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‘An extremely dangerous book’? James Hope Moulton's Religions and Religion (1913)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Martin Wellings
Martin Wellings*
Affiliation:
Oxford
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Extract

On 4 April 1917 the British steamship SS City of Paris was torpedoed by a German submarine in the Gulf of Lions, and sank with considerable loss of life. Among the passengers was the Wesleyan Methodist scholar James Hope Moulton.’ Paying tribute to his friend and colleague,Arthur Samuel Peake recorded the ‘tragic irony’ of the death under such circumstances of an eloquent advocate of peace and of a scholar whose international reputation in New Testament studies was signalled by plaudits from Harnack, a doctorate from the University of Berlin and a longstanding academic friendship with Adolf Deissmann. Moulton, however, was more than a New Testament scholar. His presence in the Mediterranean in the spring of 1917 came about through his expertise in the history and thought of Zoroastrianism, which had taken him to India for eighteen months’ work with the Parsee community under the auspices of the Indian YMCA.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 51: Christianity and Religious Plurality , 2015 , pp. 322 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015

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References

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31 Ibid. 5,6, 11.

32 Ibid. 7.

33 Ibid. 13, 16.

34 Ibid. 23-6.

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36 Ibid. 47; cf. Hope Moulton, James, ‘How stands the Bible: Three Lectures on Biblical Apologetics’, in idem, The Christian Religion in the Study and the Street (London, 1919), 1–60 Google Scholar, at 1, 4, attributing the phrase about ‘the infallibilities’ to Harris.

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38 Ibid. 87-8.

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42 Ibid. 98, 123.

43 Ibid. 132.

44 Ibid. 128, 131, 147-8, 154-5.

45 Ibid. 209.

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61 Geden's work ran to over nine hundred pages and retailed at 12s. 6d.; Religions and Religion sold for 3s. 6d.: Methodist Times, 24 July 1913, 1.