Alfred Loisy and Modern Biblical Studies 0813231213, 9780813231211

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ALFRED LOISY & MODERN BIBLICAL STUDIES

Alfred Loisy & MODERN BIBLICAL STUDIES

JEFFREY L. MORROW

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞

Image on page iii: Depiction of Anzu pursued by Ninurta, palace relief, Nineveh. Black and white crop of full engraving plate scan; 1853; from ‘Monuments of Nineveh, Second Series’ plate 19/83, London, J. Murray, 1853 by Austen Henry Layard; 1853 (Assyrian). Courtesy of Wikimedia.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Morrow, Jeffrey Lawrence, 1978– author. Title: Alfred Loisy and modern biblical studies / Jeffrey L Morrow. Description: Washington, D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018026098 | ISBN 9780813231211 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Loisy, Alfred, 1857–1940. | Modernism (Christian theology)—Catholic Church. Classification: LCC BX4705.L7 M67 2019 | DDC 220.092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018026098

This book is dedicated to my mother, Cheryl Banks, and to my father, Jay Morrow, with much love and affection

Contents

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Preface ix 



Introduction 1

Acknowledgments xv

1  / Things New and Old: Loisy’s Place in the Controversy over Modernism  11 2  / The Bible and Its Ancient Near Eastern Milieu in Nineteenth-Century France  31 3  / Loisy’s Work in the Study of the Ancient Near East and the Old Testament  51 4  / Loisy on the Book of Genesis in Light of Mesopotamian Literature 73 5  / Back to the Sources: The History of the Source Critical Tradition upon Which Loisy Drew  89 6  / Loisy’s Engagement with Biblical Scholarship: Fr. Richard Simon as Heroic Symbol  110 7  / Loisy’s Defense of Historical Biblical Criticism  130

Conclusion 158



Selected Bibliography  165 

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Index 207

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Preface

When, on that Sunday in September 1871, at the age of fourteen, Alfred Loisy felt the first inklings of his calling to the Catholic priesthood, he could not have known that within forty years he would be solemnly excommunicated from the Catholic church in which he had grown up and served as priest for nearly thirty years. The facts of his life show the steps he took to engage in the teaching and scholarship that he was convinced were so necessary for him to undertake—despite formal warnings from his superiors, including his bishop as well as the pope via the Vatican’s secretary of state. His effort to avoid excommunication is also apparent. He published some controversial works, but did so pseudonymously. When he wrote in his own name, for example, in writing L’Évangile et l’Église, he did so, at least ostensibly, as a Catholic apologist defending the faith against the German Protestant historian Adolf von Harnack. The year 1908 began with the death of one of Loisy’s primary opponents, Cardinal Richard of Paris. Loisy’s excommunication later that year could not have been a surprise, not merely because of the decrees and formal condemnations of modernism from the Holy See the previous year, but also because Loisy had been given a warning that he would be excommunicated if he did not make a formal retraction. Thus on March 7, 1908, Loisy was excommunicated, although he did not discover his excommunication until the following day.

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Preface As he tells the story, he picked up the newspaper for March 8 and discovered that he had been formally excommunicated by the pope on the previous day. He had not been personally notified. And yet he described his response as one of “infinite solace” or “relief.” He wrote, “The Church had rendered me a great tumult, in the manner of wilting and condemnation, by ostracism, and, in the measure it was possible, by extermination, but in the end she granted me liberty.”1 He thus narrated his excommunication as an experience of liberation. Loisy’s personal story, complicated and ambiguous as it appears, is intimately tied to a larger story of the church’s adjustment to the modern world, quintessentially represented by the documents produced by the Second Vatican Council, the first modern ecumenical council not to issue any anathemas.2 Among the documents of Vatican II, Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, is arguably one of the most significant. In Dei Verbum we see the fruit of the biblical, patristic, and liturgical renewal come together in the Council’s discussion of divine revelation. There is more going on behind the scenes, however, than readers of Dei Verbum are often aware. Many of the debates that occurred during the modernist controversy continued at the Council, and particularly in the drafting of what would become Dei Verbum. This included matters concerning biblical inspiration as well as interpretation. The role of the historical critical method itself was one such point of controversy. Loisy’s attempts at bringing the results and methods of modern historical biblical criticism into the world of Catholic bibli1. Alfred Loisy, Choses passées (Paris: Nourry, 1913), 367. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations, except from Vatican documents, are my own. 2. John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 45.

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cal scholarship of his day was a failure. He was not successful in his lifetime. His works were widely read, but the antimodernist infrastructure drove such exegesis underground. It would survive and thrive already beginning prior to the Council. The ways in which Pope Pius XII’s 1943 Divino Afflante Spiritu were interpreted facilitated the appropriation of methods very much like what Loisy was advocating and using.3 This history is covered elsewhere, but Catholic scholars, and those in the United States in particular, began to excel in the use of the historical critical method.4 The ways in which this has developed are not without ambiguity, but they remain part of the history of Catholic biblical scholarship, and a history of what led to Vatican II. There are some younger scholars of Catholic history and theology that might wonder why work on Loisy is useful or relevant. Is he not of the sort that is best left to be forgotten? Why spend time delving into the skills, work, and controversy of a scholar excommunicated by the church? In fact, why should the topic of modernism more broadly deserve the attention of academics who study church history and Catholic theology? These questions of the newer generations of Catholics distinguish them from those who lived through the period of time before, during, and immediately after the Second Vatican Council. For some scholars of modernism, the controversies over modernism are very similar to the challenges they faced in the 1960s 3. Pope Pius XII, Divino Afflante Spiritu, Encyclical Letter, September 30, 1943; available at www.vatican.va. 4. See, e.g., Jeffrey L. Morrow, “The Fate of Catholic Biblical Interpretation in America,” in Weaving the American Catholic Tapestry: Essays in Honor of William L. Portier, ed. Derek C. Hatch and Timothy R. Gabrielli (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2017), 41–59, and “Dei verbum in Light of the History of Catholic Biblical Interpretation,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 23, no. 1–2 (2016): 227–49; Sandra Yocum Mize, Joining the Revolution in Theology: The College Theology Society, 1954–2004 (Lanham, Md.: Sheed and Ward, 2007), 36–39; and Gerald P. Fogarty, SJ, American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989).

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and 1970s, when they were students and young scholars. In his important study of American Catholic biblical scholarship, Gerald Fogarty describes some of the controversies from 1955–62, prior to Vatican II, as a sort of reenactment of the Americanist controversy, of which, in some ways, the modernist controversy was a continuation.5 Many of these controversies continued during the Council itself, in some instances pitting friend against friend, as had happened earlier in the modernist controversy.6 These controversies demarcated firm lines in the sand. Scholars of my generation experienced these controversies secondhand, primarily as expressed by our own teachers and their stories of the 1960s and 1970s. The modernist conflict does not fit my own personal story. And yet, the wrestling with the relationship between faith and reason, the Bible and history, and the text’s past and the interpreter’s present cannot but remain important issues. My interest in the modernist controversy is rooted in better understanding the perspective and past experiences of my teachers. In an attempt to better understand their experiences of coming to age—theologically speaking— in the 1960s and 1970s, and learning from those experiences, has helped drive me to study the modernist conflict. I am also increasingly convinced that the issues the modernist controversy raised remain with us. Some of the points of conflict continue, and so I think the history of modernism retains its relevance now in the twenty-first century, as it did throughout the twentieth. As a scholar of the history of modern biblical criticism, the present volume brings my own area 5. Fogarty, American Catholic Biblical Scholarship, 254–55 and 258–323. 6. On the ways in which that played out in the modernist controversy, see the stories of John Slattery, Denis O’Connell, Joseph McSorley, and William Sullivan in William L. Portier, Divided Friends: Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the United States (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013).

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of expertise into dialogue with the history of modernism. It illuminates some aspects to that controversy, thus adding to the history leading up to the Second Vatican Council, filling in a lacuna in Loisy scholarship, as well as helping my generation better understand our teachers. This volume will examine an understudied part of this history, that of Loisy’s early engagement with historical and historical critical methodologies in his scholarly work in Assyriology and biblical studies (the Old Testament in particular), as well as his broader arguments concerning the important role of the historical critical method in his own attempt to reform the church and theology. Loisy remains an important figure in this history. His studies of ancient Mesopotamian literature, culture, and religion, as well as the ways in which he applied that to his biblical studies, as he was appropriating the literary methods of historical biblical criticism, laid the very foundation for his work which would be censured as modernist. This particular strand of history—both how biblical scholars like Loisy engaged in historical biblical criticism, as well as the formal juridical and informal responses of antimodernists—is one important but too often neglected aspect of the theological and pastoral climate that led to Vatican II.

Preface /  xiii

Acknowledgments

The researching, writing, and editing of this book took a number of years, and was aided by the assistance of many people during that time. My initial interest in Loisy began while I was a doctoral student. My dissertation director, William L. Portier, a scholar of modernism among other areas, pointed out to me the importance of the modernist controversy within the history of Catholic biblical interpretation. I discovered that I needed to research this topic for my doctoral dissertation, although in the end only a few paragraphs resulted from this research. Later, after acquiring a full-time teaching position as an assistant professor at Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology, I became a member of La Société Internationale d’Études sur Alfred Loisy. As an active member of that group, I have had the good fortune to spend time with a number of scholars of various aspects of Loisy’s work and of the modernist time period, especially Portier, C. J. T. Talar, David Schultenover, SJ, Danny Praet, and Annelies Lannoy. I have learned much from my conversations with each of them. I owe an immense debt of gratitude specifically to C. J. T. Talar for regularly inviting me to present my work on Loisy at the annual meetings of La Société, which meets along with the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Much of the work that went into the present volume originated in

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Acknowledgments the research I conducted for those presentations. Talar has also been extremely generous and helpful in his correspondence, in his critique of my work, helping guide my research by pointing me in the right direction where material can be found, and in providing me with sources, his own, sometimes prior to publication, as well as those of others, including his surprise gifts of difficult-to-find works, such as various obscure texts of Émile Poulat. The second, third, and fourth chapters of this volume originated in research I conducted for three professional paper presentations. The first was a paper entitled, “Babylonian Myths and the Bible: The Historical and Religious Context to Loisy’s Application of ‘Myth’ as a Concept,” which I presented on November 24, 2013, at the Nineteenth Century Theology Group’s annual meeting at the American Academy of Religion in Baltimore, Maryland. The second paper was entitled, “Babylon in Paris: Alfred Loisy and the Discipline of Assyriology,” and was presented at the annual meeting of La Société in Baltimore later that same day. I thank Talar for inviting me to present my work at that meeting. The third paper was “Alfred Loisy, Assyriology and the Old Testament,” which Edwin Yamauchi invited me to present at the annual meeting of the Near Eastern Archaeological Society. The first of these presentations was initially published in the conference proceedings as “Babylonian Myths and the Bible: The Historical and Religious Context to Loisy’s Application of ‘Myth’ as a Concept,” Papers of the Nineteenth Century Theology Group 44 (2013): 43–62. That paper was later revised and published as “Alfred Loisy and les Mythes Babyloniens: Loisy’s Discourse on Myth in the Context of Modernism,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology/Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologie-

Acknowledgments xvi  /

geschichte 21, no. 1 (2014): 87–103. I owe thanks to the Journal for allowing me to reuse material from this article in my volume here. The second of those presentations went through a long series of revisions. I eventually published an article based on that presentation, as well as on the third presentation, as “Études Assyriologie and 19th and 20th Century French Historical-Biblical Criticism,” Near Eastern Archaeological Society Bulletin 59 (2014): 3–20. I owe thanks to the Bulletin for allowing me to reuse material from this article in the present volume. That initial second presentation was further revised and expanded, incorporating material from the Bulletin article with permission, and published as “Babylon in Paris: Alfred Loisy as Assyriologist,” Journal of Religious History 40, no. 2 (2016): 261–76. I owe thanks to the Journal for allowing me to reuse material from this article in my volume here. The sixth chapter originated in research I initially undertook for a paper presentation entitled, “Histoire Critique and la Question Biblique: Alfred Loisy’s Use of Richard Simon Prior to the Modernist Controversy,” which I presented at the American Catholic Historical Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., on January 5, 2014. Finally, the seventh chapter originated in research I initially conducted for a paper presentation entitled, “Doctrinal Development: Alfred Loisy, Biblical Criticism and the ‘Firmin’ Articles,” which I presented at the annual meeting of La Société in San Francisco, California, on November 20, 2011. The paper was later revised and was published as “Alfred Loisy’s Developmental Approach to Scripture: Reading the ‘Firmin’ Articles in the Context of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Historical Biblical Criticism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 3 (2013): 324–44. This sev-

Acknowledgments /  xvii

enth chapter represents a further revised and expanded version of this paper. I owe the Journal thanks for allowing me to reuse material from this article. Some of the material in the sixth and seventh chapters was the fruit of the research I undertook during the summer of 2015. That work was part of a project entitled, “Alfred Loisy’s Ecclesiological Vision in L’Évangile et l’Église,” which was funded by a Summer Stipend Award from the University Research Council of Seton Hall University for that summer. The remainder of this book was researched, written, and revised during my sabbatical during the academic year 2015–16. I also revised the earlier material and incorporated it into this volume during my sabbatical. I am indebted to Seton Hall University and, in particular, to the dean of Seton Hall’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology, Msgr. Joseph Reilly, and the then-provost, Dr. Larry A. Robinson, for granting my sabbatical leave. The St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology granted me a very generous sabbatical research grant, without which neither my sabbatical nor the completion of this volume would have been possible. Finally, I served as a visiting scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary during my sabbatical, where I conducted much of the work that went into this volume. I owe thanks to the staff and administration of Princeton Theological Seminary, and especially to President M. Craig Barnes, who appointed me a visiting scholar for the academic year 2015–16. Last but certainly not least, I owe a tremendous word of thanks to the individuals who helped critique various portions of this manuscript and assisted in the editing and revision of this work. Katie Wesolek thoroughly edited chapters 2, 3, and 4, as well as the introduction—I owe Katie a tremendous word of thanks for her editorial efforts without which those chapters

Acknowledgments xviii  /

would be less readable. I also owe my wife, Maria Morrow, a tremendous word of thanks for her editorial work revising the early versions of the papers that led to chapters 2–4, as well as her editorial work on chapters 1, 5, 7, and the conclusion. I owe a word of thanks to the two reviewers whose comments aided my revisions of this manuscript. Finally, I owe a real debt of gratitude to all of the fine people at the Catholic University of America Press who helped see this project through to completion, especially John Martino, Theresa Walker, and Paul Higgins.

Acknowledgments /  xix

ALFRED LOISY & MODERN BIBLICAL STUDIES

Introduction

The Second Vatican Council was the fruit of a number of important movements from the first half of the twentieth century. We can speak of at least three major renewal movements that preceded the Second Vatican Council: patristic, liturgical, and biblical. These movements of renewal are noteworthy and were essential developments leading up to Vatican II. This history, however, cannot be adequately understood without reference to the controversies that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century involving the so-called modernist crisis, as well as the primarily neo-Thomist antimodernist response. In fact, in writing a history of twentieth-century Catholic theology by way of surveying prominent theologians, Fergus Kerr goes so far as to claim: “The history of twentieth-century Catholic theology is the history of the attempted elimination of theological modernism, by censorship, sackings and excommunication—and the resurgence of issues that could not be repressed by such methods.”1 Kerr’s comments in his initial chapter, “Before Vatican II,” are helpful for getting a general picture of the theological climate of the times.2 The church’s official response against modernism affected virtually all formal theological and philosophical education in the Catholic world, and at Catholic seminaries 1. Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 4–5. 2. Ibid., 1–16.

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Introduction in particular. In 1910, Pope St. Pius X imposed the Oath Against Modernism in his motu proprio Sacrorum Antistitum.3 The Oath against Modernism was ritually sworn each year by all Catholic clergy, seminary faculty, etc., until after the Second Vatican Council when, starting in 1967, it was no longer required. As Kerr points out, the “Twenty-four Thomistic Theses” were the foundation of the requisite philosophy examinations needed in order to study theology.4 St. Thomas Aquinas was depicted primarily as a philosopher rather than a theologian. One irony here was that for Thomas, Aristotle was “the philosopher.” Thomas never depicted himself as a philosopher—rather, he was a theologian, which for Thomas meant a commentator of scripture.5 Kerr maintains that there was another irony at work: Paradoxically, the revival of Thomistic philosophy in the wake of Leo XIII’s directive, intended to keep modern philosophy out of Catholicism, and especially German Romanticism, kept to very much the same canons of rationality as we find in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment ideal was to attain timeless, universal and objective conclusions by exercising a unitary and ahistorical form of reasoning. Similarly, neoscholastic theology “identified truth and life with immutability and rationality; it opposed being to history and ignored concreteness in human life and in the economy of salvation.” For neothomists, as for Enlightenment philosophers, appealing to experience, tradition and historical studies was the wrong way to get to truth.6 3. English translations of the Oath can be found in ibid., 223–25; in Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 235–36; and online at www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10moath.htm. 4. Kerr, Twentieth-Century, 2–5. The theses are available online in various places, e.g., www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/24Thomisticpart2.htm. 5. On St. Thomas, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, OP, Saint Thomas Aquinas Volume 1: The Person and His Work, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005 [1996]), and Saint Thomas Aquinas Volume 2: Spiritual Master (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003). 6. Kerr, Twentieth-Century, 2. In this quotation, Kerr quotes from Thomas F. O’Meara,

Introduction 2  /

This description might not be completely accurate. After all, Leo’s Aeterni Patris, which initiated his Thomistic revival, included other thinkers besides Thomas, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm.7 After Pius X promulgated Pascendi Dominici Gregis in 1907, however, Kerr’s description of the forms of Thomism permitted seems more accurate. There is quite a wide diversity within Thomism, or perhaps versions of Thomism.8 Prior to and even contemporary with Aeterni Patris, at least, there seemed to be more theological and even philosophical diversity within Thomism than in the immediate wake of Pascendi.9 Furthermore, as Kerr points out, in this period of time, following the church’s law then in force, the philosophy and theology lectures that were mandated for those seeking to enter the clerical state were “delivered in Latin, by professors who treated everything according to the method, doctrine and principles of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas.”10 The tensions from the Americanist controversy through the modernist crisis had political roots as well as intellectual roots. William Portier explains how, “in the chronicle of Catholicism’s protracted and ambivalent struggle with liberal secular states, the modernist crisis emerges as one in a continuing series of OP, Thomas Aquinas, Theologian (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 171. 7. Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris, Encyclical Letter, August 4, 1879, no. 13; available at www.vatican.va. 8. See, e.g., Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Gerald A. McCool, SJ, From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), and The Neo-Thomists (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1994). 9. For just one example of this diversity, see some of the comments on the relationship between nature and grace made by an Italian immigrant priest in the U.S., and drafter of the Baltimore Catechism, Januarius De Concilio. See Biff Rocha, “ ‘De Concilio’s Catechism,’ Catechists, and the History of the Baltimore Catechism” (PhD diss., University of Dayton, 2013), 136–42. The passages he cites are from Januarius De Concilio, “What Was the Primitive State of Man?,” Catholic World 29 (1879): 602–11. 10. Kerr, Twentieth-Century, 1.

Introduction /  3

Catholic openings to the age.”11 In agreement with Kerr’s assessment concerning the centrality of the modernist controversy to understanding twentieth century Catholic theology, Portier continues, underscoring: “But it is the pivotal opening that gives shape to twentieth-century Catholic theology.”12 It affected virtually every area of theology, especially biblical studies and the development of doctrine. Thus, a consideration of the modernist crisis is essential, but all too often neglected, when discussing the history leading up to Vatican II. The history of the Council, and particularly its discussion of scriptural interpretation in its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, cannot be properly understood without reference to the modernist crisis which preceded it at the beginning of the twentieth century. One of the crucial fields of theological and historical investigation intimately involved in the modernist controversy was biblical studies. Yet, by and large, the majority of scholars of modernism were historical theologians or systematic theologians rather than Bible scholars or historians of exegesis. One of the central players in the modernist crisis was Alfred Loisy (1857–1940). Prior to his excommunication in 1908, Loisy’s scholarly work was primarily in the field of biblical studies. After his excommunication, Loisy was appointed chair of the history of religion at the Collège de France, and from that point forward much of his scholarly work pertained to the history of religion. He worked in other areas throughout his career, including Assyriology, as we shall see in this book. The bulk of his work during the modernist controversy, however, pertained to the Bible. He argued that what John Henry Newman (1801–90) had done in the area 11. Portier, Divided Friends, 14. 12. Ibid.

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of development of doctrine, he, Loisy, was attempting to do for scripture. Some studies exist on Loisy’s work on the Bible, but they remain few in number, and are primarily in the form of articles and essays.13 This volume thus takes a look at Loisy’s biblical scholarship within its historical context, which represents a neglected area within Loisy scholarship; there is a dearth of studies on Loisy’s Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern scholarship in particular.14 This study provides a window into one significant current that would be addressed later in the debates of the Second Vatican Council concerning the question of biblical interpretation. The first chapter looks at the history of modernism and situates Loisy within that history. The very history and application of the word “modernism” itself is controversial; therefore, I examine the history of the term. Despite scholarly assertions 13. Examples of scholarly work on Loisy’s biblical scholarship include: C. J. T. Talar, “Between Science and Myth: Alfred Loisy on Genesis,” Mythos 7 (2013): 27–41; Jean Zumstein, “Alfred Loisy, commentateur de l’évangile selon Jean,” Mythos 7 (2013): 43–58; Frédéric Amsler, “Les sources des évangiles synoptiques de Loisy à la recherche actuelle,” in Alfred Loisy cent ans après: Autour d’un petit livre: Actes du colloque international tenu à Paris, les 23–24 mai 2003, ed. François Laplanche, Ilaria Biagioli, and Claude Langlois (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 93–105; and C. J. T. Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and AntiModernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 191–211. Important discussions of Loisy’s work on the Bible can also be found in William Baird, History of New Testament Research Volume Two: From Jonathan Edwards to Rudolf Bultmann (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003), 163–72; Harvey Hill, The Politics of Modernism: Alfred Loisy and the Scientific Study of Religion (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 59–89; Pierre Colin, L’audace et le soupçon: La crise moderniste dans le catholicisme française (1893–1914) (Paris: De Brouwer, 1997), 133–44 and 151–63; Nadia M. Lahutsky, “Paris and Jerusalem: Alfred Loisy and Père Lagrange on the Gospel of Mark,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 52 (1990): 444–66; and Christoph Théobald, “L’exégèse catholique au moment de la crise moderniste,” in Le monde contemporain et la Bible, ed. Claude Savart and Jean-Noël Aletti, 387–439 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985), 391–92, 396–403, 418–21, 425, 432–38. 14. Talar, “Between Science and Myth,” 27–41, and some of my own work being among the very few exceptions.

Introduction /  5

that the term was invented by Pius X and first used in his encyclical Pascendi, I found some earlier references to the term, used in ways very similar to how it would later be employed in Pascendi. In general, though, it was not until 1907 that the term “modernism” gained broad usage and in the way Pascendi used it. I then examine some of the roots of modernism. Of course, there was no organized modernist movement. The currents of thought that were identified as modernist, however, go back into the nineteenth century. I then discuss some of the characteristics that Pascendi identified as modernist. These were real intellectual trends, albeit not organized in any unified modernist movement. After this I address some of the political context for understanding the modernist controversy, a context too often ignored in the literature. I then describe the antimodernist response, and conclude with a look at Loisy’s place at the heart of this conflict. Some of Loisy’s earliest scholarship was actually in the discipline of Assyriology, which laid the foundation for his work in biblical studies and thus of his modernist writings. Therefore, in the second chapter, I take a step back and examine the history of the discipline of Assyriology, focusing especially on the France of Loisy’s day. This is important, not only better to situate Loisy’s work in Assyriology, but also because Loisy was not far removed from the discipline’s origin, and, in fact, worked with one of the discipline’s founding figures, Jules Oppert (1825–1905). Contrary to what might be popularly assumed, British and French work in Assyriology predates German dominance in the field. I thus discuss some of Assyriology’s prehistory leading up to the important work of early French scholars in the nineteenth century. This chapter sets the stage for understanding Loisy’s own work in Assyriology.

