first time in Western history, a diversity of philosophical-theological systems with scholarly respectability competed in the intellectual marketplace. These included a variety of approaches to Christian theism ranging from scholasticism to experiential pietism, Pyrrhonic agnosticism, atheism, and pragmatic rationalism.116 The sanctity of tradition, the customs of culture, and the regulations of the marketplace all favored the theistic option; however, Christianity and the Bible were subjected to an unprecedented and trenchant examination and critique. The agent of this activity was deism.
Deism’s roots can be traced to various earlier influences and anticipatory figures. McKee has done this in the case of Isaac de la Peyrere, who in 1655 published a work advancing such hypotheses as the existence of men before the creation of Adam and the non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Gay provides a good description of the exponents of the movement:
All deists were . . . both critical and constructive . . . All sought to destroy in order to build, and reasoned either from the absurdity of Christianity to the need for a new philosophy or from their desire for a new philosophy to the absurdity of Christianity . . . Deism . . . is the product of the confluence of three strong emotions: hate, love, and hope. The deists hated priests and priestcraft, mystery-mongering, and assaults on commonsense. They loved the ethical teachings of the classical philosophers, the grand unalterable regularity of nature, the sense of freedom granted the man liberated from superstition. They hoped that the problems of life—of private conduct and public policy—could be solved by the application of unaided human reason, and that the mysteries of the universe could be, if not solved, at least defined and circumscribed by man’s scientific inquiry.117
Various stances towards the Bible were taken by the deists, but as a rule, they sought to distill the biblical traditions; to siphon off the supernatural, the miraculous, and the unbelievable; and to leave behind the pure essence of a reasonable faith.118
During the height of the deistic controversy in England (1700–1750), two major studies of Israelite and Judean history were published. Prideaux’s work, which covers the period from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III to the lifetime of Jesus, comprises three volumes that totaled almost 1,400 pages.119 The work went through over a score of editions and was translated into German and French. Prideaux relied primarily upon the biblical traditions and Josephus, but made use of practically every known literary document from antiquity. Only occasionally did Prideaux take a critical attitude towards his sources. He challenged the authenticity of the letter of Aristeas and its account of the origin of the LXX and provided the reader with a history and description of the study of the LXX.120 Prideaux disagreed with Josephus on Alexander’s route to Jerusalem,121 and argued that the synagogue had its origin in the days of Ezra.122
Shuckford wrote his volumes to present the history from creation to the point where Prideaux had begun. Like his predecessors, from the fourth century on, Shuckford presented universal history in a biblical perspective, beginning with Adam and Eve. This was still the classical model. Sir Walter Raleigh had started at this point in his widely used History of the World, published in 1614, and although unfinished it covered history down to the Roman period. Basically the same model was employed in the multi-volume An Universal History from the Earliest Time to the Present, written by a consortium of scholars, mostly from Oxford and Cambridge, and published in 1736–50.123 Shuckford, like Prideaux, was thoroughly familiar with all the ancient sources as well as the historyof research. Both, for example, used, quoted, and opposed Spinoza and Simon. Shuckford’s work, which was never completed beyond the time of Joshua, was, perhaps because of the biblical material covered, more influenced by the deistic controversy than that of Prideaux. In describing the magicians at the court of Pharaoh, Shuckford presents them as deistic philosophers:
In Moses’s time, the rulers of the Egyptian nation . . . were then the most learned body in the world, beguiled by the deceit of vain philosophy . . . The Pagan divinations, arts of prophecy, and all their sorceries and enchantments, as well as their idolatry and worship of false gods, were founded, not upon superstition, but upon learning and philosophical study; not upon too great a belief of, and adherence to revelation, but upon a pretended knowledge of the powers of nature. Their great and learned men erred in these points, not for want of freethinking, such as they called so; but their opinions upon these subjects were in direct opposition to the true revelations which had been made to the world, and might be called the deism of these ages; for such certainly was the religion of the governing and learned part of the Heathen world in these times.124
Like his predecessors, Shuckford stretched his intellectual powers in defence of the biblical chronology, arguing that the antediluvians enjoyed longevity because before the flood the earth was situated so as to have a perpetual equinox, thus sparing its inhabitants the rigors of seasonal change.125 He argued that “at the flood, the heavens underwent some change: the motion of the sun was altered, and a year, or annual revolution of it, became, as it now is, five daysand almost six hours longer than it was before.”126 However, Shuckford, who was thoroughly familiar with the problems of textual criticism, was occasionally willing to amend the Hebrew text on the basis of the Greek (for example, Deut 34:6 should read “they buried him”;127 thus Moses did not write the account of his death). He sensed the problem of the divine names in Genesis and Exodus, and devoted an extended discussion to the use of the names Jehovah, El Shaddai, and Elohim.128 His solution tothe problem was not to postulate a multiplicity of documents but to theorize about the diversity of persons in the godhead.
Outside England, the deist impulse led to some very scathing attacks on Christianity and the Bible. The Frenchman Voltaire (1694–1778) never tired of pointing out what he called the absurdities, inconsistencies, and low morality found in the Bible. To claim that God was its author was to make “of God a bad geographer, a bad chronologist, a bad physicist; it makes him no better a naturalist.”129 To claim that Moses wrote the Pentateuch was to claim Moses to be a fool. Voltaire suggested that much of the Old Testament was borrowed by the Jews from other peoples, and proposed that Moses may have never lived: “If there only were some honest and natural deeds in the myth of Moses, one could believe fully that such a personage did exist.”130 The significance of Voltaire was his popularization, in caustic language, of many of the issues that had previously been the concerns of erudite scholars. Voltaire, however, approached the Bible and its historical materials not so much as a critic but as an assassin.
In Germany, the impact of deism can be seen in the work of H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768), who, at his death, left behind what the philosopher Lessing published as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. One of these fragments was an essay on “the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea.”131 Reimarus sought to show the impossibilities in a literal interpretation of the biblical description of the crossing of the sea. According to Exod 12:37–38, about six hundred thousand Hebrew men left Egypt, not counting the women, children, and mixed multitude and animals that accompanied them. Reimarus says this would give a figure of about three million people, three hundred thousand oxen and cows, and six hundred thousand sheep and goats. Approximately five thousand wagons would have been needed to carry provisions and three hundred thousand tents would have been required to house the people at ten per tent. Had the multitude marched ten abreast, the three million would have formed a column one hundred and eighty miles long. It would have required nine days as a minimum for such a group to march through the parted sea. Reimarus’s arguments, and there were others who made similar points, hit at the very heart of those who took the Bible as literally inspired and as factually infallible.
Among the founding fathers of the United States were many with deistic leanings. Jefferson edited a version of the New Testament devoid of any miracles and concluding with the death of Jesus. Thomas Paine, an Englishman who spent several years in the U.S. supporting the Revolutionary War and some time in France in exile, was a brutal controversialist in his attack upon the Bible. Paine’s peculiarity consists in the “freshness with which he comes upon very old discoveries, and the vehemence with which he announces them.”132 In his book The Age of Reason, Paine wrote:
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous
