The use of the Bible during the period between around 1500 and 1750 cannot be understood without considering the influences upon the intellectual climate of the centuries between the late Middle Ages and the rise of the modern world. There was no break between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The so-called Middle Ages served as a bridge transporting characteristic traditions from Classical Antiquity to later times. Broadly speaking there were three main tendencies. Humanism (which flourished in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in Holland as far as the seventeenth, but remained influential much later) inherited from Antiquity, mediated by ecclesiastical theology and the study of classical sources, the following modes of thought:

1. 1. Moralism, particularly in the Stoic tradition. Stoic authors were popular with the intellectual elite, especially in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. Also, the theory of natural law was of Stoic origin.

2. 2. Reason, too, was a classical heritage. The Aristotelian tradition, after a revival by Arabic mediation (Averroes, 1126–98), was kept alive through the use of Aristotelian rationality in the scholastic dogmatic systems. Later rationalistic approaches, such as Cartesianism (René Descartes, 1596–1650) gained only a temporary restricted influence.

3. 3. Also, historical viewpoints played an important role already in humanism with its call ad fontes (to the sources). The method intended to restore the best available form of texts was textual criticism. During the period we have in view we can observe a growing consciousness that all written documents are time-bound and imprinted with the cultural characteristics of their times. This insight could conflict with the official dogma of verbal inspiration, which regarded each verse of the Bible as inspired, unconditioned and free of error.

Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the first who (in his edition of the New Testament, Novum Instrumentum, 1516) used textual criticism for restoring the text of the New Testament. Textual criticism has retained its importance since then. Besides, Erasmus's intention was, in a spiritualistic and anti-ceremonial vein, a reform of the church on the basis of the New Testament and the Church Fathers. The Erasmian Hugo Grotius (de Groot; 1583–1645) worked in the spirit of toleration between the confessions and hoped for a reunification of the church on the basis of Bible and patristic theology.