Introduction 6  /

In the third chapter, I take a closer look at Loisy’s own training and scholarship in Assyriology. Loisy engaged in graduate work in Assyriology culminating with a thesis and a failed attempt at securing a chair of Assyriology. Loisy turned to the study of Assyriology after he grew dissatisfied with his formal biblical studies courses which he took from Fulcran Grégoire Vigouroux (1837–1915). It was also at this time that he sat in Ernest Renan’s (1823–92) biblical studies lectures at the Collège de France. He described himself as put off by Renan’s skeptical treatment of scripture, but was equally dissatisfied by what he saw as Vigouroux’s apologetic approach, both of which he felt were overly simplistic. After discussing Loisy’s studies, I survey his scholarly publications in Assyriology. Assyriology gave him an important background in ancient Near Eastern studies, and the study of ancient Mesopotamia in particular, so that when he turned to biblical studies, he was able to bring a wealth of knowledge and insight into comparable ancient Near Eastern material. This set him apart from many other biblical scholars at the time who were focusing almost exclusively on internal literary methods within historical biblical criticism for analyzing the biblical material. Loisy engaged in such historical critical studies as well, but he also made comparisons with the broader material available to him through his studies in Assyriology. The fourth chapter takes a look at Loisy’s biblical studies on the Book of Genesis, specifically focusing on the creation and flood material, as he compared it with other documents from the ancient Near East. I focus on two important books, little studied by scholars, that Loisy wrote engaging with Mesopotamian creation and flood traditions. In light of Loisy’s attempt to place himself as a sort of via media between Vigouroux and Renan, I use the example of how he writes about the notions of

Introduction /  7

“myth” and “legend” in the biblical material and in the Mesopotamian traditions. I close this chapter with a brief reflection on the role of the modernist controversy in his discussion of the Babylonian, Assyrian, and biblical materials. This chapter provides a concrete example of how Loisy applied his Assyriology training to his biblical studies. Before continuing to treat Loisy’s work in biblical studies, I again take a step back, in chapter 5, to situate Loisy’s engagement with the historical critical method of biblical studies within the broader history of that method’s own development. It has been typical for scholars of the history of biblical criticism to trace the methods employed—namely source and form criticism—to the nineteenth and maybe eighteenth centuries. In this chapter, however, I trace the history of source criticism of the Old Testament back to the seventeenth century, where Loisy places it as well, especially to the work of Fr. Richard Simon (1638–1712). I mention some important precursors, discussing early advances in textual criticism and similar developments in late antiquity as well as in the medieval period. I include brief discussions of Simon’s seventeenth century precursors and contemporaries like Isaac La Peyrère, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza. I then work from Simon through Jean Astruc (1684– 1766), to the important eighteenth-century works of Johann David Michaelis (1717–91) and his student Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827). Eichhorn in particular espouses a view of history and myth that is very close to what Loisy would later articulate in his works, such as those examined in chapter 4. From Eichhorn I move to Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780– 1849), Hermann Hupfeld (1796–1866), Édouard Guillaume Eugène Reuss (1804–91), Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–69), and ultimately, Loisy’s contemporary Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918).

Introduction 8  /

I chose to trace the history of one specific source critical theory, the Documentary Hypothesis of Pentateuchal origins, not only because it was one of the most controversial in the Catholic world of Loisy’s day, but also because it set the pace for parallel source critical trends in other areas of Old Testament studies as well as in New Testament studies, and thus proves paradigmatic. In the sixth chapter, I look at Loisy’s actual engagement with biblical scholarship both prior to and contemporary with his work. I begin this chapter by looking at the secondary scholarly literature upon which Loisy relies in nine of his early scholarly books on the Bible. In light of the previous chapter, many of these scholars will be recognized as significant pioneers in the field of biblical studies. Loisy shows a breadth of engagement that was impressive in his time, spanning English, German, and French scholarship. The majority of this chapter focuses on Loisy’s use of one early scholar, the seventeenth-century pioneering biblical critic, Richard Simon. Here I do not limit myself to the nine books already discussed, but include nearly all of the books Loisy published in which Simon is referenced. I show how, early on, Simon functioned for Loisy as a privileged source among other sources. After his excommunication, however, Simon starts to function symbolically as representing the sort of Catholic scholar Loisy attempts to be. There are numerous similarities in their biographies which lend themselves to this sort of symbolic use of Simon, and I address these throughout the chapter. The final chapter examines Loisy’s so-called Firmin articles, especially his last one in its expanded book form, The Religion of Israel. The Firmin articles were so named because Loisy published them pseudonymously under his middle name, as A. Firmin. De-

Introduction /  9

spite this attempt at anonymity, Loisy’s final installment, what was to be the first of three articles on the religion of Israel, was censured by the cardinal archbishop of Paris and became an important work for the investigation leading up to Loisy’s eventual excommunication in 1908. The earlier Firmin articles led to the publication of Loisy’s most famous work, L’Évangile et l’Église, The Gospel and the Church. In this chapter, I argue that Loisy was attempting to defend the use of the modern historical critical method of exegesis in officially approved Catholic biblical scholarship. He used the example of John Henry Newman and the development of doctrine in church history to argue for looking at developments within the biblical material as well. This present book seeks to help fill a lacuna in Loisy scholarship, particularly regarding his work in the Old Testament and the ancient Near East. It is an attempt at better understanding the intellectual foundations—education and scholarship—in Assyriology and biblical studies of the later theological work of one of the most significant figures of the modernist crisis. In doing so, I hope to contribute not only to the history of modernism but also to the history of biblical scholarship that led up to the Second Vatican Council, a watershed event in the life of the Catholic church. It is a Council which, as with all ecumenical councils less than a century after their closing, remains contested, and thus a council whose teachings Catholics are still trying to appropriate.

Introduction 10  /

1  /

Things New and Old Loisy ’s Pl ace in the Controver sy over Modernism

In 1907, Pope St. Pius X (1835–1914) famously condemned modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.”1 The term “modernism” began to be used regularly by the Magisterium of the Catholic church during that fateful year, 1907.2 Prior to that 1. Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Encyclical Letter, September 8, 1907, no. 39; available at www.vatican.va. On the drafting of Pascendi and its history, see Claus Arnold, “P. Joseph Lemius OMI und die Entstehung der Enzyklika ‘Pascendi,’ ” in Kirchengeschichte. Alte und neue Wege. Festschrift für Christoph Weber, ed. Gisela Fleckenstein, Michael Klöcker, and Norbert Schloßmacher (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008), 299–320; C. J. T. Talar, “ ‘The Synthesis of All Heresies’—100 Years On,” Theological Studies 68, no. 3 (2007): 491–514, and “Introduction: Pascendi dominici gregis: The Vatican Condemnation of Modernism,” U.S. Catholic Historian 25, no. 1 (2007): 1–12; Claus Arnold, “Absage an die Moderne?: Pius X. und die Entstehung der Enzyklika Pascendi (1907),” Theologie und Philosophie 80 (2005): 201–24; and Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, 232–34. 2. For important studies on the history of the Roman Catholic modernist controversy, see, e.g., Portier, Divided Friends; Claus Arnold, Kleine Geschichte des Modernismus (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2007); César Izquierdo, “Cómo se ha entendido el ‘modernismo teológico’: Discusión historiográfica,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 16 (2007): 35–75; Jodock (ed.), Catholicism Contending with Modernity; C. J. T. Talar, (Re)reading, Reception, and Rhetoric: Approaches to Roman Catholic Modernism (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Colin, L’audace et le soupçon; Marvin R. O’Connell, Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994); Daly, Transcendence and Immanence; Ramón García de Haro, Historia teológica

/  11

The Controver sy over Modernism time, neither the Magisterium, publicly, nor those later labelled as “modernist” used the term (even privately).3 After Pius’s 1907 encyclical letter, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, where he defined and attacked modernism, some of the individuals involved (e.g., Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell) began to use that label to self-identify. It has become commonplace in the scholarly historiography of modernism to view modernism as a fictional creation of Pius X.4 Yet César Izquierdo is probably correct when he points out that, “It is certain that the encyclical Pascendi of Pius X systematized the principles more or less common that imbued the different authors, but it cannot be thus attributed with being the creator of something nonexistent.”5

Origin of the Term “Modernism,” and related terms like “modernist,” were used prior to 1907, but in the context of Catholicism “modernism” was primarily a substitute for “liberalism,” not typically used as a particularly virulent new form of “liberalism” as Pius X would use the term.6 Evidence indicates that some bishops and some del modernismo (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1972); and Émile Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (Paris: Casterman, 1962). 3. On the history of the terms “modernism” and “modernist” stretching from Luther to Pascendi, see Jean Rivière, “Pour l’histoire du terme ‘modernisme,’ ” Revue des sciences religieuses 8 (1928): 398–421. 4. For a study on the changes within the historiography of modernism see C. J. T. Talar, “The ‘Synthesis of All Heresies’: Roman Catholic Modernism,” Religion Compass 4, no. 7 (2010): 426–35. 5. Izquierdo, “Cómo se ha entendido,” 37. 6. This is the sense in which it is used, for example, in Charles Périn, Le modernisme dans l’Église: D’après les lettres inédites de Lamennais (Paris: Lecoffre, 1881). Even amidst the controversies over liberalism, some of the language can appear similar to what would come later in the wake of the 1907 condemnations of modernism, e.g.: “Now we know the birth certificate of modernism. This child of the revolt will have as its elder brother liberalism which only lives through fear, and for its younger brother opportunism which will reign through terror . . . that day they gave access to the demon of liberalism who presented

The Controver sy over Modernism 12  /

Catholic authors used the terms at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth century in this way.7 The shift to using it more in the manner of Pascendi did not gain traction until 1907, although early examples exist that sound very much like what we find in Pascendi.8 Sometimes it was even associated with positions on the historical background to the composition of portions of scripture, e.g., the denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.9 In 1883 there was an article in La Civiltà cattolica entitled, “Il modernismo: A rispetto della Chiesa” (“Modernism: In Respect to the Church”).10 In himself in the form of a serpent and congratulated [félicita] them on their prudence and wisdom.” See Vicomte G. de Chaulnes, book review of Charles Périn’s Le modernisme dans l’Église, Revue de la suisse catholique 13 (1881): 124–25. 7. See, e.g., the comments in Portier, Divided Friends, 19; and Colin, L’audace et le soupçon, 108. Portier notes its usage specifically in the French controversy over the French edition of Walter Elliot, The Life of Father Hecker (New York: Columbia University Press, 1891). The French version, usually referred to as La vie du Père Hecker, was first published as W. Elliot, Le Père Hecker: Fondateur des “Paulistes” américains: 1819–1888 (Paris: Lecoffre, 1897). The only edition I was able to access was W. Elliot, Le Père Hecker: Fondateur des “Paulistes” américains: 1819–1888, 7th ed. (Paris: Lecoffre, 1898). The title page (apparently of all the editions) mentions that the volume was translated and adapted from the English with the author’s authorization, and that it includes an introduction by Msgr. Ireland, a preface by Félix Klein, and a letter from Cardinal Gibbons. It was Klein’s preface that initiated the controversy over Americanism which Pope Leo XIII censured in his 1899 Testem Benevolentiae. There are a number of examples of this usage of modernism (modernisme), e.g., G. Péries, book review of Msgr. Spalding’s Opportunité, trans. Félix Klein, Polybiblion 94 (1902): 525; and Louis Robert, book review of Charles Maignen’s Études sur l’américanisme, Polybiblion 83 (1898): 345. 8. E.g., “La canonizzazione del La Salle: E l’insegnamento popolare,” La Civiltà cattolica 11 (1900): 7, where we read, “The chorus leaders [I corifei] of revolutionary modernism, liberal, masonic and atheistic (all qualities that practically merge into one).” On the role of La Civiltà cattolica in the history of the modernist controversy, see Giovanni Sale, ‘La Civiltà cattolica’ nella crisi modernista (1900–1907): fra transigentismo politico e integralismo dottrinale (Milan / Rome: Jaca Book / La Civiltà cattolica, 2001). 9. This in fact is one of the issues identified as a characteristic of modernism (modernismo) in G. G. F. Re [Giuseppe Giacomo Filippo Re], Dizionario di erudizione biblica, propedeutico, storico, geografico, esegetico ed apologetic Volume IV (Turin: Stamperia Reale della Ditta G.B. Paravia, 1900), 322. 10. “Il modernismo: A rispetto della Chiesa,” La Civiltà cattolica 4 (1883): 539–48. This articles emphasizes the political aspects of what it identifies as modernism; issues concerning the relationship between church and state are central to its discussion. These

The Controver sy over Modernism /  13

that piece, we read a statement that sounds very close to what we later find in Pascendi: “The new paganism, which is called Modernism, and more commonly Liberalism or Revolution, also battles the Church; because, as an instrument of Satan, and informed by the same spirit, the hatred of Christ, it is moved by the same end, namely of impeding everyone from the benefit of redemption.”11 One of the clearest pre-1907 examples of using “modernism” in this way was Alessandro Cavallanti’s 1906 volume entitled Modernismo e modernisti (Modernism and Modernists).12 Early in his book, Cavallanti writes: “Modernism, counterfeit of the true and genuine concept of modernity, and the morbid and unhappy state of not a few Catholic consciences of mostly the very young, affirming and professing aspirations, opinions, tendencies, diverse ideas, which—here and there taking the form of a system—conspire to create new foundations and new garments for society, for politics, for philosophy, for theology, for the Church, for Christianity.”13 Even prior to this, however, as the archival material indicates, Pius X was being warned privately about “modernism” and “modernists.” In a letter from 1904, the cardinal archbishop of Turin, Agostino Richelmy, invoked St. Joseph’s protection “from the intrigues of a worthless [indegno] Loisy and his wretched [infelici] disciples.”14 In the following year, 1905, the bishop of Arezzo warned Pius X that his diocese matters remain in the background of the intellectual trends both Leo XIII and Pius X addressed. 11. Ibid., 539. 12. Alessandro Cavallanti, Modernismo e modernisti (Brescia: Luzzago, 1906). Jean Rivière claims that Cavallanti’s volume actually appeared in print in the first months of 1907. See Rivière, “Pour l’histoire du terme,” 408. 13. Cavallanti, Modernismo, 1. 14. Alejandro M. Diéguez and Sergio Pagano (eds.), Le carte del “Sacro Tavolo”: Aspetti del pontificato di Pio X dai documenti del suo archivio privato Vol. 1 (Vatican City: Vatican Secret Archive, 2006), 129.

The Controver sy over Modernism 14  /

was “infected with so-called modernism.”15 In some of these letters, including one from 1905, various related ideas were labelled as “modernist” (moderniste).16 As early as 1928, Jean Rivière cautioned that although it would appear that this pre-1907 understanding of “modernism” belongs to “the Italian milieux over the course of the years 1904– 1905,” this assumption would be “excessive, if not completely inaccurate . . . there are much older attestations.”17 One of the first precursors Rivière brings up is Charles Maignen (1858–1937), who was a leading French opponent of Americanism. Already in 1901 Maignen linked modernism with its antecedent Americanism, when he wrote of “proponents of Americanism and Modernism” and linked them together as a “system.”18

The Beginnings of Modernism Dating the modernist controversy, or the modernist crisis as it is often called, proves to be a difficult task. Scholars often see it beginning in 1907 with Pius’s definition, which they deem artificial. They typically see the controversy ending with the death 15. This letter is from the Vatican Secret Archive from Pius X’s private archive, as quoted in Alejandro Mario Dieguez, “Modernisti e antimodernisti sul tavolo di Pio X,” in ‘In wilder zügelloser Jagd nach Neuem’. 100 Jahre Modernismus und Antimodernismus in der katholischen Kirche, ed. Hubert Wolf and Juditz Schepers (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2009), 40. 16. Ibid. 17. Rivière, “Pour l’histoire du terme,” 412–13. 18. Charles Maignen, Nouveau catholicisme et nouveau clergé (Paris: Victor Retaux, 1902), 83. Maignen is aware of some level of diversity within what he identifies as Americanism and modernism, as he appends to his statement the phrase, “in all its forms.” This 1902 edition was the only edition to which I had access. Although it does not indicate it anywhere in this volume, Rivière mentions that this is the second edition and that the first was published in 1901. See Rivière, “Pour l’histoire du terme,” 414 and 414n1. According to Rivière, an article in the periodical L’Ami du clergé 20 (October 13, 1898): 914–15, also uses the term “modernism,” which it links with Americanism. I have not been able to verify this claim found in Rivière, “Pour l’histoire du terme,” 414.

The Controver sy over Modernism /  15

of Pius X in 1914. For understandable reasons, then, scholars often associate the controversy over modernism with Pius X’s pontificate (1903–14). On the other hand, the roots of this controversy predate Pius X, and much of the antimodernist juridical infrastructure erected by Pius X remained in place until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65). Hence the modernist controversy actually started prior to Pius X and lasted well beyond his papacy. Under the 1878–1903 pontificate of Pius’s immediate predecessor, Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903), many of the trends that Pius X would later condemn as modernist already existed, and Leo XIII dealt with a number of matters that were clearly related to the same concerns that his successor would have. This included especially Catholic work in scripture. Leo XIII had concerns about how some exegetes, including Loisy, were teaching scripture. Thus Leo produced the first ever papal encyclical devoted to the study of scripture, his 1893 Providentissimus Deus. This is significant because, as Pierre Colin observes, “The biblical question is at the heart of the modernist crisis.”19 The issue of dating the trends that Pius later condemned as modernist is thus even more complicated than the history of the usage of the term. At the very least, it seems that some of what Pius identified as modernist tendencies were present and easily identifiable during the pontificate of Leo XIII, if not earlier.

Modernist Characteristics If the dating of modernism presents a challenge, defining it is even more difficult. Pascendi’s definitions are well-known. In 19. Colin, L’audace et le soupçon, 115. See 115–63 for Colin’s important discussion of the role of biblical exegesis in the modernist crisis.

The Controver sy over Modernism 16  /

Pascendi Pius X associates modernism with the following: agnosticism, defined as the view which limits reason to sensible reality; immanence, wherein religious knowledge is sought in an individual’s subjectivity and faith is identified as a sentiment; a view of religion (including Catholicism) as the result of a natural historical process of development, explaining away apparently supernatural elements with natural alternatives; dogmas understood as symbols, “inadequate expressions” of the object of faith, which change with the vicissitudes of historical circumstances; emphasis on the believer’s individual experience; science and reason seen as independent from faith—they are autonomous and, if anything, they stand above faith; a sharp divide between pastoral work and historical and scholarly work, seeing the former as spiritual whereas in the latter God plays no role; operating as if the Bible were merely a collection of books written by human authors alone; etc.20 This long list gives a sense of what Pius X worried about in regard to modernism. However, one of the greatest stumbling blocks in identifying specific, official modernist characteristics is that there does not appear to have been a unified modernist movement. It was not as though a group of scholars worked together forming common propositions that they supported together. Nor did modernism spring out of one particular school, naming itself due to its line of thought. Rather, numerous individuals, some of whom were even quite critical of each other, were lumped together and suspected of modernism. Both Marie-Joseph Lagrange, OP (1855– 1938), and Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) were suspected of being modernists and were often lumped together with Loisy, even though both Lagrange and Blondel had published criticisms of

20. See Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, pars. 5–39.

The Controver sy over Modernism /  17

Loisy’s work, indicating their pronounced disagreement.21 While modernist ideas could be named quite specifically, as evidenced by Pius’s list above, modernism could also be understood broadly, with any original idea of scholarship becoming an issue for investigation. As the name was not adopted by scholars to identify their work, others could easily assign that name to them, and consequently it did not take much for someone to be suspected of modernism. A wide number of people, including future popes such as Benedict XV and St. John XXIII, apparently were suspected of being modernists. Individuals like Lagrange and Blondel contrasted sharply with Loisy in that they remained faithfully within the Catholic church. Lagrange found himself unable to publish in certain areas, was removed as editor of the Revue biblique, which he had founded, and faced other challenges as well. Blondel too had suffered during this time. Both had been vocal critics of Loisy, however, and although Lagrange too engaged in historical critical exegesis, he adhered to the Magisterium as a guiding light in his work, in contrast to Loisy. Within the context of modernism, Loisy was much closer to George Tyrrell (1861–1909) and his close friend Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925). Tyrrell 21. On Lagrange in this context see, e.g., Bernard Montagnes, OP, “Marie-Joseph Lagrange frente a los teólogos hostiles a los exegetas,” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 16 (2007): 97–112; Bernard Joassart, “Figures du modernisme Eudoxe Irénée Mignot et MarieJoseph Lagrange: À propos de livres récents,” Nouvelle revue théologique 127 (2005): 615–22; and Bernard Montagnes, OP, Marie-Joseph Lagrange: Une biographie critique (Paris: Cerf, 2004). On Blondel in this context see, e.g., William L. Portier, “Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology and the Triumph of Maurice Blondel,” Communio 38 (2011): 103–37; Peter J. Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism, and Action Française: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009); César Izquierdo, “Estudio introductorio: La intervención de Blondel en la crisis modernista,” in Blondel, Historia y Dogma: Sobre el valor histórico del dogma, (Madrid: Ediciones cristtiandad, 2004), 9–78; George H. Tavard, “Blondel’s Action and the Problem of the University,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity, ed. Jodock, 142–68; and César Izquierdo, Blondel y la crisis modernista: Analysis de “Historia y Dogma” (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1990).

The Controver sy over Modernism 18  /

would be excommunicated along with Loisy, and both engaged in similar criticism.22 Friedrich von Hügel was instrumental for Loisy, introducing the latter to the work of John Henry Newman. Friedrich von Hügel was also a kindred spirit with Loisy in regard to the use of historical biblical criticism, and particularly the work of Julius Wellhausen, of which Friedrich von Hügel was an assiduous intellectual disciple.23

The Political Backstory An unrecognized but crucial detail to consider is the way in which the modernist crisis fit within a greater historical context. It was not merely an intellectual controversy, but rather was nested within “the chronicle of Catholicism’s protracted and ambivalent struggle with liberal secular states.”24 The emergence of modern European states in the seventeenth century was not without ambiguity as it carved up “the decaying remnants of the medieval ecclesial order.”25 Prior to the modern period, things were not so easily divided into “sacred” and “secu22. On Tyrrell in this context see, e.g., William L. Portier, “George Tyrrell in America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 20, no. 3 (2002): 69–95; David G. Schultenover, “George Tyrrell: ‘Devout Disciple of Newman,’ ” Heythrop Journal 33 (1992): 20–44; Aidan Nichols, OP, “George Tyrrell and the Development of Doctrine,” New Blackfriars 67 (1986): 515–30; and David G. Schultenover, SJ, George Tyrrell: In Search of Catholicism (Shepherdstown, W.Va.: Patmos Press, 1981). 23. On Friedrich von Hügel in this context see, e.g., Lawrence Barmann, “The Modernist as Mystic: Baron Friedrich von Hügel,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology/ Zeitschrift für die Neuere Theologiegeschichte 4, no. 2 (1997): 221–50; John A. MacGrath, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Debate on Historical Christianity (1902–1905) (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1993); Lawrence Barmann, “Friedrich von Hügel as Modernist and as More than Modernist,” Catholic Historical Review 75, no. 2 (1989): 211–32, and Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Modernist Crisis in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 24. Portier, Divided Friends, 14. 25. William T. Cavanaugh, “ ‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (1995): 398.

The Controver sy over Modernism /  19

lar.”26 The theological and political development of Gallicanism in France, and other forms of conciliarism, their names differing by region, helped set the course of church-state conflicts to come.27 The tumultuous event of the French Revolution, with its widespread anticlerical violence, set in motion the modern Catholic church’s “prolonged combat with liberalism as embodied in modern secular states.”28 This is the broader political context in which William Portier situates the modernist crisis.29 Such context is beneficial for considering why modernism was such a contentious and divisive issue for the church. Napoleon was intent on expanding his authority to include the Papal States, to which end he forcibly abducted two popes, the first of whom, Pius VI, died in captivity on August 29, 1799. By the mid-nineteenth century, Pope Gregory XVI (r. 1831–46) was in conflict with those forces who desired Italian unification, the Papal States’ location in the middle of Italy being the last remaining obstacle. During Pius IX’s reign (1846–78), his appointed prime minister of the Papal States, Pellegrino Rossi (1787–1848), was assassinated with a knife in parliament. Before its loss in 1870, popes considered the control of the Papal States as central to their office and to the Catholic church spread out across the globe; they viewed their sovereignty over the Papal States as the guarantor of their autonomy as head of the Catholic church.30 26. Perhaps no one has made this as clear for the medieval period as Andrew W. Jones, “A Most Christian Kingdom: Saint Louis IX, Pope Clement IV, and the Construction of France in the Thirteenth Century,” PhD diss., Saint Louis University, 2012. 27. William L. Portier, “Church Unity and National Traditions: The Challenge to the Modern Papacy, 1682–1870,” in The Papacy and the Church in the United States, ed. Bernard Cooke (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 25–54. 28. Portier, Divided Friends, 7. 29. Ibid., 7–12. 30. Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 3rd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006 [1997]), 247–304.

