Enlightenment Reformation by Derya Gürses Tarbuck

Author:Derya Gürses Tarbuck [Tarbuck, Derya Gürses]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781315316864
Google: BRKHDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-11-18T16:19:14+00:00

The third phase of the debate: Benjamin Kennicott

What gave the Elahim controversy its cutting edge was the complete intolerance of their opponents shown by the Hutchinsonians. In the name of reforming the religion, the Hutchinsonians accused various thinkers of being either Arian, deist, or at times infidels. Eventually this was going to change and the later eighteenth century was going to witness a Hutchinsonian agenda which was basically more moderate, aimed towards uniting orthodoxy, rather than at confronting everybody, in order to get their point across. George Horne is a name to mention here, pioneering this later moderation. However the years of the Elahim controversy represented the period when Hutchinsonian intolerance was still in full flood.

The biggest clash came with the Oxford Hebraist Benjamin Kennicott, who had set himself the task of preparing the best possible unpointed text of the Old Testament. Kennicott tried to reclaim the Hebrew text for Christians by liberating it from the unchallenged authorities of the ‘rabbies’ by a systematic collection of Hebrew manuscripts and a comprehensive study of ancient translations. Kennicott compared different manuscripts of the Hebrew texts in a scholarly fashion. After tracing 615 Hebrew manuscripts and sixteen manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch, he began publishing his version in 1776 (The Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum Variis Lectionibus (1776–80)).

The Hutchinsonians were Kennicott’s most enthusiastic antagonists. The aims of the two opposing sides were on some points similar, e.g. providing an unpointed Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The argument of the Hutchinsonians was that:

Christians should confront the Hebrew Bible directly as the continuing revelation of God, unmediated by Jewish interpretations of Scripture, and divested of the vowel points invented by modern Jews to mislead Christians in understanding their own sacred scriptures.61

Kennicott would probably not have disagreed with this. However, he certainly did disagree with the enforcement of an explicitly Trinitarian interpretation onto the text by Hutchinsonians and with the Hutchinsonian rejection of any idea that there might be variant unpointed texts.

Julius Bate’s The Integrity of the Hebrew Text, published in London in 1754, is a fine example of the Hutchinsonian approach to Kennicott’s project. Bate published several works in defence of Hutchinsonianism, including Critica Hebraea or a Hebrew-English Dictionary without Points, which appeared in 1767. Bate opened his pamphlet against Kennicott by:

Railing against his temerity of correcting the sacred pages of Scripture with the same ‘vague and licentious spirit of criticism’ that has plagued the new readers of Shakespeare and Pope.62

Bate was not the only Hutchinsonian who felt compelled to ravage Kennicott. Fowler Comings in 1753 attacked Kennicott on the same grounds as Bate did.63

The essence of the Hutchinsonian charge against Kennicott was that, in playing fast and loose with the letter that way, as the Hutchinsonians accused Kennicott of doing, destroyed the possibility of a spiritual interpretation as far as Hutchinsonians were concerned. However, the form of the criticism upset Kennicott a great deal. He published A Word to the Hutchinsonians in 1756. Kennicott pointed out the danger of the Hutchinsonian claim to be reformers of the religion.

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