius Caesar is the most reliable source for the events of his own career, is it not all the more reasonable to trust Jerome on his? And so, having gone through all his works, we made a few annotations and presented the results in the form of a narrative, not concealing the fact that we consider it a great enough miracle to have Jerome himself explaining his life to us in all his famous books. If there is anyone who must have miracles and omens, let him read the books about Jerome which contain almost as many miracles as they do sentences.81
The literary study of the early Renaissance humanists was not oriented merely to the detection of forgery and the exposure of many venerated traditions as nonhistorical legends. There was a very positive side to the focus on documentary evidence. “The mere problem of gaining access to the past began to supersede the problem of how to make use of it.”82 The humanists stressed that the recovery of the past through documentary sources had to depend upon philology and grammar. This meant a literal and realistic reading of the sources and at times textual criticism to restore the sources. Valla, in his Annotations on the New Testament published by Erasmus in 1505, came close to placing the biblical sources on the same footing with other ancient documents. Valla had also concluded that “none of the words of Christ have come to us, for Christ spoke in Hebrew and never wrote down anything.”83 Erasmus, who argued for a “return to the sources” (versetur in fontibus), defended Valla’s position on the need for textual criticism to restore the sources of theology.84 This meant that the reliability of the Old Testament versions must be established on the basis of Hebrew and the New Testament on the basis of Greek. (Pope Clement V and the Council of Vienne in 1311–12 had called for the training of teachers in three languages—Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic or Chaldee.) In interpreting the Bible, Erasmus argued that the role of the grammarian was more important than that of theologian.
Nor do I assume that theology, the very queen of all disciplines, will think it beneath her dignity if her handmaiden, grammar, offers her help and the required service. For even if grammar is somewhat lower in dignity than other disciplines, there is no other more necessary. She busies herself with very small questions, without which no one progresses to the large. She argues about trifles which lead to serious matters. If they answer that theology is too important to be limited by grammatical rules and that this whole affair of exegeting depends on the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, then this is indeed a new honor for the theologian that he alone is allowed to speak like a barbarian.85
In spite of Erasmus’s emphasis on grammar in the understanding of the biblical text, he refused to disavow allegorical interpretation, although he warned that it should not be overdone, should apply everything to Christ, and requires a pious mind.86 Here he shows himself closer kin to Augustine than to Valla.
The trivial concerns of the grammarian or the “very small questions” grammar asks—to use Erasmus’s terminology—were part of a major revolution in thought. The difference between the medieval interpretative gloss on a text and the grammatical analysis of a text is enormous; they belong to two different worlds of thought. The humanists of the Renaissance openly broke with the scholastic method, caustically opposed it, and asserted the superiority of their new methods. Valla declared: “The discourse of historians exhibits more substance, more practical knowledge, more political wisdom . . . , more customs, and more learning of every sort than the precepts of any philosophers. Thus we show that historians have been superior to philosophers.”87 The difference between scholasticism and humanism in the Renaissance period has been described in the following terms: “By proliferating abstractions and superfluous distinctions, scholastic philosophy had lost contact with concrete reality. It had cut men off from meaning, hence from their own humanity. Valla’s philosophy, on the other hand, emphasized precisely these standards—concreteness, utility, and humanity . . . Indeed, a return to reality may be taken as the slogan of Valla’s entire philosophy.”88
The quest or return to reality was not only the source of the humanistic or historical revolution of the Renaissance but also the basis for the scientific revolution that has its roots in the same period.89 Science had to overcome the legacy of Aristotelian scholasticism. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the scientific revolution, which reached a climax in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for all aspects of life including biblical studies, although Butterfield seems to have been successful in this regard: “Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom.”90 Mechanics and astronomy were the first scientific disciplines to develop.
These new approaches to reality were concerned with questions of explanation and causation in both natural and human orders. The way was opened for a view of the world that operated according to ‘natural law’ even if that law be understood as the will of God. The historical implication of such a view is enormous: humans can understand past events as analogous to present events. Human, climatic, geographical, and other factors could be viewed as causal elements in historical events both past and present. This rise of explanation in historical studies marked a significant development in historiography.
“In medieval historical writing there are explanations of an extremely specific kind, in terms of the motives of individuals; there are also explanations of an extremely general kind, in terms of the hand of God in history, or the decay of the world; but middle-range explanations are lacking.”91 These “middle-range explanations”—what today we would call sociological, economic, geographical, and climatic considerations—have their beginnings in the Renaissance.92
The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, which in many ways represents merely a radical and religious application of Renaissance principles and aims, made at least four significant contributions that were ultimately of great importance in the history of Hebrew historiography.
First of all, the reformers placed the Bible at the center of the theological enterprise. Sola scriptura was the keynote of the Reformation.93 In emphasizing the Bible as the rule and norm of faith, the reformers stressed a literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Luther wrote:
The Holy Spirit is the plainest writer and speaker in heaven and earth, and therefore His words cannot have more than one, and that the very simplest, sense, which we call the literal, ordinary, natural sense.
All heresies and error in Scripture have not arisen out of the simple words of Scripture . . . All error arises out of paying no regard to the plain words and, by fabricated inferences and figures of speech, concocting arbitrary interpretations in one’s own brain.
In the literal sense there is life, comfort, strength, learning, and art. Other interpretations, however appealing, are the work of fools.
In addition to an emphasis on the literal reading of Scripture, the reformers argued that Scripture is its own interpreter. Luther declared: “Scripture itself by itself