The Controver sy over Modernism 20  /

When we speak of the church’s battle with modernity, at least in the United States, we tend to disembody “modernity,” as we do for virtually all related words which deal in some sense with intellectual activity. Talal Asad has written, “Modernity is a project—or rather, a series of interlinked projects—that certain people in power seek to achieve.”31 Modern states, governments, and all that goes along with them, are the embodiment of modernity.32 It is thus important to understand the apparently antimodern intellectual remarks and teachings of the Magisterium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the historical-political context of concern about the Papal States. Situating Pius IX and Leo XIII in this context does not have to be an exercise in reductionism, but rather provides a necessary context for proper interpretation. Omitting this historical context, on the other hand, has been one of the consistent errors made by interpreters of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council when they pit statements from the documents of 31. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 13. Asad continues: “The project aims at institutionalizing a number of . . . principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge. The notion that these experiences constitute ‘disenchantment’ . . . is a salient feature of the modern epoch . . . . Modern projects do not hang together as an integrated totality, but they account for distinctive sensibilities, aesthetics, moralities . . . . what is distinctive about modernity as a historical epoch includes modernity as a politicaleconomic project” (13–14). 32. In this context, universities play an important role, as Stanley Hauerwas’s insightful comments make clear: “In effect the state and the university reflect the symbiotic relationship that once pertained between the university and the church. In the Middle Ages the university was used to produce clerks for church and state. Now the university is expected to produce people educated to serve the bureaucracies of modernity in which it is assumed the state is crucial for an ordered world. That the university serves this function should not surprise us given the fact that the modern university and the modern state developed together.” See Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 179.

The Controver sy over Modernism /  21

Vatican II against earlier statements, say, from Pius IX. Context often clarifies the meaning of the documents in part because it explains the occasion for a pope putting pen to paper in the first place. This is an essential context for understanding Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors. Even the timing of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception can be read in this context, as well as Leo XIII’s oeuvre—including Aeterni Patris (1879), Rerum Novarum (1891), and Providentissimus Deus (1893).33 Scholars have a habit of forgetting that Aeterni Patris and Providentissimus Deus, both of which they tend to denigrate, shared the same author with Rerum Novarum, which they tend to celebrate. These encyclicals form part of Leo’s unified Thomistic response to philosophical, political, economic, social, and biblical scholarly trends in modernity.34 As Portier explains, “Aquinas redivivus would supply the intellectual resources necessary to restore epistemological and political order to the chaos of a post-Kantian, post-revolutionary Europe.”35 Perhaps the most controversial of Pius’s pronouncements of the time was the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and this is, in fact, a beneficial example to consider in detail. Obviously, the church’s teaching on the Immaculate Conception is a dogma 33. The two most important scholarly works that grasp this are Joseph A. Komonchak, “The Enlightenment and the Construction of Modern Roman Catholicism,” Catholic Commission on Intellectual and Cultural Affairs Annual (1985): 31–89; and James Hennesey, SJ, “Leo XIII’s Thomistic Revival: A Political and Philosophical Event,” Journal of Religion 58, supplement (1978): S185–S197. 34. Although he does not address Providentissimus Deus, see the comments in Portier, “Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology,” 107. 35. Portier, Divided Friends, 7. He elaborates: “With its massive objectivity, the neo-Thomism of Leo’s Aeterni Patris would counter the turn to the subject in modern philosophy. In his contributions to Catholic social teaching, especially Rerum Novarum (1891), Leo began to articulate an alternative social and political order in traditional terms of goods and ends. From a contemporary vantage point, it is well to keep in mind that Aeterni Patris and Rerum Novarum were written by the same Pope as part of the same overarching project” (7–8).

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of the faith, and as a Catholic, I believe firmly in Mary’s Immaculate Conception, with “the assent of theological faith.”36 The truth of the dogma and its admittedly sincere “manifestation” of the pope’s Marian devotion notwithstanding,37 I think James Hennesey’s comments are important for grasping fully the timing and context of Pius’s solemn definition. Hennesey writes, “It was also a political statement of the first order. It highlighted the teaching that all other human beings are born in sin, their intellects darkened, their wills weakened, their passions dominant. Sin-weakened man was incapable of self-government. He needed the rein of God-given authority to control him. These were conclusions immediately drawn by contemporary commentators.”38 Indeed, as Hennesey points out, the Syllabus of Errors was initially intended as an addendum to Pius’s definition of the Immaculate Conception, underscoring “man’s fallen state and his unwillingness to be rescued from it by listening to the authoritative voice of the church.”39 Hence these various statements of the pope were not random, disparate items, but rather each was part of a coherent worldview, albeit expressed discretely. Thus, when we turn to the dawn of the twentieth century and the pontificate of Pius X, we need to keep all of this historical context and the pope’s viewpoint in mind. When examining the historical context of the modernist controversy, we must bear in mind that, “In the Modernist crisis, the intellectual and theological issues are real and important but they are intensified by and difficult to disentangle from the politics of revolu36. See Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio fidei,” (1998), no. 5; available at www.vatican.va. 37. Hennesey concedes that “the definition of Mary’s unique exemption from Original Sin was surely a manifestation of Pius IX’s sincere Marian piety.” See Hennesey, “Leo XIII’s Thomistic Revival,” S187. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid.

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tion and restoration.”40 This, in part, explains the severity of the antimodernist response.41

Antimodernist Witch Hunts Pius X ended Pascendi with several “remedies” for the modernist infection. Among them he included several which set in motion a juridical infrastructure intended systematically to eradicate modernism from the Catholic church; this formal infrastructure continued until its dismantling at the Second Vatican Council. One part of the infrastructure was “episcopal vigilance over publications.”42 This included Pius’s strong injunction, directed at all Catholic bishops in the world: “Do everything in your power to drive out of your dioceses, even by solemn interdict, any pernicious books that may be in circulation there.”43 Pius included an entire subsection to “censorship,”44 wherein he directed: “But it is not enough to hinder the reading and the sale of bad books—it is also necessary to prevent them from being printed. Hence let the Bishops use the utmost severity in granting permission to print.”45 Another of the steps Pius asked to be taken was the creation of “diocesan watch committees.” Pius decreed that every diocese across the globe should establish a “Council of Vigilance,” which would gather every two months, with the bishop at its head. The members 40. Portier, “Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology,” 107–8. 41. See, e.g., Portier, Divided Friends, 7–12 and 41–48; and Gary Lease, “Vatican Foreign Policy and the Origins of Modernism,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity, ed. Jodock, 31–55, although, in this essay, Lease shows no attempt at sympathy for the antimodernists. 42. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, pars. 50–51. 43. Ibid., par. 51. 44. Ibid., pars. 52–53. 45. Ibid., par. 52.

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shall be bound to secrecy as to their deliberations and decisions, and their function shall be as follows: They shall watch most carefully for every trace and sign of Modernism both in publications and in teaching, and, to preserve from it the clergy and the young, they shall take all prudent, prompt and efficacious measures. Let them combat novelties of words. . . . Finally, We entrust to the Councils of Vigilance the duty of overlooking assiduously and diligently social institutions as well as writings on social questions so that they may harbour no trace of Modernism.46

Finally, Pius demanded that each bishop or archbishop functioning as ordinary of their diocese would, starting in 1908 and then every three years afterwards, “furnish the Holy See with a diligent and sworn report on all the prescriptions contained in them, and on the doctrines that find currency among the clergy, and especially in the seminaries and other Catholic institutions, and We impose the like obligation on the Generals of Religious Orders with regard to those under them.”47 The antimodernist environment allowed for the creation of the Sodalitium Pianum, the Sodality of St. Pius V, often referred to by its alias, La Sapinière (the piney wood). The Sodality was the brainchild of Umberto Benigni (1862–1934), a journalist, priest, and church history professor.48 A member of the Curia, he used all the contacts at his disposal to fight modernism in whatever manner he could. Marvin O’Connell describes the work of the Sodality under Benigni as “what might be called a bureau of propaganda that served the double purpose of providing infor46. Ibid., par. 55. 47. Ibid., par. 56. 48. On Benigni and the Sodalitium Pianum see, e.g., Portier, Divided Friends, 42–45; Talar, “Synthesis of All Heresies,” 502–3; O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 361–65; Émile Poulat, Catholicisme, démocratie et socialisme. Le mouvement catholique et Mgr Benigni de la naissance du socialisme à la victoire du fascisme (Paris: Casterman, 1977), and Intégrisme et catholicisme intégral: Un réseau secret international antimoderniste: la ‘Sapinière’ (1909–1921) (Paris: Casterman, 1969).

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mation about Modernists or alleged Modernists to interested periodicals and of receiving such information from sympathetic correspondents all over Europe.”49 The Sodality functioned as a network of spies, carrying “out its activities mainly through clandestine operations via a federation of secret societies that included agents throughout Europe.”50 Anonymous denunciations were one of the main tools of the Sodality. Antimodernist periodicals and other publications had already proven integral to the Benigni’s war on modernism. With the Sodality, Benigni went after “hidden” modernists, and much of their activities call to mind the McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts in the United States. O’Connell explains: Grown out of the network of stringers Benigni had established to supply material for his journalistic ventures, the sodality provided an opportunity for all those who cared to label as Modernists their bishops, parish priests, professors, local editors, or indeed anyone with whom they disagreed. No one was safe. The cardinal of Vienna was accused of “sadly” loose morals as well as doctrinal transgressions. The cardinal of Paris . . . was delated for being soft on Modernism. . . . So were the Jesuits who staffed the Études. The Dominican theologians at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland constituted a veritable “soup of Modernist culture.” The files of the sodality eventually bulged with the names of such alleged malefactors, whose guilt was maintained simply by the fact that they had been denounced.51

When thinking about this time period, I am often reminded of Joseph Ratzinger’s words: “The danger of a narrow-minded and petty surveillance is no figment of the imagination, as the history of the modernist controversy demonstrates.”52 It was Pi49. O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 362. 50. Talar, “Synthesis of All Heresies,” 502. 51. O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 363. 52. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology: Essays to Orient

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us’s successor, Pope Benedict XV (r. 1914–22), himself formerly suspected of being a modernist, who suppressed the Sodality once it was exposed in 1921. Indeed, no one was safe from the accusations of the Sodality. Supposedly, when Pope St. John XXIII took office he found his name in a file of the Holy Office in which it mentioned that he was suspected of being a modernist. In response, he took out his pen and wrote in the file, “I, John XXIII, Pope, declare that I was never a Modernist.”53 Even Joseph Ratzinger, later to be Pope Benedict XVI, had to deal with accusations of modernism as late as 1957 when completing his Habilitation (second doctorate for teaching). As he explained in his memoirs, one of his readers, Michael Schmaus, apparently feared in his thesis “a dangerous modernism that had to lead to the subjectivization of the concept of revelation,” and thus Ratzinger had to remove a section from his thesis.54 In light of this context we can understand why Portier would describe Pascendi’s aftermath as “chilling,” and why O’Connell would explain that when Loisy referred to the work of widespread denunciations as “the black terror,” he did so “with justice.”55

Loisy’s Place in the Modernist Crisis So where does Loisy fit in this history? What part does he play? Loisy stands in the forefront and plays a leading role in the modernist controversy. Of all the figures within the broad hisTheology in Today’s Debates, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995 [1993]), 66. 53. Lawrence Elliott, I Will Be Called John: A Biography of Pope John XXIII (New York: Dutton, 1973), 92. See comments in Portier, Divided Friends, 42–44. 54. Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998 [1997]), 109. 55. Portier, Divided Friends, 40. The reference to Loisy is from Alfred Loisy, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire religieuse de notre temps III: 1908–1927 (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1931), 194. O’Connell’s comment is from O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 364.

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tory of the modernist controversy, perhaps none can be said to have so precipitated the intensity of the controversy as Loisy. Indeed, his work may be said to have been the matchstick that ignited the passions of Pius X and of the Magisterium. As he would tell the story in his many autobiographical writings, Loisy was initially an unwilling target of Vatican opposition to the work of renewal then ongoing informally in the church, but later, Loisy described his excommunication as a liberating experience. Born in rural France in 1857, Loisy was a farmer’s son.56 Inspired by his new parish priest, Loisy decided to discern a vocation to the priesthood. By seventeen Loisy had entered the seminary, but he never felt satisfied with the intellectual level of the courses. His bishop eventually sent him for advanced theological training at the Institut Catholique de Paris, where he began in 1878. Ordained to the priesthood in 1879, Loisy took a break from his studies at the Institut, but he returned in 1881, and his church history professor, Louis Duchesne, had things so arranged that Loisy’s earlier studies could count toward the requirements for a bachelor’s degree, which he was thus able to obtain shortly after his return. He was able to commence teaching Hebrew at the Institute that same year. This fast track enabled him to earn his licentiate the following year in 1882. After the successful completion of his doctorate in Sacred Scripture, in 1890 Loisy became a professor of Sacred Scripture at the Institut, with the Bible becoming the new focus of his work. Inside and outside of the scripture classroom, Loisy fully appropriated the methods of modern historical biblical criti56. To date, no critical biography exists of Loisy. Some helpful biographical sources include Hill, Politics of Modernism, 12–35; O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 1–21, 62–69, 115–16, 126–40, 182–83, 234–54, 368–70; Aidan Nichols, From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1990), 71–113; and Émile Poulat, Alfred Loisy, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Éditions du Centre national de la recherché scientifique, 1960).

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cism. As will become clear in the remainder of this book, Loisy was incredibly well-versed in the world of biblical scholarship. He soon gained notoriety in ecclesiastical circles for his views on the nature of biblical inspiration and for various historical opinions on the origin of biblical books and the history of Israel, the New Testament, and the church, where he sided more with German Protestant historical biblical critics than with the Thomistic Catholic traditions of interpretation, which were then on the ascendancy. Some of his scholarly works were thus placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Pope Leo XIII’s 1893 encyclical, Providentissimus Deus, which included a number of warnings directed at Catholic biblical exegetes, was aimed in part at Loisy, even though, as is customary in official papal documents, he was not named directly.57 On the very day that Leo issued Providentissimus Deus, Loisy had to resign from the Institut. Initially, Loisy took the post of chaplain for a convent, while continuing to publish his scholarly works. By 1900 he was teaching again, this time at the secular institute, École pratique des hautes études, where he had earlier studied. Loisy continued his prolific scholarship, both under his given name and also pseudonymously, but Cardinal Richard of Paris was delating him to Rome and censuring his work. While this was taking place, the religious skeptic Prince Albert of Monaco submitted Loisy’s name as one of three he would consider nominating for the vacant episcopal see of Monaco, which the prince had the authority to do based on a prior concordat with the Holy See. Loisy worked behind the scenes to help see this possibility become a reality, but Loisy never received the necessary approval from Rome.58 57. See, e.g., Harvey Hill, “Leo XIII, Loisy, and the ‘Broad School’: An Early Round of the Modernist Crisis,” Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 1 (2003): 40, 47, 51, 53, 56; and O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 133 and 135. 58. On the ecclesiastical political background here, and how it affected Loisy’s slippery

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The Holy Office of the Inquisition condemned sixty-five propositions as “modernist” in its 1907 decree Lamentabili Sane Exitu, some propositions of which were taken directly from Loisy’s publications and censured. Later that same fateful year, Pius X condemned modernism in Pascendi.59 Pius X solemnly excommunicated Loisy the following year in 1908. From that point forward, beginning in 1909, Loisy took up the Chair of the History of Religions at the Collège de France which he held actively until his retirement in 1931. He would continue to publish in the history of religions and related material until 1939, the year before he died. Although never formally reconciled to the church, his tombstone would include the designation, prétre, priest.60 writing at the time, see, e.g., Hill, Politics of Modernism, 175–78, and “French Politics and Alfred Loisy’s Modernism,” Church History 67, no. 3 (1998): 526; O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 236–51, and “The Bishopric of Monaco, 1902: A Revision,” Catholic Historical Review 71, no. 1 (1985): 26–51. 59. See, e.g., Claus Arnold and Giacomo Losito (eds.), ‘Lamentabili sane exitu’ (1907). Les documents préparatoires du Saint Office (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2011). 60. O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 2.

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2  /

The Bible and Its Ancient Near Eastern Milieu in Nineteenth-Century France

In its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council taught: To search out the intention of the sacred writers, attention should be given, among other things, to “literary forms.” For truth is set forth and expressed differently in texts which are variously historical, prophetic, poetic, or of other forms of discourse. The interpreter must investigate what meaning the sacred writer intended to express and actually expressed in particular circumstances by using contemporary literary forms in accordance with the situation of his own time and culture. For the correct understanding of what the sacred author wanted to assert, due attention must be paid to the customary and characteristic styles of feeling, speaking and narrating which prevailed at the time of the sacred writer, and to the patterns men normally employed at that period in their everyday dealings with one another.1

As the biblical books were written over a period of many centuries in the varied social and cultural matrices of the ancient Near 1. Dei Verbum, no. 12; available at www.vatican.va.

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The Bible and Its Milieu East, studying this wider context is important, especially if the biblical “interpreter” is intent on investigating how the sacred authors used their “contemporary literary forms in accordance with the” various situations of their “own time and culture.” A study of “the time of the sacred writer” emerges as a significant aspect of biblical interpretation. This was one of Loisy’s motivations for studying Assyriology, the discipline that investigates ancient Mesopotamia. We will explore Loisy’s work in Assyriology more thoroughly in the next chapter, but in order to situate his work in context, this chapter will briefly examine the history of the discipline itself, specifically in the France of Loisy’s day.

Germany as Latecomer Although Assyriology’s beginnings occur much earlier than Loisy’s time, it is a relatively recent discipline, dating to about the middle of the nineteenth century.2 As in so much of biblical 2. For overviews of the history of Assyriology see Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 194–203 and 236–51, and Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 222–27; Steven W. Holloway, “Introduction: Orientalism, Assyriology and the Bible,” in Orientalism, Assyriology, and the Bible, ed. Holloway (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006), 1–41, and Aššur is King! Aššur is King!: Religion in the Exercise of Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 9–64; Mark W. Chavalas, “Assyriology and Biblical Studies: a Century and a Half of Tension,” in Mesopotamia and the Bible: Comparative Explorations, ed. Mark W. Chavalas and K. Lawson Younger Jr. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2002), 21–67; Béatrice André-Salvini, “Les débuts de la recherché française en assyriologie. Milieu et atmosphère du déchiffrement,” Journal asiatique 287 (1999): 331–55; Jean Bottéro, Mésopotamie: L’écriture, la raison et les dieux (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 88–107; C. Wade Meade, Road to Babylon: Development of U.S. Assyriology (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 1–16; Cyrus H. Gordon, Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and Decipherment (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 40–100; Svend Aage Pallis, The Antiquity of Iraq (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1956); E. A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (London: Hopkinson, 1925); Robert William Rogers, A History of Babylonia and Assyria: Volume I (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1900); and D. G. Lyon, “A Half Century of Assyriology,” The Biblical World 8 (1896): 125–42.

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and ancient Near Eastern scholarship, for more than a century German scholarship has been at the forefront of Assyriology.3 German scholars, German scholarly projects, German universities and research institutions, and German publication venues for presenting the results of such scholarship to the world continue to dominate the fields of both biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies. These trends mirrored those of other disciplines, such as history. Even scholars from as far away as the United States were sent to Germany to study under the leading scholarly luminaries at the German universities. Within the discipline of history, few have shown as thoroughly as Peter Novick how indebted American historical scholarship was to German tutelage. He includes a marvelous quotation from the literary critic Bliss Perry, who explains: “That Germany possessed the sole secret of scholarship was no more doubted by us young fellows in the eighteen-eighties than it had been doubted by George Ticknor and Edward Everett when they sailed from Boston, bound for Göttingen, in 1814.”4 Far from being isolated incidents, what Perry identifies was in fact a trend that spread throughout the great panoply of academic disciplines in the United States. Novick writes: “During the course of the [nineteenth] century, thousands of young Americans in search of advanced professional or academic training trav3. In my “Études Assyriologie and 19th and 20th Century French Historical-Biblical Criticism,” Near Eastern Archaeological Society Bulletin 59 (2014): 3–20, at 3, I overemphasize the importance of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft for Assyriology. As with the American Oriental Society and La Société Asiatique, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft places more emphasis on archaeology in general. This was first pointed out to me by an anonymous reviewer for my article, “Babylon in Paris: Alfred Loisy as Assyriologist,” Journal of Religious History 40 (2016): 261–76. 4. Bliss Perry, And Gladly Teach: Reminiscences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 88–89. This was brought to my attention by Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21.

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elled to Göttingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, Freibourg, Berlin, and other German university centers.”5 When it came to acquiring scholars for newly founded American universities—which had taken German universities as their models—they often looked across the Atlantic to renowned German academics. This was the case, for example, with the Near Eastern Studies Department at Johns Hopkins University. When this department opened its doors in 1883 (the University itself was founded just a few years earlier, in 1876), it brought in the German Assyriologist Paul Haupt from the University of Göttingen.6 Likewise, when the University of Pennsylvania began its program in Assyriology, it looked to Germany and hired Hermann Hilprecht of the University of Erlangen.7 Something similar could be said for biblical studies. In each of these fields, German scholarship quickly became dominant. This was not always the case. Both Assyriology and modern biblical criticism share partial origins in philology. In both, contrary to mistaken scholarly perceptions, Germany appears to have been a latecomer. In the case of biblical criticism, Michael Legaspi has shown how pivotal the eighteenth-century work of Johann David Michaelis was in securing biblical studies a future at the Enlightenment university by emphasizing Hebrew philology and transforming the study of scripture into the secular study of the Bible as classic.8 However, even though Michaelis exemplified Enlightenment German biblical scholarship at the University of Göttingen—the premier Enlightenment universi5. Novick, That Noble Dream, 21–22. 6. Haupt continued to teach at Göttingen during the summer sessions for another six years. See, e.g., Meade, Road to Babylon, 32–34; and Cyrus Adler, “Paul Haupt,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 47 (1927): 1–2. 7. See, e.g., Meade, Road to Babylon, 34–37. 8. Michael C. Legaspi, The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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ty—much of what he brought to the German scholarly study of the Bible came from earlier English biblical criticism, such as that of Robert Lowth.9 Indeed, already in 1980 Henning Graf Reventlow pointed to eighteenth-century German scholarly borrowing and learning from earlier English Deistic biblical criticism, underscoring how much of the German biblical scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries grew on English Deistic soil.10 In my own work, I have emphasized the seventeenth-century precursors to Enlightenment historical biblical criticism, especially in the work of the French Isaac La Peyrère, the English Thomas Hobbes, the Dutch Baruch Spinoza, and more recently, the French Richard Simon.11 Long before German scholarship came on the scene, Moshe Goshen-Gottstein identified the seventeenth century and these figures as pivotal in the development of modern biblical criticism.12 Further studies have begun to trace the roots of modern biblical criticism even earlier, to the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the late medieval period, as well as earlier to medieval Muslim biblical critique and late antique anti-Christian polemics.13 9. Ibid., 105–28. 10. Henning Graf Reventlow, Bibelautorität und Geist der Moderne. Die Bedeutung des Bibelverständnisses für die geistesgeschichtliche und politische Entwicklung in England von der Reformation bis zur Aufklärung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1980). 11. Jeffrey L. Morrow, “The Acid of History: La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, and the Separation of Faith and Reason in Modern Biblical Studies,” Heythrop Journal 58, no. 2 (2017): 169–80; “Spinoza and Modern Biblical Hermeneutics: The Theo-Political Implications of his Freedom to Philosophize,” New Blackfriars (forthcoming); Three Skeptics and the Bible: La Peyrère, Hobbes, Spinoza, and the Reception of Modern Biblical Criticism (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2016); “Faith, Reason, and History in Early Modern Catholic Biblical Interpretation: Fr. Richard Simon and St. Thomas More,” New Blackfriars 96 (2015): 658–73; and “Spinoza’s Use of the Psalms in the Context of His Political Project,” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 11 (2015): 1–18. 12. M. H. Goshen-Gottstein, “The Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Rise, Decline, Rebirth,” Journal of Biblical Literature 102 (1983): 376. 13. Jeffrey L. Morrow, “Averroism, Nominalism, and Mechanization: Hahn and Wiker’s

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What these and other scholars have identified are the philosophical frameworks, political and theological motivations, philological and textual analytical tools, as well as primary questions to be investigated, that already set biblical interpretation on its path to becoming modern biblical scholarship prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when it is often assumed such methods originated. More work needs to be done on how such intellectual currents entered the modern Catholic world; that is, in fact, part of the goal of the present volume. In a similar way, but with less historical reach into the past, Assyriology began in France and England before German Assyriological scholarship entered the scene.14 In fact, the prehistory of German Assyriology and related philological work begins with German scholars studying in France, especially under the renowned French philologist Antoine-Isaac, Baron Silvestre Unmasking of Historical Criticism’s Political Agenda by Laying Bare its Philosophical Roots,” Nova et Vetera 14, no. 4 (2016): 989–1036; Three Skeptics and the Bible, 10–53; “Secularization, Objectivity, and Enlightenment Scholarship: The Theological and Political Origins of Modern Biblical Studies,” Logos 18, no. 1 (2015): 14–32; “The Untold History of Modern Biblical Scholarship’s Pre-Enlightenment Secular Origins,” Journal of Theological Interpretation 8, no. 1 (2014): 145–55; “The Enlightenment University and the Creation of the Academic Bible: Michael Legaspi’s The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies,” Nova et Vetera 11, no. 3 (2013): 897–922. See also Scott W. Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, Politicizing the Bible: The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture 1300–1700 (New York: Herder and Herder, 2013); Pierre Gibert, L’invention critique de la Bible: XVe– XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2010); Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); James L. Kugel, “The Bible in the University,” in The Hebrew Bible and Its Interpreters, ed. William Henry Propp, Baruch Halpern, and David Noel Freedman (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990), 143–65; and Moshe Goshen-Gottstein, “Foundations of Biblical Philology in the Seventeenth Century: Christian and Jewish Dimensions,” in Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 77–94. 14. Ursula Wokoeck, German Orientalism: The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 146–63; Sabine Mangold, “France Allemagne et retour: une discipline née dans l’émulation,” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008): 109–24; K. Lawson Younger Jr., “The Production of Ancient Near Eastern Text Anthologies from the Earliest to the Latest,” in Orientalism, ed. Holloway, 208; and Meade, Road to Babylon, 16.

