Introduction

Connected from the outset with other religions or other churches, the Semitic languages – Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Arabic – were approached in early modern Europe with all the ambivalence that has characterised Western attitudes to the East through the ages. In the first part of his Opus majus, written shortly after 1266, the Franciscan Roger Bacon, the ‘doctor mirabilis’ noted for his thirst for knowledge, pleaded for the ‘study of tongues’. Among the reasons he listed was ‘the correction of errors and false statements without end’ in the fundamental theological texts, but he also added another one: the importance of languages ‘for the conversion of unbelievers’. Both arguments induced the participants in the Council of Vienne, which ended in 1312, to proclaim that chairs in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Greek should be founded at the main European universities: Paris, Oxford, Bologna, Salamanca, and the seat of the papacy which was then Avignon.

On the one hand, therefore, there was a desire to read the Bible in the original languages, to improve on the existing translations, and to establish the most reliable text possible. On the other, there was a wish to confute the rival monotheistic faiths, Judaism and Islam, and to argue against the Christian churches of the East. The object was ultimately to convert the Jews and the Muslims to Christianity, and to bring the Eastern Christians back to the single Catholic fold. In order to achieve this goal it was essential to become acquainted with their beliefs and their customs, and that could best be done by reading their literature.

Hebrew

Some of the finest theologians of the Middle Ages had aspired to the knowledge of Hebrew – men such as Bede, Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus, eager to tread in the steps of Origen and Jerome. In the thirteenth century the Mendicant orders had been interested in Hebrew for missionary purposes, and the Spanish Dominican Raimundo Martini had assembled material on the Jews in his notorious attack, the Pugio fidei, completed in 1278. Certain monastic orders, notably the Victorines in Paris, attempted to cultivate Hebrew studies, and an increasing number of monastic libraries tried to collect Hebrew texts. Nevertheless, few Christian theologians knew any Hebrew, and those who did seldom had more than a smattering. Many years passed before the proposals made at Vienne were actually carried out.

Introduction

The Polyglot Bibles published in Europe between 1500 and 1700 offer some of the best expressions of the objectives of late Renaissance humanism. Exquisitely printed, in an increasing number of ancient and Eastern languages, edited by the greatest biblical scholars of the day, they combined the ideals of the bibliophile with those of the philologist.

The production of parts of the Bible in various languages was by no means new. Bilingual texts appear throughout the Middle Ages. They served various purposes. They could assist students of the languages or simply provide the translation into a known language of a liturgy in one no longer spoken. The Coptic monasteries of Egypt held versions of the Bible in their libraries which were in more than two languages and intended for visitors from the different parts of the vast Monophysite world. By the twelfth century, when Coptic was being replaced by Arabic, we find fragments of the New Testament in Coptic, Ethiopic, Syriac, Arabic and Armenian. The tradition continued well into the fourteenth century, as we see from the polyglot fragments of the New Testament from the Baramus monastery in the Wadi Natrun north-west of Cairo, and the Psalter at the Macarius monastery in the same area, purchased (but never received) in the early seventeenth century by the French antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, involved in the preparation of the Paris Polyglot Bible.

Yet another contemporary polyglot manuscript, however, also from the Monophysite world, a psalter now in the Cambridge University Library, in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Arabic, was intended for a more scholarly end. The compiler clearly wished to correct the Syriac version on the basis of the Hebrew. He thus seems to have been following a different tradition – one which was known in the West – and which dates back to the early third century when Origen prepared his Hexapla, an edition of the Old Testament in six different versions presented in parallel columns: the Hebrew text, the Hebrew text transcribed in Greek characters, and the four Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion and the Septuagint.

The background

The intensity of the debate which followed the publication of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in 1904-1905 shows how relevant the essay was considered at the time. The subject interested many of Weber's contemporaries – economists, historians, social scientists and philosophers. What, they were asking, were the origins of capitalism? What were its characteristics in its modern form? How far was it affected by religion and, more particularly, by Protestantism? The prosperity of Holland and England in the seventeenth century, attended by the economic decline of Italy and Spain, had long fascinated scholars and suggested that there was some relationship between the Reformation and economic progress. In order to confirm this theory they could turn to far earlier sources – the seventeenth-century political economist William Petty, the great exponent of the Enlightenment Montesquieu, and the historian Henry Thomas Buckle writing in the mid-nineteenth century. But they were also in search of a more modern analysis of the true nature of the relationship. In his study on suicide which appeared in 1897, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim observed that Protestants, and above all German Protestants, divorced more and killed themselves more than the members of any other confession. Such primacies, he maintained, indicated an industrial society in a particularly advanced stage, with a high standard of education and living. This, in turn, raised the question of the extent to which Protestantism might have contributed to this advance and to the development of the class on which such a society rested, the bourgeoisie.