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de Sacy (1758–1838).15 Silvestre de Sacy became famous principally for his work in Arabic and Persian; he also trained a generation of philologists. His German students, such as Franz Bopp (1791–1867), brought his philological method back with them and continued Silvestre de Sacy’s philological school in Germany. Thus, Paris is the geographical origin of the tradition of German oriental studies. The philological study of Persian in Paris, especially under Silvestre de Sacy and his students, played an important role in the later decipherment of cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia.16 The German study of Assyriology really begins in roughly 1875 with the work of Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922), who was a student of the famous Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–88).17 Fleischer, who directed Delitzsch’s 1874 Habilitationsschrift in Assyriology at the University of Leipzig, was himself a student of Silvestre de Sacy.18 Ursula Wokoeck points out: “Until 1870, German schol15. Wokoeck, German Orientalism, 14, 87–90, 92, 115; Mangold, “France Allemagne,” 109–24, esp. 110–19; Maurice Pope, The Story of Archaeological Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Linear B (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 104; Raymond Schwab, La renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950), 55–56, 71–74, 316–18; and Rogers, History of Babylonia, 43. 16. Schwab’s 1950 La renaissance orientale is very important for showing these connections. See also Mangold, “France Allemagne,” 110–19. 17. On Delitzsch see, e.g., Bill T. Arnold and David B. Weisberg, “Delitzsch in Context,” in God’s Word for Our World Volume 2, ed. J. Howard Ellens, Deborah L. Ellens, Rolf P. Knierim, and Isaac Kalimi (London: T and T Clark, 2004), 37–45; and Reinhard G. Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1994). 18. On Fleischer see, e.g., Holger Preißler, “Les contacts entre orientalistes français et allemands dans les années 1820 et 1830, d’après la correspondence de Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888),” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008): 93–108, and “Friedrich Rückert und Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer—Beziehungen zwischen zwei Orientalisten,” in Friedrich Rückert: Dichter und Sprachgelehrter in Erlangen, ed. Wolfdietrich Fischer and Rainer Gömmel (Neustadt an der Aisch: Degner, 1990), 23–34; Manfred Müller, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer und die Entwicklung der Assyriologie,” in Orientalische Philologie und arabische Linguistik, ed. Wolfgang Reuschel (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1990), 40–45; and August Müller, “Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer,” Beiträge zur kunde der indogermanischen sprachen 15 (1889): 319–37.

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ars did not show any interest in the new discipline [of Assyriology], because it required not only scholarly enthusiasm but also major financial resources.”19 The brief story I am about to cover is well-known to scholars of the history of Assyriology. If I were writing this book with Assyriologists primarily in mind as my audience, I would probably omit it.20 My primary intended audience, however, is scholars of the history of the Roman Catholic modernist controversy, and in my experience, most such scholars come from the disciplines of Catholic systematic or fundamental theology, or possibly historical theology. Such scholars tend to know less about the history of biblical scholarship than the history of doctrinal development, and even less about the history of such ancillary fields to biblical studies like Assyriology. Therefore, at the risk of covering well-known terrain, I am going to summarize briefly the story of cuneiform’s decipherment, (over) emphasizing the more exciting segments, because one of the figures, as we shall see, will play a significant role in Loisy’s later Assyriological studies. Thus, this aspect of the history is important for understanding Loisy’s place within the broader discipline, which laid the foundation for his future work.

Assyriology’s Prehistory Occasionally, Assyriology’s early history is traced back to Pietro della Valle’s (1586–1652) attempt in 1616 to find the site of 19. Wokoeck, German Orientalism, 152. Moreover, once Germany did take a serious interest in Assyriology, such study served the broader German political agenda, as the title of one of Wokoeck’s subheadings captures nicely, “The museum and archaeological excavations as national-imperial projects” (153). On the general history of Germany’s entrance into Assyriology, see ibid., 146–63. 20. I probably overemphasize the importance of this history in my “Études Assyriologie,” 4–5.

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ancient Babylon.21 Things really begin to pick up speed with the Danish explorations and discoveries of Carsten Niebuhr (1733– 1815), a student of Johann David Michaelis. While embarked on the famous Arabian expedition, of which Michaelis had been the mastermind, Niebuhr made several discoveries of cuneiform documents from ancient Persia that eventually contributed to the script’s decipherment.22 Michaelis had convinced King Frederick V of Denmark to sponsor an expedition of the Middle East in order to better understand the historical and cultural background to the Bible. Although he himself did not go on the journey, Michaelis formulated the primary research questions to be investigated, and he came up with the expedition, recommending his own student, Niebuhr, as a participant. The English adventurer Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (1810–95), who served as an army officer for the British East India Company, contributed to this decipherment as well. One 21. Antonio Invernizzi, “Discovering Babylon with Pietro della Valle,” in Proceedings of the First International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Rome, May 18th–23rd 1998), ed. Paolo Matthiae, Alessandra Enea, Luca Peyronel, and Frances Pinnock (Rome: Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza,” Dipartimento di Scienze Storiche, Archeologiche e Anthropologiche dell’Antichità, 2000), 643–49; J. D. Gurney, “Pietro della Valle: The Limits of Perception,” Bulletin of the Schools of Oriental and African Studies 49, no. 1 (1986): 103–16; Michel Bastiaensen, “Pietro Della Valle et le héros baroque,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 60 (1982): 540–51; and Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 44. 22. Rafael Jiménez-Zamudio, “Primeros pasos en el deciframiento del cuneiforme,” in El redescubrimiento de oriente próximo y Egipto: Viajes, hallazgos e investigaciones, ed. J. M. Córdoba Zoilo, R. Jiménez Zamudio, and C. Sevilla Cueva (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Departamento de Historia Antigua, Centro Superior de Estudios de Asiriología y Egiptología, 2001), 130; Mogens Trolle Larsen, The Conquest of Assyria: Excavations in an Antique Land 1840–1860 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 9; Michael Harbsmeier, “Before Decipherment: Persepolitan Hypotheses in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in The Construction of the Ancient Near East, ed. Ann C. Gunter (Copenhagen: Academic, 1992), 23–58; Edwin M. Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1990), 26, 134–35, 284–85; Pope, Story of Archaeological Decipherment, 94; Gordon, Forgotten Scripts, 43–44; Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 7; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 45; and Rogers, History of Babylonia, 34–37.

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of the better known episodes in Rawlinson’s adventures was his harrowing transcription of the trilingual Behistun inscription.23 The Behistun inscription was written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, and located high up on the rock cliff of Mount Behistun more than three hundred feet above the ground. Ever the adventurer, Rawlinson perched himself high up near the inscription in order to transcribe it. To do this, he was only able to secure himself, maintaining balance, with a single arm. He then used his free hand to write in the notebook held in the hand of the very same arm which he used to maintain his position. This ludicrous feat took him the better part of six years, and the Akkadian segment was only published in 1851.24 We should keep in mind, however, that contrary to much of the scholarship, the Behistun inscription did not significantly contribute to Akkadian’s decipherment, as Kevin Cathcart makes clear in his introduction to the published letters of Edward Hincks: “Since Akkadian cuneiform was deciphered between 1846 and 1850 using other inscriptions, the claim that the Behistun inscription was the key to decipherment is an academic myth.”25 We will come back to the adventurer Rawlinson in a mo23. Many scholars have exaggerated the significance of the Behistun inscription, and I have been guilty of this as well in my “Études Assyriologie,” 5. Kevin Cathcart’s more recent careful historical work on the decipherment of cuneiform and of other ancient Near Eastern languages has helped clarify that the Behistun inscription did not really play as important a role in cuneiform’s decipherment as previously had been thought. See, e.g., Kevin J. Cathcart, “The Earliest Contributions to the Decipherment of Sumerian and Akkadian,” Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 1 (2011): nos. 1–7, and “The Age of Decipherment: The Old Testament and the Ancient Near East in the Nineteenth Century,” in Congress Volume: Cambridge 1995, ed. J. A. Emerton (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 81–96. 24. Cathcart, “Earliest Contributions,” nos. 1.4–1.5, 2.1, 2.3; Holloway, Aššur is King, 12–26; Larsen, Conquest of Assyria, 181; Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible, 26–27 and 135; Pope, Story of Archaeological Decipherment, 106, 108, 110, 113–14; Meade, Road to Babylon, 8–9; Gordon, Forgotten Scripts, 55–60; Kramer, Sumerians, 13–15 and 17; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 91 and 111–13; and Rogers, History of Babylonia, 175–99. 25. Kevin J. Cathcart, introduction to The Correspondence of Edward Hincks: Volume I (1818–1849), ed. Kevin J. Cathcart (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007), 7.

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ment, but in this immediate context of discovering cuneiform documents, the work of the English traveler Sir Austen Henry Layard (1817–94) was very important, as his documentary discoveries opened to the world numerous cuneiform texts. Layard’s 1847 excavations, for example, uncovered thousands of cuneiform tablets from Ashurbanipal’s library in ancient Assyria. These texts uncovered by Layard include the first fragments discovered of the Epic of Gilgamesh.26 Rawlinson, whom we have already encountered, was responsible for correctly identifying many of the documents Layard uncovered, but it was the work of George Smith (1840–76), who died prematurely of dysentery, that brought the flood narrative from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the public’s attention, and drew obvious comparisons with the Genesis flood material.27 The decipherment of cuneiform, specifically Akkadian, was itself the accomplishment of philologists. One of the most significant contributions was made by the German philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853). Grotefend’s breakthrough was with Persian cuneiform which later allowed others to apply his insights to Akkadian. He was not the only one to contribute to cuneiform’s decipherment, but Grotefend made significant progress, especially in 1802, such that cuneiform could be deciphered, and this became the inspiration for the later work of 26. Larsen, Conquest of Assyria, 34–39; Meade, Road to Babylon, 13–14; Kramer, Sumerians, 15; Rogers, History of Babylonia, 138–59; and Lyon, “Half Century,” 126–28. 27. David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), esp. 12, 16–19, 30–34; Chavalas, “Assyriology and Biblical Studies,” 28; David Toshio Tsumura, “Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Stories of Creation and Flood: An Introduction,” in “I Studied Inscriptions from Before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1–11, ed. Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 52; Richard S. Hess, “One Hundred Fifty Years of Comparative Studies on Genesis 1–11: An Overview,” in I Studied Inscriptions, ed. Hess and Tsumura, 4–6; Gordon, Forgotten Scripts, 75–76; and Lyon, “Half Century,” 130–31.

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decipherment, including Rawlinson’s own contributions.28 The work of other scholars contributed as well. Three of the most significant after Grotefend, as far as Akkadian is concerned, are the true genius Edward Hincks, the sagacious philologist Jules Oppert, who taught Loisy’s teacher and served on Loisy’s thesis committee, and our previously discussed adventurer Rawlinson.

The Genius, the Philologist, and the Adventurer 29 I have already covered some of Rawlinson’s adventurous exploits, but he also contributed to Akkadian cuneiform’s decipherment.30 He catalogued meticulously many of the finds in the British Museum, most notably the cuneiform tablets in the British Museum’s Kouyunjik Collection.31 Another important 28. Elena Torres Torres, “El desciframiento de la escritura cuneiforme: un hito culminó hace 150 años,” Isimu 10 (2007): 80–81; Jiménez-Zamudio, “Primeros pasos,” 130–35; Cathcart, “Age of Decipherment,” 81–96; Pierre Swiggers, “La base leibnizienne des déchiffrements de G.F. Grotefend,” Orientalia Lovaniensia Periodica 10, no. 1 (1979): 125–32; Karl Brethauer and Waldemar R. Röhrbein, “Georg Friedrich Grotefend: Eine biographische Skizze,” in Die Welt des Alten Orients: Keilschrift—Grabungen—Gelehrte, ed. R. Borger, K. Brethauer, W. Hinz, W. R. Röhrbein, K. Schippmann, and W. Schramm (Göttingen: Seminar für Keilschriftforshung der Universität Göttingen, 1975), 9–14; Walther Hinz, “Grotefends genialer Entzifferungsversuch,” in Die Welt, ed. Borger et al., 15–18; Madeleine David, “Des écritures universelles aux déchiffrements de textes anciens: Georg Friedrich Grotefend (1775–1853),” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 165 (1975): 434–38; Pope, Story of Archaeological Decipherment, 94 and 99–102; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 99–105, 133–37, 139–40; and Rogers, History of Babylonia, 46–83. 29. The idea for this subhead comes from a very insightful comment I received from an anonymous reviewer of my “Babylon in Paris.” The reviewer wrote, “Hincks was a true genius, Oppert a true philologist, and Rawlinson a smart adventurer, but a very nasty and exploitive man.” 30. Torres Torres, “El desciframiento,” 77–97; Lesley Adkins, Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003); Cathcart, “Age of Decipherment,” 81–96; Larsen, Conquest of Assyria, 79–87; Pope, Story of Archaeological Decipherment, 106, 108, 110, 113–14; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 94–187; and Rogers, History of Babylonia, 43–83. 31. H. C. Rawlinson, The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia Vol. I: A Selection from the Historical Inscriptions of Chaldaea, Assyria and Babylonia, prepared for publication, by Major-General Sir H. C. Rawlinson, K.C.B., assisted by Edwin Norris (London: British

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figure was the Irish Anglican cleric Edward Hincks (1792–1866). Hincks made some of the most significant breakthroughs in the decipherment. A master linguist, he also made significant contributions to Egyptology.32 Hincks kept up a lively correspondence with scholars throughout Europe and shared many of his findings in his letters, as he challenged and, in turn, was challenged by these scholars.33 The final figure we shall spend more time discussing below, because of his significance for early French Assyriology, was a philology professor in France, Jules Oppert (1825–1905), who taught Loisy’s Assyriology teacher.34 Museum, 1861); The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia Vol. II: A Selection from the Miscellaneous Inscriptions of Assyria, by Sir H. C. Rawlinson, assisted by E. Norris (London: British Museum, 1866); The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia Vol. III: A Selection from the Miscellaneous Inscriptions of Assyria, by Sir H. C. Rawlinson, assisted by George Smith (London: British Museum, 1870); The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia Vol. IV: A Selection from the Miscellaneous Inscriptions of Assyria, by Sir H. C. Rawlinson, assisted by George Smith (London: British Museum, 1875); and The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia Vol. V: A Selection from the Miscellaneous Inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia, by Sir H. C. Rawlinson, assisted by Theophilus G. Pinches Parts I and II (London: British Museum, 1880 and 1884). 32. Torres Torres, “El desciframiento,” 77–97; Cathcart, introduction to Correspondence I, 1–18, “Age of Decipherment,” 81–96, “Edward Hincks (1792–1866): A Biographical Essay,” in The Edward Hincks Bicentenary Lectures, ed. Kevin J. Cathcart (Dublin: The Department of Near Eastern Languages, University College Dublin, 1994), 1–29; Peter T. Daniels, “Edward Hincks’s Decipherment of Mesopotamian Cuneiform,” in Edward Hincks, ed. Cathcart, 30–57; John Ray, “Edward Hincks and the Progress of Egyptology,” in Edward Hincks, ed. Cathcart, 58–74; Pope, Story of Archaeological Decipherment, 108 and 110; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 120–21, 134, 139, 141–44, 149–52; and Rogers, History of Babylonia, 70–71. 33. Kevin J. Cathcart (ed.), The Correspondence of Edward Hincks (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2007–9). 34. On Oppert and his work in deciphering cuneiform, see especially Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel, “Jules Oppert et le syllabaire akkadien,” in Histoires de déchiffrements: Les écritures du Proche-Orient à l’Égée, ed. Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel (Paris: Errance, 2009), 81–94, and “Jules Oppert (1825–1905),” in Les écritures cunéiformes et leur déchiffrement, ed. Brigitte Lion and Cécile Michel (Paris: De Boccard, 2007), 22–23; Torres Torres, “El desciframiento,” 77–97; Jean Baumgarten, “Jules Oppert et la naissance de l’assyriologie,” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 23 (2001): 77–99; Perrine Simon-Nahum, La cité investie: La «Science du Judaïsme» français et la République (Paris: Cerf, 1991), 58–59 and 63–69; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 121, 135, 162–68; Bernard Hassoulier, “Notice sur la vie et les oeuvres de M. Jules Oppert, membre de l’Académie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 50 (1906): 567–92; and W. Muss-Arnolt, “The

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One episode in this history stands out, even though it does not directly pertain to cuneiform’s decipherment. I refer to the famous translation of the cylinder of the Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser I, sponsored by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1857, after Akkadian’s decipherment.35 Controversy still existed in the mind of the public, and among some intellectuals as well, regarding whether or not cuneiform had in fact been deciphered. William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877), an inventor and photographer who was self-taught in Akkadian, arranged for a scholarly demonstration of sorts that Akkadian cuneiform had in fact been deciphered.36 It was arranged that Rawlinson, Talbot, Hincks, and Oppert would each make an English translation of Tiglath-Pileser’s cylinder. This task took quite a while and their translations were finally submitted by post; then the sealed envelopes were opened at the same time.37 Works of Jules Oppert,” Beiträge zur Assyriologie und vergleichenden semitischen Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1894): 523–56. 35. The translations were published as Henry Rawlinson, Fox Talbot, Hincks, and Oppert (trans.), Inscription of Tiglath Pileser I, King of Assyria, B.C. 1150 (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1857). The title omits the first names of Hincks and Oppert. After the copyright page, however, on page 3 of the volume, it lists Rawlinson last and includes his middle initial, includes the initials of William Henry Fox Talbot’s first two names, and includes Hincks’s first initial, although it still omits Oppert’s first initial. Their translations are interspersed, beginning with Rawlinson and Talbot, and the pages often compare Rawlinson and Talbot in dual columns on alternate pages, and Hincks and Oppert in dual columns on alternate pages, but the layout is not consistent. 36. On this famous demonstration, see Cathcart, “Earliest Contributions,” 6.5 and 7.2; Lion and Michel, “Jules Oppert,” 81 and 89–91; Torres Torres, “El desciframiento,” 77–97; Holloway, Aššur is King, 20–23; Pope, Story of Archaeological Decipherment, 114 and 116–17; Meade, Road to Babylon, 12–15; Gordon, Forgotten Scripts, 66–67; Kramer, Sumerians, 14–15; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 159–62; Rogers, History of Babylonia, 195–97; as well as the letters from Edwin Norris to Hincks and to Fox Talbot on April 20, 1857, requesting the translations, in Correspondence, ed. Cathcart, 3:18–20. 37. In my initial discussion of this episode in “Études Assyriologie,” 6, I mistakenly wrote that they were locked in separate rooms, and made the unfortunate comparison with the tradition of the Septuagint’s translation from the Letter of Aristeas. They were not in fact in separate rooms, but took their time where they resided, translating the text and mailing in their translations upon completion. I wrote that they had no means of communicating with one another, which is patently false. Hincks corresponded with many

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Assyriology in France As should be evident by now, scholarship from France played an important role in the development of the discipline of Assyriology. We have already discussed a little of the influence of Silvestre de Sacy on the prehistory of Assyriology. France was important, as well, however, for archaeological excavations. The work of Paul-Émile Botta (1802–70) was especially important. An Italian-born French citizen, Botta represented the French government as the consul to Mosul. His mission was to acquire ancient Near Eastern artifacts for the Louvre. He was quite successful in this endeavor. Among Botta’s major excavations were Nineveh and Khorsabad. He uncovered the Assyrian King Sargon II’s royal palace, and later excavators such as Layard built upon his foundational work.38 scholars, and frequently shared his work with others. Oppert’s and Fox Talbot’s translations of the cylinder are the weakest, probably due to Oppert’s challenges with the English language (which is evident in his letters preserved in the volumes of Hincks’s correspondence), and Fox Talbot’s only recent work with cuneiform (compared to the others), and even more recent work with making translations. Rawlinson’s and Hincks’s translations, however, were extremely close. This can be obscured by the fact that their translations are often not presented on the same pages. There is also a question of whether or not the more famous Rawlinson, with his strong connection to the prestigious Royal Asiatic Society, who organized the demonstration, made use of Hincks’s work, some of which was shared with him before being submitted. 38. Billie Melman, “The Power of the Past: History and Modernity in the Victorian World,” in The Victorian World, ed. Martin Hewitt, 466–83 (New York: Routledge, 2012), 476; Julian Reade, “The Early Exploration of Assyria,” in Assyrian Reliefs from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II: A Cultural Biography, ed. Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2010), 95 and 97; Ada Cohen and Steven E. Kangas, “Our Nineveh Enterprise,” in Assyrian Reliefs, ed. Cohen and Kangas, 2; Lion and Michel, “Jules Oppert,” 84 and 86; Mariana Giovino, The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2007), 9n11; Magnus T. Bernhardsson, Reclaiming a Plundered Past: Archaeology and Nation Building in Modern Iraq (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 41; Pauline Albenda, “Dur-Sharrukin, the Royal City of Sargon II, King of Assyria,” The Canadian Society for Mesopotamian Studies Bulletin 38 (2003): 7–8; Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 44 and 173; Eleanor Guralnick, “New Drawings of Khorsabad Sculptures by Paul Émile Botta,” Revue d’Assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 96 (2002): 23–56;

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From Botta we turn again to Jules Oppert, often identified (along with Rawlinson and Hincks) as a “father” of Assyriology. Oppert was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1825. He became a student of languages—Arabic, Hebrew, Old Persian, Sanskrit, etc.—at the Universities of Berlin, Bonn, Heidelberg, and Kiel. He also gained proficiency in a number of modern languages including Arabic, Armenian, Danish, English, Farsi, French, Greek, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. As a Jewish scholar, Oppert was unable to secure an academic post in Germany and thus he successfully sought scholarly employment in France, where he became one of the world’s most eminent philologists. Early in his French career, he joined a Mesopotamian expedition as epigrapher, working at sites in ancient Babylon and Khorsabad.39 Oppert was then appointed Professor of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology at the École des langues at the French Imperial Library in Paris. His work in Akkadian, Elamite, and Sanskrit gained him international fame.40 Oppert’s exceptional work in Assyriology, particularly in grammar, significantly helped to place Akkadian on a secure Larsen, Conquest of Assyria, 14–20; and Giovanni Bergamini, “ ‘Spoliis Orientis onustus’: Paul-Émile Botta et la découverte de la civilisation assyrienne,” in De Khorsabad à Paris: La découverte des Assyriens, ed. Elisabeth Fontan (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994), 68–85. For a very thorough history of all of the major archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia from 1842 to 1954, see Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 266–384. 39. In my “Études Assyriologie,” 8, I made it sound as if Oppert were the first to discover the actual site of Babylon, but this is not the case. As early as 1616, della Valle had searched for Babylon, and later Niebuhr found the site. Claudius James Rich (1787–1821) is often given credit for its discovery, even though Niebuhr had already found the site. The importance of Rich is that his early work at Babylon was the most thorough study up to that time, and his mapping of Babylon was groundbreaking, even if Oppert later drew up his own map of the site (the significance of which I exaggerated in “Études Assyriologie,” 8). On this, see especially Larsen, Conquest of Assyria, 9; Pallis, Antiquity of Iraq, 44–45, 47, 51–52; and Rogers, History of Babylonia, 113–21. 40. Marchand, German Orientalism, 96; Lion and Michel, “Jules Oppert,” 82–86, 91, 94; Baumgarten, “Jules Oppert,” 80–82; Jerrold S. Cooper, “Sumerian and Aryan: Racial Theory, Academic Politics and Parisian Assyriology,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 210 (1993): 190; Hassoulier, “Notice sur la vie,” 569–75 and 585; and Muss-Arnolt, “Works,” 523–25.

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footing so that it could be studied as its own language. His most important work in this regard was the 1860 Éléments de la grammaire assyrienne, which was “the first successful attempt toward a development of the general principles of Assyrian [Akkadian] grammar.”41 Oppert likewise gained fame during the famous Sumerian controversy, as he held a very prominent role in that debate. Even though Rawlinson had already identified Sumerian as a separate language, distinct from Akkadian, Oppert was the first to recognize the significance of the Sumero-Akkadian lexical texts. Moreover, it was Oppert who first correctly named the language as Sumerian.42 In addition, Oppert published in the field of biblical studies, including commentaries on the Books of Esther and Judith, as well as major chronological studies.43 Jean Baumgarten explains that, for Oppert, when it came to the study of the Bible: “The use of the philological and comparative method participated in a sort of ‘deconstruction’ of the models of the rabbinic approach, even to the point of contesting the ‘articles of faith’ of Judaism, concerning the unity, the authority and the authenticity of the Jewish Bible.”44 Tellingly Oppert wrote: “Any apologetic tendency has to be rejected in writings of pure science [science pure].”45 Oppert, however, focused most of his ancient Near Eastern scholarship on Assyri41. Jules Oppert, Éléments de la grammaire assyrienne (Paris: Impériale, 1860). The quotation is from Muss-Arnolt, “Works,” 525. 42. Lion and Michel, “Jules Oppert,” 91; Baumgarten, “Jules Oppert,” 84–85; and Kramer, Sumerians, 20–21. On the history and controversy surrounding the proper identification and decipherment of Sumerian, see Tom Jones (ed.), The Sumerian Problem (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1969), 3–47. 43. See, e.g., the following works by Jules Oppert, Salomon et ses successeurs: solution d’un problème chronologique (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1877), La chronologie biblique fixée par les éclipses des inscriptions cunéiformes (Paris: Revue archéologique, 1868), Le Livre de Judith (Paris: Ainé, 1865), and Commentaire historique et philologique du Livre d’Esther: D’après la lecture des inscriptions perses (Paris: Moquet, 1864). 44. Baumgarten, “Jules Oppert,” 93, and see also comments on 94. 45. Oppert, Salomon et ses successeurs, 3.

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ology as its own discipline, and not on the Bible. Oppert began teaching Assyriology at the Collège de France in 1869 and from 1874 until his death in 1905, he held the Chair in Akkadian (Assyrien) Philology and Archaeology at the Collège de France.46 A less significant figure in the field of French Assyriology, but one who became incredibly famous because of his leading role in the Sumerian controversy, is Joseph Halévy (1827–1917), who served on Loisy’s thesis committee.47 In fact, Halévy’s name even became an adjective used to describe an entire academic trend within nascent Assyriology. Halévy was a prominent Semitic philologist in France at the time. He taught Ethiopic at the École pratique des hautes études. Halévy’s fame within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Assyriology stemmed from his denial that the Sumerians were not Semites, and that Sumerian was a separate non-Semitic language, all of which is now taken for granted. Halévy engaged Oppert in written polemics concerning Sumerian, and the debate became famously acerbic. In fact, this is the context for the adjectival use of Halévy’s name as, “Halévyan,” modifying an academic “school of thought” composed of those on his side of the Sumerian question.48 François Lenormant (1837–83) was another one of Halévy’s major intellectual opponents regarding Sumerian.49 C. Wade 46. Lion and Michel, “Jules Oppert,” 92; Gabriel Bergounioux, “ ‘Aryen,’ ‘indo-européen,’ ‘sémite’ dans l’université française (1850–1914),” Histoire Épistémologie Langage 18 (1996): 113; and Cooper, “Sumerian and Aryan,” 190. 47. On Halévy, see, e.g., Julia Phillips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Sephardic Scholarly Worlds: Toward a Novel Geography of Modern Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 100, no. 3 (2010): 353–55; Yosef Tobi, “An Unknown Study by Joseph Halévy on his Journey to Yemen,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 35 (2005): 287–92; Elisa Bianchi, Un finto rabbino, una subdola guida, un diario che riappare: Viaggio in Yemen di Joseph Halévy (Milan: Guerini e associate, 2003); and Simon-Nahum, La cité investie, 51 and 150–58. 48. Thus it is used in J. Dyneley Prince, “Sumerian as a Language,” American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 23 (1907): 202 and 205. 49. Cooper, “Sumerian and Aryan,” 182 and 184–86. On Lenormant see, e.g., Sabine Jaubert, “L’archéologie selon Charles et François Lenormant. Enquête historiographique

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Meade described Lenormant as “The giant of Sumerology.”50 Indeed, according to Meade, Lenormant’s Sumerian grammar laid “the foundation for future Sumerian grammars.”51 Within the history of Catholic theology, Lenormant is better known for his views on the inspiration of scripture. He articulated a form of limited inspiration focused on faith and morals. He conceded that all of scripture is inspired, per se, by God, but he emphasized that God did not intend everything in scripture to be considered divine revelation. Lenormant famously wrote, “Everything there is inspired, not everything is revealed.”52 Finally, Arthur Amiaud (1849–89) was Loisy’s primary teacher in Assyriology and directed his thesis in that subject. Amiaud was highly accomplished in a wide variety of ancient languages typically left separate by specialists in our day. This fact is even more impressive when we consider that Amiaud only lived to the age of forty. Amiaud became a well-known Assyriologist and undertook pioneering work in Sumerian. During his time, outside of the discipline of Assyriology, he was better known for his work in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic, and became particularly noted for his edition and French translation of “The Legend of St. Alexis,” a medieval Syriac manuscript which Amiaud pubsur l’archéologie du XIXe siècle” (PhD diss., Université Paul-Valéry, 2008); and Olivier Masson, “François Lenormant (1837–1883), un érudit déconcertant,” Museum Helveticum 50 (1993): 44–60. 50. Meade, Road to Babylon, 15. On Lenormant’s significance for the field of Assyriology as a whole, see Kramer, Sumerians, 24. 51. Meade, Road to Babylon, 15. Meade’s reference is to François Lenormant, Lettres Assyriologiques: Seconde série: Études Accadiennes (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1873, 1874, 1880). The third volume is usually listed by scholars (including by me in “Babylon in Paris,” 265n26) as 1879, but while working on this book, the only volume I was able to obtain was listed as 1880, and it did not give any indication that it had already been published. 52. François Lenormant, Les origines de l’histoire d’après la Bible et les traditions des peoples orientaux I (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1880), xvi. See also François Laplanche, La Bible en France: entre mythe et critique XVIe–XIXe siècle (Paris: Michel, 1994), 191–93; and James Tunstead Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration Since 1810: A Review and Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 63–65.

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lished the year he died.53 Amiaud had been one of Oppert’s leading students in Assyriology, and was appointed Chair of Assyriology at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, where he taught until his early death in 1889.54 In Amiaud’s obituary, Morris Jastrow wrote, “Though but a few years past thirty he had already acquired a high rank as an Assyriologist, acknowledged to have but few superiors in France or out of it, such was the thoroughness of his attainments and the sagacity of his insight.”55 Now that we have some passing familiarity with the major figures in the field, we are better prepared to situate Loisy’s work in Assyriology in the context of the time. This is significant because, as we shall see in the next chapter, Loisy devoted himself to the study of Assyriology at a time when the field was still burgeoning, and he was in the geographical center of the most advanced schools of thought on the topic, namely, Paris. Moreover, as we shall see, he studied with some of the leading figures in the field, encountered above. This will prove important because, although scholars have tended, on the whole, to ignore or simply mention in passing Loisy’s studies in Assyriology, I would argue that his work in Assyriology was fundamental for his biblical studies, which was at the heart of his program that was censured as modernist. Understanding his training and scholarship in Assyriology will help us better to understand his work in the Bible, and thus his modernist writings as a whole. 53. Arthur Amiaud, La légende syriaque de Saint Alexis l’homme de Dieu (Paris: Bouillon, 1889). 54. Bergounioux, ‘Aryen,’ ‘indo-européen,’ ‘sémite,’ ” 115; Morris Jastrow Jr., “Supplementary Account of Thirty Years’ Progress in Semitic Studies, and Discussion of Dr. Peters’ Paper,” in Thirty Years of Oriental Studies, ed. Roland G. Kent (Philadelphia: Oriental Club of Philadelphia, 1918), 62, and “Death of Prof. Arthur Amiaud,” The Old and New Testament Student 9 (1889): 188. 55. Jastrow, “Death,” 188. Himself a noted Assyriologist, Jastrow had attended Oppert’s and Halévy’s lectures while he was abroad visiting in France. See Albert T. Clay, “Professor Jastrow as an Assyriologist,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 41 (1921): 333.

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3  /

Loisy’s Work in the Study of the Ancient Near East and the Old Testament

The Assyriologist Alfred Firmin Loisy When Alfred Loisy’s name comes up in scholarly conversation in university coffee lounges or at professional conferences, it is typically in the context of discussions concerning the modernist controversy at the dawn of the twentieth century. His most famous work is certainly L’Évangile et l’Église, which might be said to be one of the matchsticks that ignited the antimodernist condemnations which followed in its wake.1 Sometimes at issue is his later work dating from after his 1908 excommunication, especially his further work on Christian origins; or perhaps his biblical studies, in particular his work in the New Testament. Rarely, I suspect, is Loisy’s Assyriological work on ancient Assyria or Babylon the main topic of conversation. Yet this is precisely the topic of this chapter, wherein I examine Loisy as an Assyriologist. 1. Alfred Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1902).

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Ancient Near East and Old Testament I argue that Loisy’s work in Assyriology is important for understanding his biblical studies, and thus his entire modernist program. His discussions of doctrinal development and reform are all grounded in his biblical work, especially his New Testament studies. Even his New Testament studies, however, stand on the foundation of his work in the Old Testament, and virtually all of his publications dealing with the Old Testament are either grounded in or at least in dialogue with his Assyriological studies on the ancient Near East. Moreover, the fact that his biblical studies are so enmeshed with his Assyriological studies is not by accident, but rather by design. As we shall see, Loisy’s interest in the religion, culture, language, tradition, and broader world of the ancient Near East was inspired by his studies in the Bible. Indeed, Loisy felt driven to investigate the ancient world of Mesopotamia in order to strengthen his study of the Bible. I think the most important lesson Loisy would have taken from Assyriology was the comparative approach, initially similar to that of the scholarship of Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), whose works he digested and utilized. Later Loisy would follow more closely the phenomenological approach of the Belgian scholar of religion Franz Cumont (1868–1947), with whom he engaged in lively correspondence after Loisy’s 1908 excommunication.2 In his autobiographical writings, Loisy depicts his Assyriological studies as part of his attempt to challenge the skepticism of Joseph-Ernest Renan (1823–92), from whom Loisy learned historical biblical criticism.3 In the end, studying 2. See, e.g., Danny Praet, “Symbolisme, évolution rituelle et morale dans l’histoire des religions: le cas du Taurobolium dans les publications et la correspondance de Franz Cumont et d’Alfred Loisy,” Mythos 7 (2013): 127–45; Annelies Lannoy, “Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927: Entre histoire des religions et histoire du christianisme,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 229, no. 4 (2012): 503–26, and “La correspondance bilatérale entre Alfred Loisy et Franz Cumont: brève présentation et projet d’édition,” Anabases 13 (2011): 261–65. 3. On Renan’s historical biblical criticism see especially Thomas Römer, “Renan et

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ancient Assyria and Babylon, especially Assyrian and Babylonian religions, provided an important historical and literary context for Loisy when he returned to the biblical material, especially in the Old Testament.

Adventures in Internet Research My interest in Loisy’s Assyriological training and publications was first piqued when I was investigating Loisy’s broader use of the historical critical method for studying the Bible. I was working on a conference presentation dealing with Loisy’s so-called Firmin articles, which he had published pseudonymously under his middle name, Firmin. During the course of that research, I noticed that one of Loisy’s early criticisms of Renan was the latter’s lack of engagement with the then newly developing discipline of Assyriology. A number of scholars have mentioned Loisy’s own studies in Assyriology, but always only in passing. As a former student of Edwin Yamauchi, who taught ancient history at my alma mater, Miami University, nestled in rural Oxford, Ohio, I became intrigued.4 Yamauchi inl’exégèse historico-critique,” in Ernest Renan: La science, la religion, la République, ed. Henry Laurens (Paris: Jacob, 2013), 145–62. 4. Among the wide variety of courses in languages and ancient history that Yamauchi taught were Near Eastern History, Mesopotamian History, and Persian History. As a graduate student, Yamauchi studied a number of ancient Near Eastern languages, including Akkadian. Moreover, he directed six masters’ theses that dealt with Assyriology. His scholarship dealing with Assyriology spans at least seventy-eight professional papers and scholarly lectures, more than nine books, thirteen book chapters, forty-three entries in reference works, thirty-five journal and periodical articles, and twenty-eight book reviews—and this represents only a small portion of his scholarly work on the Bible, ancient Greece, and broader ancient Near East. On Yamauchi see Paul L. Maier, foreword to The Light of Discovery: Studies in Honor of Edwin M. Yamauchi, ed. John D. Wineland (Eugene, Ore.: Pickwick, 2007), xi–xiv; John D. Wineland, preface to ibid., xv–xvii; Jerry Pattengale, “The Essence of a Mentor: A Tribute to Dr. Edwin Yamauchi,” in ibid., xix– xxi; Kenneth R. Calvert, “Edwin M. Yamauchi,” in ibid., 1–23; and Edwin M. Yamauchi, “An Ancient Historian’s View of Christianity,” in Professors Who Believe: The Spiritual

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stilled in his students the importance of working with primary sources in their original languages. His students left his courses with an appreciation for biblical scholarship that availed itself of the broader ancient Near Eastern world from which the Bible emerged.5 Scholars like Yamauchi emphasized the centrality of primary sources in their original languages, were trained primarily as ancient historians working with a broad range of ancient sources in their original scripts, and were not primarily trained as bibliJourneys of Christian Faculty, ed. Paul M. Anderson (Downers Grove, Ind.: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 192–99. 5. This was in part due to Yamauchi’s training; he earned a doctorate under Cyrus Gordon (1908–2001) in the then-unique department of Mediterranean Studies that Gordon created at Brandeis University. On Gordon see Gary A. Rendsburg, “Cyrus H. Gordon (1908–2001): A Giant Among Scholars,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92 (2001): 137–43, and “ ‘Someone Will Succeed in Deciphering Minoan’: Cyrus H. Gordon and Minoan Linear A,” Biblical Archaeologist 59, no. 1 (1996): 36–43; Cyrus H. Gordon, A Scholar’s Odyssey (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000); Meir Lubetski and Claire Gottlieb, “ ‘Forever Gordon’: Portrait of a Master Scholar with a Global Perspective,” Biblical Archaeologist 59, no. 1 (1996): 2–12; Howard Marblestone, “A ‘Mediterranean Synthesis’: Professor Cyrus H. Gordon’s Contributions to the Classics,” Biblical Archaeologist 59, no. 1 (1996): 22–30; Martha A. Morrison, “A Continuing Adventure: Cyrus Gordon and Mesopotamia,” Biblical Archaeologist 59, no. 1 (1996): 31–35; David Toshio Tsumura, “The Father of Ugaritic Studies,” Biblical Archaeologist 59, no. 1 (1996): 44–50; and Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Magic Bowls: Cyrus H. Gordon and the Ubiquity of Magic in the Pre-Modern World,” Biblical Archaeologist 59, no. 1 (1996): 51–55. Under Gordon’s leadership Brandeis combined the study of the ancient Near East and the Bible with classical antiquity in all its diversity (e.g., ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Greek and Roman Classics, Islamic civilization), and thus his students gained both a rare breadth and depth in their studies. Gordon was a student of the renowned polymath Max Margolis (1866–1932), and was thus likely influenced by him. On Margolis see Leonard Greenspoon’s “On the Jewishness of Modern Jewish Biblical Scholarship: The Case of Max L. Margolis,” Judaism 39 (1990): 82–92, Max Leopold Margolis: A Scholar’s Scholar (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), “Max Leopold Margolis: A Scholar’s Scholar (A BA Portrait),” Biblical Archaeologist 48 (1985): 103–6; Robert Gordis, “The Life of Professor Max Leopold Margolis: An Appreciation,” in Max Leopold Margolis: Scholar and Teacher, ed. Robert Gordis (New York: Bloch, 1952), 1–16; Frank Zimmermann, “The Contributions of M. L. Margolis to the Fields of Bible and Rabbinics,” in ibid., 17–26; Ephraim A. Speiser, “The Contribution of Max Leopold Margolis to Semitic Linguistics,” in ibid., 27–33; Harry M. Orlinsky, “Margolis’ Work in the Septuagint,” in ibid., 35–44; and Joshua Bloch, “Max L. Margolis’ Contribution to the History and Philosophy of Judaism,” in ibid., 45–59.

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cal scholars. Such scholars (e.g., among Assyriologists, Egyptologists, etc.), with some exceptions, tend to eschew the more internal literary compositional theories like those of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) who, in turn, tended to ignore the many Assyriological findings even though he was competent in the discipline and could read Akkadian.6 Others, like Egyptologist James Hoffmeier, have pointed out how one of the major differences between scholars of the Bible who tend to read the history via documentary type literary source theories and those who view the biblical documents as integral wholes rather than fragmented pieces has to do with differences in training. Hoffmeier observes: “One reason for the disparity between historical maximalists and minimalists is that the former tend to be trained in Near Eastern languages, history, and archaeology with the Hebrew Bible as a cognate discipline, whereas the latter are largely trained in Old Testament studies in the nineteenth-century European mold and treat cognate languages and sources as ancillary rather than central to their discipline.”7 For well over a century it was true that Assyriologists by and large had not followed the path of Homeric and biblical scholars who divided up their texts into various hypothetical earlier literary sources.8 The eminent Assyriologist and Sumerolo6. On Wellhausen’s relationship to the field of Assyriology, see especially Peter Machinist, “The Road Not Taken: Wellhausen and Assyriology,” in Homeland and Exile: Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honour of Bustenay Oded, ed. Gershon Galil, Mark Geller, and Alan Millard (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 469–531. 7. James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 15. 8. On the connection here between the early development of a documentary-type source criticism in Homeric and biblical studies, see, e.g., John Van Seters, The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the “Editor” in Biblical Criticism (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2006), esp. 133–243; Aulikki Nahkola, Double Narratives in the Old Testament (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2001); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214–45; Edwin Yamauchi, Composition and Corroboration in Classical and Biblical

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gist William Hallo (1928–2015) pointed this out back in 1962.9 Cyrus Gordon (Yamauchi’s teacher) made some relevant autobiographical remarks concerning his “discoveries” while teaching Akkadian cuneiform after World War II as a secular Jewish scholar who had no theological interest in the debates: The accepted way to analyze the Pentateuch was to divide it into four hypothetical sources: J, E, D, and P. One of the presumed characteristics of P (the Priestly Code, supposedly from the time of the Second Temple, ca. fifth century B.C.E.) was a preoccupation with details such as the measurements of Noah’s ark. However, while at Dropsie I reread the description of Utnapishtim’s ark in the Gilgamesh Epic and observed a similar concern with detailed specifications. If this feature obliged us to attribute the Genesis account to P of the fifth century, it must, I reasoned, do the same for the Babylonian account, which is absurd. I also found other absurdities in the so-called higher criticism of the Establishment. If Yahweh-Elohim owed its origin to the combination of God’s name in J (Jehovah is the mistaken reading of Yahweh) with his name in E (Elohim), then every Egyptian inscription mentioning the god Amon-Re must have derived the name from an A-document combined with an R-document. One might also argue the same for Ugaritic documents, which abound with divine names composed of two elements.10

From my undergraduate work with Yamauchi, I was primed to recognize biblical scholars who lacked expertise in ancient Near Eastern languages, literatures, and civilizations, waxing Studies (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1966); Umberto Cassuto, The Documentary Hypothesis and the Composition of the Pentateuch: Eight Lectures ( Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2006 [1941]), and La questione della Genesi (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1934). 9. William W. Hallo, “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature,” Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962): 13–26. This is no longer the case. See, e.g., Y. C. Chen, The Primeval Flood Catastrophe: Origins and Early Development in Mesopotamian Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 10. Gordon, Scholar’s Odyssey, 80. See also his “Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit,” Christianity Today 4 (November 23, 1959): 3–6.

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creatively about hypothetical histories behind the biblical text in a vacuum sealed off from its ancient Near Eastern milieu. Loisy, however, was no such novice to the study of the ancient Near East, having studied Assyriology assiduously, but also having spent a year studying Egyptology.11 I was thus very interested to find in Loisy a scholar who utilized Wellhausen-style documentary source criticism while also delving deep into ancient Assyrian and Babylonian history and literature—not as an ancillary discipline to his biblical studies, but as a primary discipline in its own right. When I initially set out to investigate Loisy’s academic training in Assyriology, I had somewhat of a challenging task before me, as much of the scholarly literature fails to mention at all that Loisy ever studied Assyriology. Those few scholars who do acknowledge Loisy’s Assyriology studies often mention it only in passing, without naming his teachers. So, I turned to Google to see if the Internet would turn up any clues as to who Loisy’s Assyriology teachers were. The first source that I found that mentioned the names of Loisy’s instructors happened to be an online encyclopedia. This reference work indicated that Loisy studied with both Jules Oppert and Joseph Halévy. As I scoured the scholarly Loisy literature, however, I eventually discovered that Loisy’s thesis director was Arthur Amiaud, but no one mentioned any involvement Loisy might have had with Oppert. I chalked up what I took to be the mistaken attribution in the encyclopedia to the vagaries of online reference works. Then I took a second glance at the entry. The article was from the 1911 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica, and the author’s initials were “F.v.H.” It did not take long for me to suspect, and then 11. C. J. T. Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity (ed. Jodock), 207.

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verify, that the author was none other than Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925), Loisy’s intimate friend.12 Did Friedrich von Hügel make a mistake? Or did Loisy have some connection with Oppert that I had been thus far unable to track down? With much effort, I finally located the volume published by the École pratique des hautes études which listed the diplomas granted from the school’s historical and philological sciences unit from 1868 to 1893, wherein Loisy’s diploma thesis was listed, along with his research committee. Indeed, Amiaud served as his director, while the duo, Oppert and Halévy, served as readers. Had I first taken the time to read through Loisy’s own autobiographical memories, I could have saved myself the trouble, for I later discovered, much to my chagrin, that he mentions his work with Amiaud, Oppert, and Halévy there.13

Loisy’s Turn to Assyriology Loisy commenced studies in Assyriology in part because of his growing dissatisfaction with his scripture studies under the Sulpician Fulcran Grégoire Vigouroux (1837–1915). Loisy attended Vigouroux’s scripture courses at the Sulpician seminary but was put off by what he described as Vigouroux’s apologetically oriented lectures. He found Vigouroux’s responses to challenges emerging from historical biblical criticism deeply unsatisfying. In 1881 Loisy began taking Louis Duchesne’s (1843–1922) courses in church history. It was in those courses that Loisy began to 12. Baron Friedrich von Hügel, “Loisy, Alfred Firmin,” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information: Eleventh Edition: Volume 16: L to Lord Advocate (New York: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911), 926–28. Friedrich von Hügel wrote that, “At the governmental institutions, Professors Oppert and Halévy helped further train him [Loisy]” (926). 13. Alfred Loisy, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire religieuse de notre temps I: 1857–1900 (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1930), 117, 129, 133, 162.

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learn the historical critical method, although Duchesne did not apply that method to scripture, but to other historical sources. Another pivotal moment in Loisy’s intellectual life began the following year, in 1882, when Loisy audited Ernest Renan’s courses in biblical criticism at the Collège de France, where Oppert was teaching Assyriology. As Loisy would later describe the situation, he felt inspired to learn and master Renan’s historical critical method in order to use it against him. If he was dissatisfied with Vigouroux’s apologetics, he later claimed he was likewise dissatisfied by Renan’s rationalism.14 One of Loisy’s most stringent critiques of Renan was Renan’s poor knowledge of Assyriology, despite Renan’s renown as a Semitic philologist.15 As we saw in the previous chapter, part of Renan’s opposition to Assyriology was his initial refusal to accept the idea that Akkadian was a Semitic language. Despite his facility for Semitic languages, Renan simply found the cuneiform script too complex, and he criticized in print Oppert’s work on Akkadian.16 Loisy thus set out to learn Assyriology, 14. Loisy, “Le cours de Renan au Collège de France,” Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique 20 (1923): 325–30, and Choses passées (Paris: Nourry, 1913), 65–66, 75, 372–74; Talar, “Between Science and Myth,” 27–42; François Laplanche, “Une église immuable, une époque en mouvement,” in Alfred Loisy: La crise de la foi dans le temps présent (Essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses), ed. François Laplanche (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 508 and 510–12; Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” 198–99, 198n24, 201, 205; Marvin R. O’Connell, “Duchesne and Loisy on the Rue de Vaugirard,” in Studies in Catholic History in Honor of John Tracy Ellis, ed. Nelson H. Minnich, Robert B. Eno, and Robert F. Trisco (Wilmington, Del.: Glazier, 1985), 589–616; Théobald, “L’exégèse catholique,” 405–9; Alan H. Jones, Independence and Exegesis: The Study of Early Christianity in the Work of Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), Charles Guignebert (1857–1939), and Maurice Goguel (1880–1955) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1983), 10–11; and Fausto Parente, “Monsignor D’Hulst, Loisy e l’«École large»,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 90 (1978): 853–57 and 870–71. 15. For Loisy’s critique of Renan see Alfred Loisy, “Ernest Renan, historien d’Israël,” in Revue anglo-romaine 26 (1896): 385–96; 28 (1896): 491–502; 37–38 (1896): 100–111; 39 (1896): 153–63; 40 (1896): 197–215; 41 (1896): 256–72; 42 (1896): 298–317; 44 (1896): 396–415; and 45 (1896): 448–61. 16. Dominique Charpin, “Renan, un sémitisant au berceau de l’assyriologie,” in Ernest

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including the Akkadian language, but also the religion, culture, and broader history of ancient Mesopotamia. In many ways, Loisy’s ideas and methods approached those of Lenormant, particularly regarding limited biblical inspiration, but also the use of Assyriological findings for understanding the Bible for non-apologetic purposes, combined with an appropriation of literary source critical methods.17 Loisy eventually earned a diploma in Assyriology from the École pratique des hautes études in 1889, with his Assyriology thesis entitled “Les Annales de Sargon, roi d’Assyrie.” Loisy’s thesis included the cuneiform text of the royal annals of the Assyrian King Sargon II, as well as Loisy’s own transcription of the text and his own French translation of the Akkadian text. Finally, the thesis included Loisy’s commentary and notes on the royal annals.18 As mentioned above, Loisy’s thesis director was none other than Amiaud, from whom Loisy learned Akkadian while studying at the École pratique des hautes études in 1882–86, and whom we encountered in the previous chapter. It appears that Loisy was the only student whose research Amiaud directed.19 Again, as has already been mentioned, the two other members of Loisy’s research committee were none other than Oppert and Halévy.20 Renan (ed. Laurens), 77–99; Lion and Michel, “Jules Oppert,” 91; Baumgarten, “Jules Oppert,” 90–91; and Muss-Arnolt, “Works,” 525. 17. Laplanche, La Bible en France, 190–91. 18. Alfred Firmin Loisy, “Les Annales de Sargon, roi d’Assyrie” (diploma thesis, École pratique des hautes études, 1889). I have not been able to access this document. 19. Loisy, Mémoires I, 116–17, 129, 133, 162, 165; Laplanche, “Une église immuable,” 514 and 522; Pierre-Eugène Leroy, “Loisy et le Collège de France: Les conditions de l’élection, les circonstances de la leçon d’ouverture,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 142 (2010): 105–22; and Simon-Nahum, La cité investie, 63–67. 20. Loisy, Mémoires I, 133; and Émile Bouillon (ed.), L’École Pratique des Hautes Études (1868–1893): Documents pour servir a l’histoire de la section des sciences historiques et philologiques Volume 1 (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, 1893), 160.

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Loisy also studied more directly with Halévy, from whom he learned Ethiopic at the École pratique des hautes études.21 In light of the bitter academic feud between Oppert and Halévy on the Sumerian question, it is rather incredible that both were able to work together on Loisy’s committee, and indeed, that the committee led under the direction of Oppert’s former student Amiaud approved the thesis “favorably” in 1889.22 Anyone who has worked on thesis or dissertation committees knows how truly astounding this is. Loisy’s thesis is listed as approved on April 14, 1889. His director, Amiaud, died the following month, on May 22, 1889. After Amiaud’s death, Loisy sought to replace his mentor as Professor of Assyriology at the École pratique des hautes études, but was unable to get the position.23 This attempt shows how serious Loisy was about the discipline of Assyriology. Although he was unable to secure that Assyriology post, Loisy was able to teach Assyriology at the Institut Catholique in Paris where he had already been teaching Hebrew since 1881. He continued to teach Hebrew as he was teaching Assyriology. In fact, Loisy had been able to add Assyriology to his teaching program already in 1886 after completing his As21. Loisy, Mémoires I, 117; and A. Bea, “L’enciclica ‘Pascendi’ e gli studi biblici: Nel 500 anniversario dell’importante documento,” Biblica 39 (1958): 129. 22. Loisy, Mémoires I, 133; and Bouillon (ed.), L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, 160. Perhaps even more remarkable, the same vote, “favorable,” was given on a committee a few years later in 1892, when Oppert served as a reader and Halévy was the thesis director. The topic was similar, pertaining to a royal inscription of the Assyrian King Tiglath-Pileser, although I am uncertain to which Tiglath-Pileser this refers (I, II, or III). The thesis referred to here was Désiré Tostivint, “Inscription du roi Téglatphalasar,” (thesis, École pratique des hautes études, 1892). I have not been able to access this thesis, but found the citation and composition of the thesis committee in Bouillon (ed.), L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, 161. We should keep in mind that the fierce polemical salvos Oppert and Halévy published against one another predate both of these theses. E.g., J. Halévy, “Observations critiques sur les prétendus Touraniens de la Babylonie,” Journal asiatique 3 (1874): 461–536; and J. Oppert, “Études sumériennes, second article. Sumérien ou rien?,” Journal asiatique 5 (1875): 442–97. 23. Loisy, Mémoires I, 165–67; and O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 67–68.

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syriological coursework, but prior to completing and defending his thesis.24

“That Scholar of Scholars”: François Thureau-Dangin It was in his capacity as professor of Hebrew and Assyriology at the Institut Catholique that Loisy would have his most lasting impact on the discipline of Assyriology and also on Sumerology, the study of ancient Sumerian languages, culture, and history. This influence was through Loisy’s student François Thureau-Dangin (1872–1944).25 Thureau-Dangin initially studied biblical exegesis with Loisy, and Loisy encouraged Thureau-Dangin to pursue Assyriology and put him in contact with Oppert.26 The great Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer (1897–1990) called Thureau-Dangin’s 1905 work on Sumerian and Akkadian inscriptions “epoch-making.”27 In his autobiography, Kramer lauds Thureau-Dangin with the following: “that scholar of scholars, François Thureau-Dangin, resurrected Sumer’s historic past. Thureau-Dangin dominated the cuneiform field 24. Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 34; Bergounioux, “«Aryen», «indo-européen», «sémite»,” 119; and O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 67. 25. On Thureau-Dangin’s important place in the early history of Assyriology and especially Sumerology, see Edouard Dhorme, “La vie et l’oeuvre de François ThureauDangin, Membre de l’Institut de France,” in Hommage à la mémoire de l’éminent assyriologue François Thureau-Dangin (1872–1944) (Leiden: Brill, 1946), 7–14; and Henri Maspero, “Éloge funèbre de M. François Thureau-Dangin, membre de l’Académie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 88 (1944): 55–63. 26. Loisy, Mémoires I, 283. See also Maspero, “Éloge funèbre,” 56, where we read, “First drawn to biblical exegesis, he spent a year as Loisy’s student, and it was he that turned him to Assyriology and advised him to take Oppert’s and Menant’s courses.” 27. Kramer, Sumerians, 24. The reference is to François Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad: Transcription et traduction (Paris: Leroux, 1905). Regarding this text, Kramer writes further that it “proved a milestone in the progress of Sumerian studies. It is a superb compendium of straightforward translation and tersely worded notes revealing a masterful distillation of the accumulated Sumerological knowledge of that day, not a little of which could be traced to Thureau-Dangin’s own original contributions” (Sumerians, 25).

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for close to half a century, until his death in 1944 at the age of seventy-two . . . he exemplified my ideal of a productive scholar.”28 Thureau-Dangin played an important role in the early years of deciphering Sumerian, building upon the work of Loisy’s director Amiaud. Jastrow reports that without the groundbreaking work of Amiaud and of Thureau-Dangin, Friedrich Delitzsch would not have been able to have composed his famous Sumerian grammar.29 Jastrow further observes that “it is through Thureau-Dangin . . . that the study of Sumerian, so inextricably bound up with Assyriology, has been placed on a scientific basis.”30 Thureau-Dangin’s work is well-known within the fields of Assyriology and Sumerology, so much so that a more recent popular Spanish text includes, “The final decipherment of the Sumerian language, to which the studious French François Thureau-Dangin contributed in an important way with his labors in 1907 [sic], definitively completed the birth of a new discipline in the camp of oriental studies.”31 Although Thureau-Dangin had initially followed Halévy on the Sumerian question, the discoveries at Telloh, and, in particular, the cuneiform tablets that were non-Semitic, changed his mind.32 Thureau-Dangin’s influence can be seen, for example, in his method of attaching accents to syllables in transliteration which, in the words of one popular Akkadian grammar, remains “the classic.”33 In Thureau-Dangin’s 28. Samuel Noah Kramer, In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 222. 29. Jastrow, “Supplementary Account,” 62. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Francisco Javier Gómez Espelosín, Memorias perdidas: Grecia y el mundo oriental (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2013), 26. The date cited is a mistake. Gómez Espelosín is referring to Thureau-Dangin, Les Inscriptions de Sumer et d’Akkad, which was published in 1905, not 1907. 32. Cooper, “Sumerian and Aryan,” 193–96; and Jones (ed.), Sumerian Problem, 49–92. 33. Richard Caplice, Introduction to Akkadian, 4th ed. (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2002), 2 and 6.

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time, there was no agreed upon method of transliterating cuneiform.34 Thureau-Dangin’s system of transliteration involved attaching French accents, and it was adopted broadly within Assyriology on both sides of the Atlantic until the twenty-first century. In fact, the foundation of Thureau-Dangin’s system is still utilized, in cases where accents are being used.35 In light of Thureau-Dangin’s supremely important role in the field, Loisy’s influence on Thureau-Dangin to pursue Assyriology remains, without a doubt, Loisy’s most lasting Assyriological achievement. Loisy, however, also published scholarly works in Assyriology. In 1901 he even wrote an Akkadian grammar, Grammaire assyrienne, though this was never published. His early interest in Assyriology was piqued by his studies in scripture, so it should not surprise us that Loisy frequently engaged the biblical texts in his Assyriological studies, and indeed, that there is sometimes quite a bit of overlap between his works on Mesopotamian literature and on the Bible.

Loisy’s Assyriological Oeuvre The first work in Assyriology that Loisy published was his contribution to conference proceedings in 1889, the year he defended his Assyriology thesis. Loisy had delivered the paper the year before, in April 1888.36 The paper was entitled “A Fragment 34. Recognizing that such was the case, Oppert used Hebrew characters in his Akkadian verb paradigms, rather than transliterating them into Latin letters, as so many of his contemporary scholars knew Hebrew. Thus Oppert was able to avoid the challenges faced with multiple different accent uses in modern languages that use Latin letters. See, for example, Oppert, Éléments de la grammaire assyrienne, 42–43, 45–46, 49. 35. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for my “Babylon in Paris” for helping me to understand this point. 36. Loisy, “Un morceau du rituel babylonien: Traduction et commentaire d’un texte cunéiforme,” in Congrès scientifique international des catholiques, tenu à Paris du 8 au 13 avril 1888 (Paris: Bureau des Annales de philosophie chrétienne, 1889), 1–21.

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of Babylonian Ritual” and included Loisy’s own French translation of the document pertaining to Babylonian religion (specifically, a religious incantation invoking the sun god Shamash) as well as his commentary on the text.37 He began the piece with a brief discussion of the significance of the discovery of cuneiform literature for understanding religion of the ancient Near East.38 He explained that the purpose of the article was to translate an Akkadian religious text, in this case an incantation, which had thus far not been translated.39 His translation was interspersed with commentary.40 Loisy made a number of comparisons with some portions from the initial chapters of the Book of Genesis.41 He then included some specific technical notes on the text,42 and concluded with a transliteration of the Akkadian text.43 Loisy cited very few sources from the scholarly literature, and among the primarily French sources he does cite—and explicitly praises—are the scholars with whom we are now familiar: Oppert, Halévy, and Lenormant.44 At this stage in his career, Loisy did not have a well-articulated method or theory of studying religions. He would soon engage the work of Hermann Gunkel, who became a leading scholar represent37. The text is a fragmentary tablet housed in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum under the registration number K. 4872, originally published by Henry Rawlinson in Rawlinson, Cuneiform Inscriptions V, plates 50–51. It appears that Loisy never published a cuneiform text for the first time, as indicated by his absence from the exhaustive three-volume work by Rykle Borger, Handbuch der Keilschrift-literatur (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967–75). He did claim, however, that as far as he was aware, this was the first translation of this Shamash text. See Loisy, “Un morceau du rituel babylonien,” 2. 38. Loisy, “Un morceau du rituel babylonien,” 1–2. 39. Ibid., 2. 40. Ibid., 3–14. 41. Ibid., 13–14. 42. Ibid., 14–16. 43. Ibid., 16–21. 44. For the names of the scholars Loisy cites and the number of times he cites them, in all of the works discussed in the remainder of this chapter, see the list in the footnotes of my article “Babylon in Paris” (261–76).

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ing the History of Religion phenomenological approach, but even then Loisy did not commit himself to that school. After his excommunication, Loisy would become a phenomenologist, but then he was influenced more by the work of Cumont than by the German historians of religion, as I have already mentioned.45 Loisy next published a seven-part series of articles in 1890– 92. The articles were entitled “Studies on Chaldean-Assyrian Religion” and appeared in the journal Revue des religions.46 In the first article, he discusses the main sources for the information on Babylonian and Assyrian religions that he will be examining. He provides a sort of introduction to the state of Assyriology at that time, and mentions what was known about the Babylonians and Assyrians in antiquity from sources like Herodotus and Josephus, but emphasizes how our knowledge of ancient Babylon and Assyria has advanced greatly through the discovery of cuneiform literature from these civilizations. He also mentions similarities with the Old Testament, particularly regarding the account of the flood. Loisy briefly summarizes the characteristics of the national religions of Babylon and Assyria. He concludes with a brief review of the debate over the Sumerian language (discussed above), particularly concerning Oppert and Halévy. The second article deals particularly with solar deities, a topic that was very much a part of the work of German PanBabylonian scholars such as Delitzsch and Peter Jensen, whom Loisy cited throughout (eighteen times combined). As with his 45. See, e.g., Annelies Lannoy, “Comparing Words, Myths and Rituals: Alfred Loisy, Franz Cumont and the Case of ‘Gaionas le δειπνοκρίτης,’ ” Mythos 7 (2013): 111–26, and “Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927,” 503–26; and Praet, “Symbolisme, évolution rituelle et morale,” 127–45. 46. Loisy, “Études sur la religion chaldéo-assyrienne” (I–VII), Revue des religions 2 (1890): 512–32; 3 (1891): 5–55, 97–130, 193–222, 289–318, 481–519; and 4 (1892): 97–153. On this series of articles see Talar, “Between Science and Myth,” 27–42.

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previous work, Loisy also relied here upon the scholarship of Amiaud, Halévy, and Oppert. The third article focuses on other deities: Nabu, Adad, Ishtar, and also gods of the underworld. Here too, Loisy relied upon the work of Halévy and Oppert, although not as much upon secondary scholarly literature in general.47 Loisy’s fourth contribution to this series focuses on the development of astrological mythology, the astral deities and lesser spirits. Work on astral mythology would dominate much of the German Pan-Babylonian school but was also the topic of a number of Oppert’s publications. Loisy utilized Amiaud, Oppert, and Halévy in this piece as well as standard Pan-Babylonian scholars such as Delitzsch and Jensen.48 The fifth article examines literature dealing with the Assyrian national god Ashur and the Babylonian national god Marduk. This article delves the least into the secondary scholarly literature of all of his articles in this series, with a mere five citations in total of four scholars. This fifth article was also published, under a different title, in conference proceedings of the same year. Loisy entitled that paper, “The National gods of Nineveh and of Babylon: Ashur and Marduk,” and it differed very little from the journal article.49 In the sixth article, Loisy addressed myths of origin; this would form part of his work on Babylonian creation and flood narratives. In his final installment of this series, he focused especially on the Epic of Gilgamesh, making comparisons with the 47. He cites a total of fourteen scholars, but only two of them more than three times, and half of them only receive a single citation. 48. Unsurprisingly, because of the topic, Loisy relied heavily upon Jensen’s work (with fourteen citations, eleven citations more than the next most cited scholar, his own director Amiaud). 49. There are very few differences between these two papers. One minor difference is that in the conference version he cites Amiaud, but not in the journal version. The conference paper was published as A. Loisy, “Les dieux nationaux de Ninive et de Babylone: Azur et Marduk,” in Compte rendu du Congrès scientifique international des catholiques, tenu à Paris du 1er au 16 avril 1891: II (Paris: Picard, 1891), 52–68.

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biblical material in Genesis. He provided an introduction to the Gilgamesh material, as well as scholarly debates concerning the story. Loisy included a discussion of the nature of such epics, like the Iliad and Gilgamesh, but also discussed the historical background. He underscored how Utnapishtim (Samasnapistim in Loisy’s rendering), or Atrahasis, is the Babylonian equivalent of the Hebrew Noah, and mentioned that the Babylonian appears to be a much more ancient tradition. After he finished his seven-part series, Loisy published the volume, Les mythes chaldéens de la création et du deluge (Chaldean Myths of Creation and Flood).50 In the first half of this manuscript, which was based on the last two articles in his sevenpart series published in Revue des religions, Loisy focused especially upon the Akkadian account of creation, the Enuma Elish.51 Roughly the second half of this slender volume is divided between a discussion of the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh and its similarities with the biblical Book of Genesis,52 and a more extensive treatment of biblical parallels in Genesis with Babylonian literature.53 Pages 1 through the top of 39 are almost completely identical to the sixth article in Revue des religions.54 The remainder of the book (from the bottom of page 39 to page 95) is identical to the seventh article in Revue des religions.55 Four years later, Loisy published a related article, “The Babylonian Poem of Creation.”56 This piece was a scholarly examination of the Enuma El50. A. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens de la création et du Déluge (Amiens: RousseauLeroy, 1892). See chapter 4 of the present volume for a more detailed look at this work. 51. Ibid., 2–39. 52. Ibid., 39–81. 53. Ibid., 82–95. 54. One minor difference is that, in the book form, he adds in Gilgamesh’s name at one point, and adds an explanatory footnote (24) that is missing from the corresponding page in the earlier article version (504). 55. The minor differences are orthographic, e.g., the capitalization of words. 56. Loisy, “Le poème babylonien de la Création,” Revue des religions 8 (1896): 193–200.

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ish, much like that in his book, and was primarily an engagement with the work of Heinrich Zimmern, Gunkel, and Delitzsch. In 1901 Loisy published a three-part series of articles in Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses entitled “Babylonian Myths and the First Chapters of Genesis.”57 Later that year, Loisy published these in a single volume and gave the book the same title as the articles.58 As the book represents a collected volume of the three previously published articles, it is very similar to the articles as published in the journal.59 The book’s first forty pages, after the foreword, are basically identical to the first article, pages 41–82 are nearly identical to the second article, and a large amount of the final portion of the book (page 83 to the top of page 130 and then again from the top of page 174 to the top of page 193) are almost exactly the same as the third article. The book version, however, includes an entire section omitted from the articles, spanning pages 130–74, and also includes nearly twenty pages of additional material at the end, seamlessly connected to the portion taken from the third journal article. In the final journal article, the journal editor includes a footnote acknowledging that material is missing but will be published in Loisy’s forthcoming volume. That missing material is a very detailed study of the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is here, in these articles and in the more extensive book-length 57. Loisy, “Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse” (I–III), Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 6 (1901): 111–50, 193–234, 318–84. 58. Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse (Paris: Picard, 1901). For more on this volume, see chapter 4. 59. The book includes an additional nine-and-a-half-page foreword. In the first article, Loisy included a footnote (111n1) omitted from the book version, mentioning that the series of three articles is the result of courses he assisted in teaching at the École pratique des hautes études. He includes similar footnotes at the outset of the second and third articles referencing that comment, also absent from the book. Moreover, the book also contains some differences in page numbers in the citations. I have not been able to check to see which citations (in the journal articles or in the book) are correct.

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treatment, that Loisy best demonstrates his Assyriological erudition, not only in his engagement with primary cuneiform material, but also in his serious engagement with the leading Assyriological and biblical scholars of the day and his extensive use of English, French, and German sources. As far I am aware, Loisy’s Les mythes babyloniens represents the first book-length scholarly investigation of parallels between Genesis and Babylonian literature in the French language. Loisy’s discussion in these articles and in the book volume overlapped with much of the territory he covered before in Les mythes chaldéens. Here, however, in Les mythes babyloniens, he spends a great deal more time studying the issues he brought up in the prior volume, and he focused more specifically on the parallels in Genesis. Thus he spent far more time in the biblical text than he had in his previous book. Roughly the first seventy pages focused on the Enuma Elish and Genesis, and the last hundred pages or so focused on the epics of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis and their parallels with Genesis, although other texts are discussed as well, such as the Adapa Legend.60 In 1910, two years after his excommunication and the year the Oath against Modernism was instituted, Loisy published a further Assyriological piece. He no longer delved much into Assyriology at this point in his career, but turned instead to the study of Christian origins, history of religion, and various related topics. In this short Assyriological piece, published both in Revue archéologique and also in Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses,61 Loisy engaged the work of Hermann Hilprecht (1859–1925), a German Assyriologist then teaching at the Uni60. Ibid., 62–82. 61. Loisy, “Le récit du deluge dans la tradition de Nippour,” Revue archéologique 15 (1910): 209–11, and “Le récit du deluge dans la tradition de Nippour,” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses N.S. 1 (1910): 306–12.

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versity of Pennsylvania.62 Loisy emphasized the importance of the flood narrative discovered at ancient Sumerian Nippur for studies on Genesis. The two published versions of Loisy’s article differ quite a bit from one another, not merely in wording, but also quite significantly in content, although his main points remain the same in both. The version in Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses is slightly longer and includes portions of the translation of the flood account which are missing from the version he published in Revue archéologique. Loisy’s final Assyriological piece, “The Passion of Marduk,” was published in 1922.63 As with his article “The Account of the Flood in the Tradition of Nippur,” this short article focused on the work of a single scholar, Zimmern. What is unique about this Assyriological contribution is that Loisy used his Assyriological training here to discuss the matter of Christian origins, and in particular, the Gospel portrayals of Jesus’ death. After reviewing the events in this document concerning the “passion” of Marduk, he examines how Zimmern relates it to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion: for example, the arrest of Bel and Jesus’ arrest; Bel’s interrogation and Jesus’ interrogation; Bel is wounded (blessé) and Jesus is scourged (flagellé). Loisy concedes some of the parallels, but demurs that others are overstretched. He concedes, “Of course, all this Christian mythology of the resurrection has its origins and affinities in pagan mythologies of the time, but it does not offer special affinities with the relatively ancient myth . . . that has just been uncovered from the excavations in Assyria.”64 Although Loisy’s Assyriological output was not large in 62. The work Loisy was reviewing was Hermann V. Hilprecht, The Earliest Version of the Babylonian Deluge Story and the Temple Library of Nippur (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1910). 63. Alfred Loisy, “La passion de Marduk,” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 8 (1922): 289–302. 64. Ibid., 302.

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quantity, especially in comparison to the other fields in which he worked, it was significant in terms of substance. Loisy was a well-trained and very skilled Assyriologist in France working on Assyriology during the field’s infancy at a time when French scholars were at the very top of the discipline, breaking new ground each decade. Loisy’s use of Assyriological sources was not primarily apologetical, like Vigouroux’s.65 Neither was Loisy’s work in Assyriology simply one more tool added to the acidic rationalism of Renan. The situation is a bit more complicated. Rather, Loisy was attempting to understand ancient Mesopotamian traditions and to understand the biblical narratives in light of their ancient Near Eastern context. He was also trying to demonstrate the usefulness of combining a comparative approach to the Bible, in a way similar to Gunkel’s approach, with the more source critical approach epitomized by Wellhausen, both of which methods Loisy used in his comparative Assyriological and biblical works.66 In this regard he was following a path similar to that which Lenormant had trodden. Loisy’s engagement with the Old Testament and his use of historical criticism was conditioned by his study of Assyriology, for he was convinced that the Bible must be understood in terms of the literary and cultural matrix in which its human authors had lived. We will see how this was the case in the chapters that follow. 65. E.g., F. Grégoire, “La Bible et l’Assyriologie d’après les récentes découvertes de la science,” Revue des questions historiques 13 (1873): 369–458. Talar, “Between Science and Myth,” 27–42, pointed me to this article, and also explained that this is Vigouroux, even though Vigouroux published it pseudonymously under his middle name. 66. See the last chapter in this volume for a more thorough discussion of Loisy’s biblical method.

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4  /

Loisy on the Book of Genesis in Light of Mesopotamian Literature

As we have seen in the previous chapters, Loisy was a prolific and wide-ranging author, but it was his work on the Bible that landed him in trouble with the Catholic church’s Magisterium. More precisely, the Magisterium looked with suspicion on the ways in which Loisy appropriated historical biblical criticism and used comparative ancient Near Eastern literature in his work on biblical history and exegesis. Loisy’s early work on the Bible made frequent reference to comparative ancient Near Eastern written documents, primarily Akkadian cuneiform tablets. As we have seen, Loisy’s use of such material did not represent the work of an amateur sifting through pre-digested studies of these ancient Near Eastern documents, selectively using the work of other scholars where it seemed to relate to the biblical texts. Rather, Loisy’s work was that of a gifted Assyriologist, who even wrote his own grammar of the Akkadian language, his Grammaire assyrienne, which was never published. As chapter 3 showed, Loisy was not only able

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Genesis and Mesopotamian Literature to make his own French translations of the cuneiform material, but was able to enter the Assyriological philology debates concerning competing translations and textual readings of the cuneiform documents. In this work, Loisy discussed the various traditions he thought lay behind the texts that he was examining. In this chapter I will focus especially on two of Loisy’s books, which were briefly introduced in chapter 3, that address these ancient Near Eastern and biblical traditions. The first, Les mythes chaldéens de la création et du Déluge (Chaldean Myths of Creation and Flood) Loisy published in 1892, a mere two decades after George Smith first identified fragments from the Epic of Gilgamesh pertaining to a flood event.1 The second volume under consideration, Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse (Babylonian Myths and the First Chapters of Genesis), which Loisy published in 1901, was, as far as I have been able to ascertain, the first French-language book-length scholarly treatment of parallels between Babylonian literature and Genesis.2 I will begin this discussion with an examination of how Loisy employed the categories of “myth” and “legend” in these two publications, showing how these terms advanced his project. Finally, I will situate this discussion in the broader context of the Roman Catholic modernist conflict. In The Longing for Myth in Germany, George Williamson has shown the many and varied ways in which religion and aesthetics played a role in nineteenth-century German discourse on 1. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens. As I mentioned in chapter 3, Les mythes chaldéens originated in a series of seven scholarly articles Loisy published as “Études sur la religion chaldéo-assyrienne” in the journal Revue des religions in 1890–92. The sixth and seventh installments in that series became Les mythes chaldéens. 2. Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens. As I mentioned in chapter 3, Les mythes babyloniens was based on a series of articles he published in the journal Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses under the same title as the book volume, and published in the same year.

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myth, with a particular focus on the German Protestant theological and political context.3 What I hope to do in this chapter is show how Loisy’s work functioned in French Catholic discourse on myth as it related specifically to the Bible. German scholarship—such as that of Wellhausen, who was profoundly shaped by the German discourse on myth that Williamson describes, and especially by Jacob Grimm’s (1785–1863) 1835 Deutsche Mythologie—was mediated to Loisy by his former teacher, Renan.4 Throughout the time Loisy wrote these early works on the Bible and the ancient Near East, he was attempting to defend the use of biblical historical critical methodology in Catholic biblical scholarship, as we shall see later in more detail in chapter 7.5 In doing this, he attempted to distance himself from those historical critical scholars such as his own teacher Renan, who simply dismissed the biblical materials as myth or legend. At the same time, Loisy was critical of the increasingly popular apologetical use of history and comparative ancient Near Eastern documentary discoveries by Catholic scholars such as his former teacher Vigouroux, as we saw in chapter 3.6 I argue that Loisy used categories like “myth” and “legend” in very subtle ways so as to appear to represent a mediating position between 3. George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 4. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 4th ed., ed. Elard Hugo Meyer (Basel: Schwabe, 1953 [1835]). 5. I will discuss this more thoroughly in chapter 7. 6. For grasping the subtlety of how Loisy was positioning himself between Renan and Vigouroux, I am indebted to Talar, “Between Science and Myth,” 27–42. Examples of Vigouroux’s work in this vein include Le Nouveau Testament et les découvertes archéologiques modernes, 2nd ed. (Paris: Berche et Tralin, 1896), La Bible et les découvertes modernes en Palestine, en Égypte et en Assyrie: Tome II, 6th ed. (Paris: Berche et Tralin, 1896), and Mélanges bibliques: La cosmogonie mosaïque d’après les Pères de l’église, suivie d’études diverses relatives a l’Ancien et au Nouveau Testament (Paris: Berche et Tralin, 1882). In some cases, the second or sixth editions of these volumes were the only ones available to me.

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Renan and skeptical scholars of his ilk, and Vigouroux and other late nineteenth-century Catholics like him. Loisy’s language was slippery by design. He wanted to dismantle what he took to be the overly simplistic apologetics he identified with scholars such as Vigouroux without completely alienating Catholics who might have some sympathies with Vigouroux’s project. At the same time, he wanted to demonstrate to more critical scholars, on their own grounds, that the presence in the Bible of material whose origins might be in mythological and legendary stories did not render those biblical accounts devoid of meaning, nor did the presence of myths falsify historical aspects of the Bible.

Between Vigouroux and Renan As we saw in chapter 3, Loisy’s interest in Assyriology and ancient Near Eastern studies in general seems to have coincided with his dissatisfaction with the biblical courses he took under Vigouroux beginning in 1881. Vigouroux’s courses in scripture included answering the criticisms of primarily German Protestant historical biblical critics. François Laplanche has labelled such approaches to the Bible as Vigouroux’s “la voie apologétique” (the apologetic route) or “concordiste.”7 Loisy found Vigouroux’s concordist apologetics unsatisfying, and in the end, offputting. Vigouroux’s lectures exposed Loisy to a number of challenges that modern biblical criticism posed for traditional Catholic biblical exegesis.8 As far as Loisy was concerned, however, Vigouroux’s 7. Laplanche, La Bible en France, 73, and “Herméneutique biblique et cosmologie mosaïque,” in Les Églises face aux sciences, du Moyen Age au XXe siècle: actes du colloque de la Commission Internationale d’Histoire Ecclésiastique Comparée tenu à Genève en août 1989, ed. Olivier Fatio (Geneva: Droz, 1991), esp. 37–42 on “la voie apologétique.” 8. Vigouroux’s four-volume Les Livres Saints et la critique rationaliste is probably representative of what his classes were like, as Loisy relates them, especially considering the

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presentations raised numerous problems without providing sufficiently rigorous answers. In the end, Loisy saw the challenges coming from German biblical criticism as unresolved.9 Loisy enjoyed his church history courses and found them to be far more intellectually satisfying than what he learned from Vigouroux. As we saw earlier, Loisy’s church history instructor was Louis Duchesne; it was from Duchesne, also beginning in 1881, that Loisy began to learn historical criticism more directly, but as applied to later documents in the history of Christianity, not the Bible, which Duchesne avoided in his lectures.10 Beginning in 1882, Loisy also sat in Renan’s classes at the Collège de France. From Renan, Loisy learned to appropriate the necesvolumes came into print only a few years after Loisy’s classes with Vigouroux. These volumes walk through the Bible and include the criticisms of primarily German Protestant historical biblical critics, as well as Vigouroux’s responses to their challenges. See F. Vigouroux’s Les Livres Saints et la critique rationaliste: Histoire et réfutation des objections des incrédules contre les Saintes Écritures Tome I (Paris: Roger and Chernoviz, 1886), Les Livres Saints et la critique rationaliste: Histoire et réfutation des objections des incrédules contre les Saintes Écritures Tome II (Paris: Roger and Chernoviz, 1886), Les Livres Saints et la critique rationaliste: Histoire et réfutation des objections des incrédules contre les Saintes Écritures Tome III (Paris: Roger and Chernoviz, 1887), and Les Livres Saints et la critique rationaliste: Histoire et réfutation des objections des incrédules contre les Saintes Écritures Tome IV (Paris: Roger and Chernoviz, 1890). By the third edition (1890–91), Vigouroux had expanded it to five volumes. The number of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century historical critical biblical exegetes with which Vigouroux engages in these volumes is quite staggering—e.g., Wilhelm de Wette, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Heinrich Ewald, Wilhelm Gesenius, Karl Heinrich Graf, Hermann Hupfeld, Abraham Kuenen, Isaac La Peyrère, Eduard Meyer, Johann David Michaelis, Theodor Nöldeke, Ernest Renan, Edouard Reuss, Johann Salomo Semler, Richard Simon, Baruch Spinoza (to whom he devotes the entire last chapter of his fourth volume), and Julius Wellhausen. He includes ancient Near Eastern scholarship as well, e.g., Paul-Émile Botta, Friedrich Delitzsch, François Lenormant, Gaston Maspero, Jules Oppert, Henry Rawlinson, Silvestre de Sacy, Eberhard Schrader, George Smith. As we shall see in the next few chapters, Loisy utilizes works by many of the same scholars. 9. Hill, Politics of Modernism, 27–28 and 31; Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” 198 and 198n24; O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 63–64; Théobald, “L’exégèse catholique,” 405–9; and Francesco Turvasi, The Condemnation of Alfred Loisy and the Historical Method (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1979), 2. 10. Laplanche, “Une église immuable,” 508; Hill, Politics of Modernism, 28–31; O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 62–63; O’Connell, “Duchesne and Loisy,” 589–616; Parente, “Monsignor D’Hulst,” 856–57; and García de Haro, Historia teológica del modernismo, 303.

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sary skills and methodology involved in historical biblical criticism. Loisy, however, expressed two major problems or reservations that he had about Renan’s work. The first was Renan’s rationalist skepticism, his dismissal of any truth in scripture. The second was what Loisy took to be Renan’s dearth of serious scholarly engagement with Assyriology and thus with Akkadian and Sumerian finds from ancient Mesopotamia, despite Renan being the most celebrated Semitic philologist in France. Loisy thought Renan’s work would have been improved had Renan been more knowledgeable in the field of Assyriology.11 Thus began Loisy’s own rigorous study of Assyriology, as we saw in chapter 3.12

Loisy’s Early Use of “Myth” and “Legend” Loisy’s two volumes dealing with Babylonian literature, Les mythes chaldéens and Les mythes babyloniens, are significant in part because of their proximity to the discovery of Babylonian texts like the fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and also because of Loisy’s erudition as an Assyriologist and biblical scholar. We covered his Assyriological background earlier, so there is no need to discuss it in more detail here. Suffice it to say that George Smith’s early comments about the similarities between 11. We saw this earlier in chapter 3. See also the comments in Loisy, “Le cours de Renan,” 325–30; Loisy, Choses passées, 65–66, 75, 372–74; Laplanche, “Une église immuable,” 510–12; Hill, Politics of Modernism, 3–4, 6, 25–28, 31; Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” 199, 201, 205; O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 63 and 178; C. J. T. Talar, Metaphor and Modernist: The Polarization of Alfred Loisy and His Neo-Thomist Critics (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), 125; Jones, Independence and Exegesis, 10–11; Parente, “Monsignor D’Hulst,” 853–56 and 870–71; and García de Haro, Historia teológica del modernismo, 300–301, 303–4, and 304n8. 12. I dealt with this in more detail earlier in chapter 2. I also noted there that Loisy also studied Egyptology for one year. See Loisy, Mémoires I, 116–17; and Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” 207.

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the flood tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis began the torrent of scholarly debate concerning a relationship between the biblical accounts of the flood and similar ancient Near Eastern stories.13 Scholars working on these cuneiform documents sometimes made reference to points of contact with the Bible, and they hypothesized about influence from ancient Mesopotamia on the Bible or from the other direction, that is, influence from the Bible on ancient Mesopotamia. It was the German biblical scholar Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), however, who did the first serious study of the biblical Genesis material in light of the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian finds.14 Although scholars had already been making connections between the influx of cuneiform literature and the Bible, it was in 1895 with Gunkel’s publication of his Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Creation and Chaos in Primeval Time and at the End of Time) that a major study emerged comparing the Genesis creation material with Mesopotamian creation accounts, particularly the Enuma Elish.15 Gunkel’s work posed a significant challenge to then-reigning 13. For an important recent discussion of the evolution of Mesopotamian flood traditions, and the relationship between the various Mesopotamian flood traditions, see Chen, Primeval Flood Catastrophe. 14. On Gunkel’s role here see Martin J. Buss, “The Relevance of Hermann Gunkel’s Broad Orientation,” in Hermann Gunkel Revisited: Literatur- und religionsgeschichtliche Studien, ed. Ute E. Eisen and Erhard S. Gerstenberger (Berlin: Lit, 2010), 71–80; Silke Petersen, “Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit—Gunkel, Bousset und die Himmelskönigin (Offb 12),” in Hermann Gunkel, ed. Eisen and Gerstenberger, 173–92; Bernd U. Schipper, “ ‘So hat sich die Überlieferung zu Judentum und Christentum zum guten Teile aufgelöst’: Adolf Erman, Hermann Gunkel und der Babel-Bibel-Streit,” Die Welt des Orients 38 (2008): 221–31; and Pieter G. R. De Villiers, “Hermann Gunkel as Innovator,” Old Testament Essays 20 (2007): 333–51. 15. Hermann Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung über Gen 1 und Ap Joh 12 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1895). The title page mentions the assistance of Heinrich Zimmern (1862–1931), who was an international authority on Assyriology. Although Gunkel’s work is commonly cited with his name only, Loisy cites both Gunkel and Zimmern in the footnotes of Les mythes babyloniens, e.g., 4n1.

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Wellhausen who characteristically refused to utilize Mesopotamian literature in his studies of Old Testament history, despite his knowledge of Akkadian and his awareness of the importance of Assyriology.16 Indeed, among primarily biblical scholars, prior to Gunkel, biblical criticism of the historical critical style tended to be focused on source criticism and was often patterned on the philological and textual analyses of classical philology; thus, much of the history of Homeric criticism and Pentateuchal criticism mimic one another.17 This tradition, which involved searching the texts for evidence of hidden sources underlying the document’s final form, has a much older pedigree, stretching back at least to the seventeenth century, and even earlier to the eleventh century work of Ibn H. azm (994–1064)18 and the ninth 16. Machinist, “Road Not Taken,” 469–531. Wellhausen was criticized by his friend and colleague in classical philology, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), for his refusal to utilize Assyrian and Babylonian literature in his work on the Old Testament. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen, 1814–1914, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Koehler, 1928), 189–90, and Letter 31 (1918), in The Preserved Letters of Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff to Eduard Schwartz, ed. William M. Calder III and Robert L. Fowler (Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1986), 32. As Machinist makes clear, Wellhausen thought it was important to utilize Assyrian and Babylonian literature in biblical studies, although with caution especially concerning overconfidence in decipherment, but he never followed through significantly on this advice in his own work. 17. John Van Seters, “The Genealogy of the Biblical Editor,” in Editing the Bible: Assessing the Task Past and Present, ed. John S. Kloppenborg and Judith H. Newman (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 13–15 and 18–19; Machinist, “Road Not Taken,” 498–504; Van Seters, Edited Bible, 133–237; Guy G. Stroumsa, “Homeros Hebraios: Homère et la Bible aux origines de la culture européenne (17e–18e siècles),” in L’Orient dans l’histoire religieuse de l’Europe: L’invention des origines, ed. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and John Scheid (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 87–100; Grafton, Defenders of the Text, 214–43; Yamauchi, Composition and Corroboration, esp. 13–19 and 27–29; and Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis, 11–14. 18. On the role of Ibn H. azm in this critical tradition, see Theodore Pulcini, Exegesis as Polemical Discourse: Ibn H.azm on Jewish and Christian Scriptures (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); Camilla Adang, Islam frente a Judaísmo: La polémica de Ibn H.azm de Córdoba (Madrid: Aben Ezra Ediciones, 1994); Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds; R. David Freedman, “The Father of Modern Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 19 (1989): 31–38; Camilla Adang, “Schriftvervalsing als thema in de islamitische polemiek tegen het jodendom,” Ter Herkenning 16 (1988): 190–202; Nurshif Rif ‘at, “Ibn H. azm on Jews and Judaism” (PhD diss., Exeter University, 1988), 220–94; and Ernest

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century writings of H. iwi al-Balkhi.19 Loisy would follow both of these traditions: Wellhausenian documentary-style theories of Pentateuchal composition as well as the comparative approach of Gunkel’s Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, which influenced Loisy through his studies in Assyriology. I will address Loisy in the context of this broader history of modern biblical criticism in chapter 5. In The Longing for Myth in Germany, Williamson includes an account of the history of the discourse on myth in nineteenthcentury Germany. Within this history, Williamson highlights the ways in which nineteenth-century German intellectuals engaged with Greek, Roman, pre-Christian German, and other ancient mythologies as they “longed” for myth amidst the societal fragmentation of modernity in which they lived.20 Williamson explains how “the modern concept of myth was intimately wrapped up with notions of history and progress that had become increasingly normative in European culture since the Enlightenment.”21 Loisy’s teacher Renan was one of the key French intellectuals who appropriated this German discourse on myth in his philAlgermissen, “Die Pentateuchzitate Ibn Hazms. Ein beitrag zur Geschichte der arabische Bibelübersetzungen” (thesis, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, 1933). 19. On the role of al-Balkhi in this critical tradition, see Judah Rosenthal, H.iwi alBalkhi (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1949). 20. Williamson, Longing for Myth, e.g., 2–4, 11–18, 23, 56–71, 73–78. Near the end of his study, Williamson summarizes quite nicely much of the ground he covered: “The longing for myth was not an expression of political impotence or compensation for something not achieved in the realm of government or legislation. Instead, it reflected a concrete experience of a German society fragmented along confessional, social, and territorial lines, lacking a common national or religious tradition, and facing dislocation and disorientation brought on by the experience of political upheaval, economic transformation, and the rapid expansion of a market-driven culture. For intellectuals immersed in Philhellenist neohumanism the solution to this crisis seemed to lie in the creation of an aesthetic-religious imagery that would unite modern society just as Greek mythology had supposedly once united the polis” (298–99). 21. Williamson, Longing for Myth, 6. See the insightful comments of the relationship between myth and enlightenment in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969 [1944]).

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ological and historical studies. Although Loisy learned from Renan, and was in part inspired by Renan to engage in Assyriological and biblical studies, his use of “myth” was not as clearly indebted to the nineteenth-century German “longing” for myth and drive for a new mythology as were the German writers Williamson examines. Loisy’s use of myth had more to do with his context as a Catholic priest in France just prior to the modernist controversy. Throughout Les mythes chaldéens and Les mythes babyloniens, Loisy employs the word “myth” and related terms, especially “legend.” He uses “myth” as a category in which he placed various ancient stories from multiple civilizations. Throughout both Les mythes chaldéens and Les mythes babyloniens, Loisy typically uses the terms “myth” and “legend” almost synonymously; in fact, it is difficult to distinguish how Loisy uses “myth” and “legend,” if there is a difference.22 Loisy often uses both terms to label the same story he was examining. In terms of use, “legend” appears to be Loisy’s favorite term, used more frequently in both Les mythes chaldéens and Les mythes babyloniens, despite the fact that only the term “myth” appeared in these two book titles. “Legend” or “legends” occurs twenty-six times in Les mythes chaldéens and 154 times in Les mythes babyloniens, compared to the mere eleven occurrences of “myth” or “myths” in Les mythes chaldéens and seventy-five occurrences in Les mythes babyloniens.23 22. This is in contrast to how he will later distinguish these terms more carefully in his work on Christian origins, for example, demonstrating a clear development of Loisy’s thought. I owe Annelies Lannoy thanks for pointing this out to me. 23. In Les mythes chaldéens Loisy uses the following related terms with the following frequency: fable (s. 1); fantaisie (s. 1); légendaire (s. 3); légende (s. 21, pl. 5); mythe (s. 9, pl. 2); mythique (s. 6); mythologie (s. 3, pl. 1); mythologique (s. 5, pl. 3); mythologues (pl. 2). In Les mythes babyloniens Loisy employs the following terms with the following frequency: légendaire (s. 5, pl. 4); légende (s. 124, pl. 30); mythe (s. 54, pl. 21); mythique (s. 2, pl. 1); mythologie (s. 14); mythologique (s. 23, pl. 8). The comparison makes quite clear that, with the exception of fable (one in Les mythes chaldéens, absent from Les mythes babyloniens),

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From the outset, Loisy put forward a definition of myth. In Les mythes chaldéens, the earlier of the two volumes, Loisy writes: “Myths are the dogmas of pagan religions, floating dogmas, poorly defined, the formation of which the imagination plays more a part than reasoning or, at least, than sound reason.”24 Throughout the rest of Les mythes chaldéens, and later in Les mythes babyloniens, however, Loisy does not adhere strictly to this definition. He labels documents, and the oral or written sources of these documents, as “myths.” The myths to which Loisy referred shared a narrative quality; that is, they were stories or fragments of stories. Loisy employed the terms “myth” and “legend.” He used these terms both as nouns, or a portion of a proper noun as in the document’s name, and as adjectives. At times, in Les mythes chaldéens, Loisy uses légendes to designate creation stories.25 Other times he turns mythologie into an adjective (mythologique) modifying a noun like tradition.26 Sometimes mythologique modified légende as in légende mythologique—here referring to the Enuma Elish, which he contrasts with “la tradition biblique” in Genesis.27 Loisy also refers to the Enuma Elish simply as a légende.28 Occasionally, he modifies tradition with légendaire.29 Loisy turns mythe into an adjective (mythique) modifying a noun like épopée (here referring to the Epic of Gilgamesh as a “mythic epic”).30 Often when Loisy refers to the stories on which the fantaisie (one in Les mythes chaldéens, absent from Les mythes babyloniens), mythique (six in Les mythes chaldéens, two in Les mythes babyloniens), mythologies (one in Les mythes chaldéens, absent in the plural from Les mythes babyloniens), and mythologues (two in Les mythes chaldéens, absent from Les mythes babyloniens), Loisy employed these terms with much greater frequency in Les mythes babyloniens than in Les mythes chaldéens. 24. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens, 1. 25. Ibid., 3 and 39; and also Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens, viii. 26. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens, 3, here in plural. 27. Ibid., 35; and Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens, 159, or plural in ibid., vi, 3, 88. 28. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens, 5 and 7. 29. Ibid., 65; or plural in Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens, vi. 30. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens, 62–63.

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texts under discussion were based, he labelled the early oral or written story as a légende (e.g., for the Enuma Elish)31 and sometimes as a mythe (also for the Enuma Elish).32 Most of the instances of Loisy’s use of “myth” pertained to non-biblical ancient Near Eastern stories, although he did occasionally apply the concept of “myth” to biblical and pre-biblical material.33 In Les mythes babyloniens Loisy speaks of biblical material much more clearly as “legend” and “myth” than he does in Les mythes chaldéens. For example, in Les mythes babyloniens he writes of “la légende israélite.”34 In this instance, however, Loisy was comparing “la légende israélite” with “le mythe babylonien,” “from which it derived.” He makes the same comparison, but in the plural form, later in Les mythes babyloniens.35 The same basic comparison occurs elsewhere in both plural36 and singular.37 Loisy also compares the “Elohist legend of creation” with the “Yahwist legend,” as when he writes of the “Yahwist legend of Eden.”38 He also writes of “légendes bibliques.”39 In at least one instance, this “légende biblique” refers explicitly to the narrative of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3.40 Much of Les mythes chaldéens concerns the Akkadian account of the Enuma Elish, which deals with the Babylonian deities, especially Apsu, Tiamat, Marduk, and Kingu, and their bat31. Ibid., 29. 32. Ibid., 12. 33. Thus he does not completely avoid applying myth to the Bible as had Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). Williamson points out how Herder carefully avoided using the term myth in reference to the Bible, and instead used terms like Fabel, Dichtung, or Sage (Longing for Myth, 34). 34. Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens, viii. 35. Ibid., 126. 36. Ibid., x. 37. Ibid., 125, in this instance, regarding Gn 3; and ibid., 212. 38. Ibid., ix. 39. Ibid., x, and singular in ibid., 100, 130, 181, 182. 40. Ibid., 130.

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tle which the Enuma Elish depicts as the creation of the world (from Tiamat’s corpse) and later the creation of humanity from the blood of the vanquished deity Kingu.41 As we saw earlier, Loisy situated his discussion of the Enuma Elish in the context of then current Assyriological scholarly debates concerning ancient Babylonian religion, history, and culture. He also made comparisons with the Genesis material.42 Near the outset of Les mythes chaldéens, Loisy already notes: “The beginning of the Babylonian poem [Enuma Elish] is one of grand simplicity that recalls, by its tone and by its sentence structure, the beginning of Genesis.”43 Indeed, Loisy remarks, concerning the resemblance of one passage from the Enuma Elish with Genesis 1, that the connection is “very striking.”44 As had become more and more common since Gunkel’s study, Loisy opines: “The tohu-bohu of Genesis, ‘the void and the formlessness,’ is nothing other than Apsu of the Chaldeans, and the mass of water that moves in the void and is mixed with it is Tiamat.”45 After his discussion of the Enuma Elish, Loisy proceeds to examine the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh46 with which he also compared the Genesis material.47 The central points of comparison in Gilgamesh obviously concerned the flood narrative and the Noah-like figure of Utnapishtim, whom Loisy called Samasnapistim.48 Loisy concludes Les mythes chaldéens with a de41. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens, 2–39. 42. Ibid., 30–39. 43. Ibid., 3. 44. Ibid., 4n2. 45. Ibid., 34. Writing further in Les mythes chaldéens, Loisy noted, “The word tehom, which designated the primitive ocean, is identical with the name Tiamat; only the Assyrian word bears the feminine ending” (35). Compare this with Loisy’s more detailed comments in Les mythes babyloniens (35 and 58). 46. Loisy, Les mythes chaldéens, 39–78 and 81. 47. Ibid., 39–40, 63–65, 75–78. 48. E.g., ibid., 63. Loisy included verbal parallels, comparing the Hebrew with the Akkadian cognates, e.g., when he observed, “It is the same verb [he took] that is employed

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tailed list of points of comparison between Babylonian literature and the biblical material and a discussion about the implications of these connections for understanding biblical history.49 Loisy maintained that the Chaldean, or Babylonian, accounts appeared to be older than the biblical narratives.50 In Les mythes chaldéens, Loisy did not come to any concrete conclusion as to the precise origin of what he identified as the Babylonian material within Genesis, partly because of the extensive nature of the themes discussed. Loisy envisioned the process as complex, with the Yahwistic and Elohistic narratives working with widespread Babylonian traditions over a period of many generations.51 In Les mythes babyloniens Loisy covers much of the same ground he had discussed in Les mythes chaldéens, discussing parallels he detected between the Enuma Elish and Genesis52 as well as Gilgamesh (and the related Epic of Atrahasis) and Genesis,53 but in far more detail than he had in Les mythes chaldéens. In Les mythes babyloniens Loisy built upon his prior analysis of the Enuma Elish and continued that discussion in light of the scholarly debate concerning the Enuma Elish’s origins.54 He also examined Gilgamesh (and Atrahasis) more thoroughly in light of more recent scholarly discussions then ongoing.55 In Les mythes babyloniens Loisy included far more discussion of other significant ancient Near Eastern texts (apart from the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh) than he had in Les mythes chaldéens; for example, he made ample comparisons in Les mythes babyloniens between the Adapa Legend in Genesis and in the Chaldean narrative” (ibid., 78). In the attendant footnote he provided the Hebrew and Akkadian, “‫לקה‬, ilqu” (ibid., 78n2). 49. Ibid., 82–95. 50. Ibid., 31. 51. Ibid., 93. 52. Loisy, Les mythes babyloniens, xi, 2–3, 13–17, 25, 35, 38, 40, 42, 51–68. 53. Ibid., xi, xiii, 102, 106–8, 113, 119–20, 124, 129–30, 136–174, 180–99. 54. Ibid., 2–8, 10–68, 83–88. 55. Ibid., 102–19, 124, 129–212.

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and Genesis.56 As in Les mythes chaldéens, Loisy does not come down conclusively on the precise textual or oral origin of Babylonian material in the Bible, but posits a long period of cultural “assimilation and of transformation” likely through intermediary cultures in Canaan prior to the complex redactional history of J and E.57

The Modernist Context to Loisy’s Discussion Loisy’s use of “myth” and “legend” as applied to both nonbiblical ancient Near Eastern stories as well as biblical and prebiblical material demonstrates his intent to situate himself between those who viewed the Bible somewhat like his former teacher Vigouroux, on the one hand, and those who viewed the Bible more like his other teacher, Renan. Vigouroux emphasized the historical character of the biblical material, often with an apologetic bent. Loisy found this position too positivist, too concordist, and overly simplistic. In the end, he found Vigouroux’s approach to be intellectually dishonest and unsatisfying. On the other hand, Renan dismissed the biblical material as mere mythology devoid of value for moderns. Loisy was careful to distance himself from Renan’s approach; in fact, Loisy wrote that his main goal in learning and mastering Renan’s method was to argue against him on his own grounds. Loisy wrote that he wanted to dismantle Renan’s overly skeptical arguments by using his scientific historical methodology, to beat him at his own game, so to speak. One of Loisy’s primary projects, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 7, was to aid the Catholic appropriation of the 56. Ibid., 68–82. 57. Ibid., x, 68, 101. In these volumes, Loisy often identifies Gn 1 as “Elohistic” (an older source critical designation), even though by this time it was more typically labelled “Priestly,” which remains the case today.

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sort of modern historical biblical criticism that biblical scholars such as Wellhausen employed at universities like the German Enlightenment University of Göttingen where Wellhausen taught. Indeed, one of the main purposes of his pseudonymous Firmin articles, which shall serve as the focal point of chapter 7, was precisely to use John Henry Newman’s (1801–90) work on the development of doctrine to justify the use of developmental approaches, such as historical criticism, to studying the Bible. This was to be part of his overall program to transform modern Catholic theology, which he saw as a project of reform.58 In Les mythes chaldéens and Les mythes babyloniens, Loisy’s use of “myth” and “legend” to describe the ancient Near Eastern stories that were appropriated into the Bible was a part of his larger theological-political program. Les mythes chaldéens and Les mythes babyloniens formed an important part of this project, because they represented his treatment of the relevant and highly controversial Genesis material studied historically from within the framework of Gunkel-style comparative ancient Near Eastern literature, while utilizing Wellhausen-style source criticism. Loisy thus attempted to demonstrate the benefit of both historical critical approaches within the world of Catholic biblical scholarship. In this way, Loisy would be positioned to be a new Renan in furthering the work of German historical biblical criticism in the francophone world without being dismissed as a mere skeptic or rationalist like Renan. Loisy hoped that his biblical work, his via media between Renan and Vigouroux, would be more favorably received than Renan’s, and contribute to a great transformation of modern Catholic theology from within its soul—the study of scripture. 58. Loisy, Choses passées, 246; García de Haro, Historia teológica del modernismo, 120n331; and Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique, 349.

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5  /

Back to the Sources The History of the Source Critical Tradition upon Which Loisy Drew

As we have seen, Loisy was an adept Assyriologist, and he became a consummate biblical scholar. If Lawrence Barmann exaggerated when he wrote that “among Roman Catholic biblical scholars [Loisy was] the only one of outstanding distinction,” we must at least concede without hyperbole that Loisy was a highly skilled biblical scholar.1 In the third chapter we saw Loisy’s Assyriological skills. In chapter 4, we examined how he applied this Assyriological work to the creation and flood accounts within the Book of Genesis. In chapter 6 we will consider Loisy’s engagement with modern biblical scholarship and conclude with a chapter looking at his apologia for why Catholic scholars should appropriate the methods of modern biblical criticism. In this chapter, however, I want to take a step back and look at the broad stream of the history of historical criticism, especially in 1. See Lawrence Barmann, “The Pope and the English Modernists,” U.S. Catholic Historian 25 (2007): 40. Surely Marie-Joseph Lagrange would be considered of “outstanding distinction.”

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Back to the Sources its source critical mode, in order for us better to appreciate Loisy in this context. Just as chapter 2 addressed the history of Assyriology in order to situate Loisy in that context, we now turn to the history of biblical studies, once again to understand Loisy better by considering this context.

Getting at the Sources: Seeds of Doubt The first step in this history will be to look at the roots of the methods engaged by Loisy. To be exhaustive, we would have to go to the roots not only of source criticism, but also of textual criticism, and both in fact would take us back into early Jewish and Christian interpretation at least as far back as the third century, and perhaps earlier. Source criticism is here understood as that attempt to search behind the texts, prescinding from traditional attributions of origins and authorship, in order to discover their origin, authorship, and history of composition. Textual criticism pertains to the history of a particular text, studying its available manuscripts and the variant readings with those manuscripts, in order to get at the original version or different versions within the manuscript tradition. Historical criticism is typically subdivided into source criticism, form criticism, and now also redaction criticism, although this last was not really an option during Loisy’s day, being a later twentieth-century development out of form criticism. Source criticism tends to investigate hypothetical literary sources, which scholars detect behind the texts, that is, the written sources that eventually were edited and combined to produce what we find in the text as we have it in its final form. Form criticism explores the hypothetical oral sources lying behind the texts. Redaction criticism examines the role of the redactor, or editor, who combined the sources into the final form that we have.

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What is interesting about Loisy’s approach in his biblical studies is the way he combines the comparative approach of comparing ancient Near Eastern literary remains with the biblical material—an approach that thrived in ancient Near Eastern studies (e.g., Assyriology)—with the cutting-edge source criticism of his own day, epitomized in the work of Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). We have already looked a bit at the history of the comparative approach in Assyriology, so now we turn to the history of the source critical approach that led to Wellhausen. We could begin our history nearly two thousand years before Loisy’s day, but for the sake of brevity, we might as well begin with the figure he takes as his model, namely, Fr. Richard Simon (1638–1712).2 As we will see in the next chapter, the 2. On Simon’s biblical exegesis in the context of this broader history, see, e.g., Morrow, “Faith, Reason, and History,” 658–73; Hahn and Wiker, Politicizing the Bible, 395–423; Sascha Müller, “Grammatik und Wahrheit. Salomon Glassius (1593–1656) und Richard Simon (1638–1712) im Gespräch,” in Hebraistik—Hermenteutik—Homiletik: Die “Philologia Sacra” im frühneuzeitlichen Bibelstudium, ed. Christoph Bultmann and Lutz Danneberg (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 515–33; Gibert, L’invention critique, 176–229 and 246–83; John W. Rogerson, “Early Old Testament Critics in the Roman Catholic Church—Focusing on the Pentateuch,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Magne Sæbø, 837–50 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008), 838–43; Antoine Fleyfel, “Richard Simon, critique de la sacralité biblique,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 88, no. 4 (2008): 469–92; Sascha Müller, Richard Simon (1638–1712): Exeget, Theologe, Philosoph und Historiker (Bamberg: Echter, 2006), and Kritik und Theologie: Christliche Glaubens und Schrifthermeneutik nach Richard Simon (1638–1712) (St. Ottilien: EOS, 2004); Francis W. Nichols, “Richard Simon: Faith and Modernity,” in Christianity and the Stranger: Historical Essays, ed. Nichols (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 115–68; William McKane, Selected Christian Hebraists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111–50; Manlio Iofrida, “The Original Lost: Writing and History in the Works of Richard Simon,” Topoi 7 (1988): 211–19; John D. Woodbridge, “Richard Simon le ‘père de la critique biblique,’ ” in Le Grand Siècle et la Bible, ed. J.-R. Armogathe (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986), 193–206; Henning Graf Reventlow, “Richard Simon und seine Bedeutung für die kritische Erforschung der Bibel,” in Historische Kritik in der Theologie, ed. Georg Schwaiger (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1980), 11–36; Paul Auvray, Richard Simon (1638–1712): Études biobibliographique avec des textes inédits (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974); Jean Steinmann, Richard Simon et les origins de l’exégèse biblique (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1960); and Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1935), 125–36.

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seventeenth-century Oratorian priest and biblical critic, Richard Simon, proved inspirational for Loisy. Especially when Loisy’s life and work became more controversial in the eyes of ecclesiastical authorities—much as Simon’s had two hundred years earlier—Simon began to function as an important symbol for Loisy, a scholar who Loisy saw as representing himself. Simon, however, relied upon a much earlier tradition. In his biblical critical works, especially his most famous Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Simon ostensibly responded to the skeptical biblical criticism of his contemporaries—Thomas Hobbes and Simon’s close friend and fellow Oratorian Isaac La Peyrère. But Simon especially had in mind Baruch Spinoza. These more skeptical biblical exegetes and political theorists (none of them were professional exegetes) relied upon earlier traditions as well, dating at least to the medieval Muslim world of polemicists like Ibn Hazm who engaged in biblical exegesis in order to refute their Jewish and Christian interlocutors and opponents.3 Some of the issues they raised, however, can be traced even earlier to Porphyry, the Gnostics, and even pre-Christian anti-Jewish sources.4 3. See the comments in, e.g., Morrow, Three Skeptics and the Bible, 12–15; Abdelilah Ljamai, Ibn H.azm et la polémique islamo-chrétienne dans l’histoire de l’islam (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Pulcini, Exegesis as Polemical Discourse; Camilla Adang, Muslim Writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: From Ibn Rabban to Ibn H.azm (Leiden: Brill, 1996), and Islam frente a judaísmo; Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds, and “TaH. rīf and Thirteen Scrolls of Torah,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 18 (1992): 81–88; Rif ‘at, “Ibn H. azm on Jews”; and David S. Powers, “Reading/Misreading One Another’s Scriptures: Ibn H. azm’s Refutation of Ibn Nagrella al-Yahūdī,” in Studies in Islamic and Judaic Traditions: Papers Presented at the Institute for Islamic-Judaic Studies, ed. William M. Brinner and Stephen D. Ricks (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986), 109–21. 4. See the comments in, e.g., Morrow, Three Skeptics and the Bible, 12; Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 400; Aryeh Kofsky, Eusebius of Caesarea Against Paganism (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 30; Arthur J. Droge, Homer or Moses?: Early Christian Interpretation of the History of Culture (Tübingen: Mohr, 1989), 178; Robert L. Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 137 and 143; and Edwin M. Yamauchi, Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 60.

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With Spinoza, however, we find the first serious attempt at the development of a rigorous method for interpreting the Bible in a scholarly manner divorced from any theological or traditional moorings.5 Prior biblical scholarship had served theological ends, whereas for Spinoza, the method he articulates in the seventh chapter of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was intended to be able to be used by any exegete, regardless of whether that exegete was Jewish, Protestant, Catholic, or even a skeptic.6 It was intended as a scientific method, along the lines of Francis Bacon’s attempt at providing a method for studying the history 5. On Spinoza’s biblical exegesis in the context of this broader history, see, e.g., Morrow, “Spinoza and Modern Biblical Hermeneutics,” and Three Skeptics and the Bible, 104–38 and 148–49; Gibert, L’invention critique, 148–75; Nicolai Sinai, “Spinoza and Beyond: Some Reflections on Historical–Critical Method,” in Kritische Religionsphilosophie: Eine Gedenkschrift für Friedrich Niewöhner, ed. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and Georges Tamer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 193–213; Steven Nadler, “The Bible Hermeneutics of Baruch de Spinoza,” In Hebrew Bible/Old Testament II, ed. Sæbø, 827–36; Frampton, Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism; Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority; Richard H. Popkin, “Spinoza and Bible Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 383–407; Daniel J. Elazar, “Spinoza and the Bible,” Jewish Political Studies Review 7 (1995): 5–19; George M. Gross, “Reading the Bible with Spinoza,” Jewish Political Studies Review 7 (1995): 21–38; J. Garrido Zaragoza, “La desmitificación de la Escritura en Spinoza,” Taula 9 (1988): 3–45; Norman O. Brown, “Philosophy and Prophecy: Spinoza’s Hermeneutics,” Political Theory 14 (1986): 195–213; Eugene Combs, “Spinoza’s Method of Biblical Interpretation and His Political Philosophy,” in Modernity and Responsibility: Essays for George Grant, ed. Eugene Combs (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 7–28; Juan José Garrido, “El método histórico–crítico de interpretación de la Escritura según Spinoza,” in El método en teología: Actas del primer Simposio de Teología e Historia (29–31 mayo 1980), ed. The Faculty of Theology of Saint Vincent Ferrer (Valencia: The Faculty of Theology of Saint Vincent Ferrer, 1981), 269–81; Martin Greschat, “Bibelkritik und Politik: Anmerkungen zu Spinozas Theologisch-politischem Traktat,” in Text—Wort—Glaube: Kurt Aland Gewidmet, ed. Martin Brecht (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), 324–43; André Malet, Le traité théologico–politique de Spinoza et la pensée biblique (Paris: Sociéte les belles letters, 1966); and Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et l’interprétation de l’Écriture (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965). 6. The most up-to-date critical edition of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus is Spinoza, Œuvres III: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus/Traité théologico-politique. The best English translation of this edition is Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise in The Collected Works of Spinoza Volume II, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 65–354.

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of nature.7 Like his Baconian model, Spinoza desired to create a method for producing a history not of the book of nature, but of the book of scripture, or, more accurately, of the books of the Bible. Simon’s Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament: Origins of the Historical Critical Method What Spinoza proposed, Simon attempted to enact. Simon claimed to be defending scripture from skeptics like Spinoza. In effect, however, he took Spinoza’s more skeptical work further and with greater philological skill.8 In an apparent attempt to defend Catholic tradition, Simon made a point to multiply the problems and difficulties in biblical interpretation—apparent contradictions, inconsistencies, etc.—in order to show that without Catholic tradition’s “fiat” scripture makes no sense and remains little more than a jumble of contradictions haphazardly spliced together by court scribes and the like. Only Catholic 7. On Bacon’s influence on Spinoza see, e.g., Morrow, Three Skeptics and the Bible, 118–20; Juan Francisco Manrique Charry, “La herencia de Bacon en la doctrina spinocista del lenguaje,” Universitas Philosophica 54 (2010): 121–30; Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority, 38, 159, 161–68; Alan Gabbey, “Spinoza’s Natural Science and Methodology,” in Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Garrett, 142–91; Alan Donagan, Spinoza (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 16–17; and Zac, Spinoza, 29–32. 8. See the argument in, e.g., Morrow, “Faith, Reason, and History,” 658–73; Hahn and Wiker, Politicizing the Bible, 395–423; Dominique Barthélemy, Studies in the Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Old Testament Text Project: English Translation of the Introductions to Volumes 1, 2, and 3 Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2012), 60–62; John D. Woodbridge, “Richard Simon’s Reaction to Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus,” in Spinoza in der Frühzeit seiner religiösen Wirkung, ed. Karlfried Gründer and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggeman (Heidelberg: Lanbert Schneider, 1984), 201–26; F. Saverio Mirri, Richard Simon e il metodo storico–critico di B. Spinoza. Storia di un libro e di una polemica sulla sfondo delle lotte politico–religiose della Francia di Luigi XIV (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1972), 29–84; and Paul Auvray, “Richard Simon et Spinoza,” in Religion, érudition et critique à la fin du XVIIe siècle et au début du XVIIIe, ed. Baudouin de Gaiffier, Bruno Neveu, René Voeltzel, Elisabeth Labrousse, Jacques Solé, Paul Auvray, and Roger Zuber (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1968), 201–14.

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tradition’s authority, which tells us that the Bible is divinely inspired, can salvage the text. Simon’s work, explicitly in defense of Catholic tradition, utilizing the most sophisticated arguments of his time, would serve Loisy as a brilliant model insofar as he argued that he was doing the same thing. As we will see in chapter 7, Loisy envisioned himself as aiding the Catholic tradition by arguing for its inclusion of the historical critical method for biblical exegesis. In many ways, Simon’s work was pivotal in the history of early source criticism. Source criticism is grounded in the idea that traditional attributions of authorship are erroneous. If the tradition associates the single author Moses as the figure responsible for the five books of the Pentateuch, then the source critics demur that it was not the work of a single author. When the tradition associates the composition of the six books of Joshua, Judges, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 2 Kings to different authors, the source critics respond that it was one author, or authorial community, the work of the Deuteronomistic Historian. The many figures prior to Simon—from Gnostic sources all the way to Ibn H. azm and later La Peyrère, Hobbes, and Spinoza—had already sowed the seeds of doubt regarding traditional attributions of authorship, in particular regarding the Pentateuch’s purported Mosaic authorship. What Simon did was come up with a theory of composition involving court scribes serving the Hebrew republic that went beyond earlier hypotheses concerning the role of Ezra or another writer/compiler. Jean Astruc: The Birth of Method in Biblical Studies Simon’s work elicited a number of responses, many of them dramatic. He was expelled from the Oratorians and his books were condemned to fire. But beyond these measures, numer-

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ous theologians and biblical exegetes, from both the Protestant and Catholic worlds, also published written responses.9 One important response from within the scholars of source criticism history came from Jean Astruc (1684–1766), the physician to King Louis XV of France.10 Astruc’s work was not a direct response to Simon, but Simon’s work, as well as that of Spinoza, Hobbes, La Peyrère, and others, became the spur that galvanized Astruc to defend the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The manner of his defense, and its continued promi9. April G. Shelford, “Of Sceptres and Censors: Biblical Interpretation and Censorship in Seventeenth-Century France,” French History 20 (2006): 161–81; Justin A. I. Champion, “Père Richard Simon and English Biblical Criticism, 1680–1700,” in Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in His Honor, ed. James E. Force and David S. Katz (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 39–61; Nichols, “Richard Simon,” 115–68; John D. Woodbridge, “German Responses to the Biblical Critic Richard Simon: From Leibniz to J. S. Semler,” in Historische Kritik und biblischer Kanon in der deutschen Aufklärung, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow, Walter Sparn, and John Woodbridge (Wiesbaden: Harrossowtiz, 1988), 65–87; Patrick J. Lambe, “Critics and Skeptics in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters,” Harvard Theological Review 81 (1988): 272–92; and Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach, “La fortune de Richard Simon au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue des études juives 146 (1987): 225–39. 10. On Astruc’s biblical exegesis in the context of this broader history, see, e.g., Jean-Louis Ska, “The Study of the Book of Genesis: The Beginning of Critical Reading,” in The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, ed. Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, and David L. Petersen (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 16–18; Gibert, L’invention critique, 299–308; Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 135–40; Rogerson, “Early Old Testament Critics,” 846–47; Rudolf Smend, “Jean Astruc: A Physician as a Biblical Scholar,” in Sacred Conjectures: The Context and Legacy of Robert Lowth and Jean Astruc, ed. John Jarick (London: T and T Clark, 2007), 157–73; Pierre Gibert, “De l’intuition a l’evidence: La multiplicite documentaire dans la Genese chez H.B. Witter et Jean Astruc,” in ibid., 174–89; Jan Christian Gertz, “Jean Astruc and Source Criticism in the Book of Genesis,” in ibid., 190–203; Aulikki Nahkola, “The Memoires of Moses and the Genesis of Method in Biblical Criticism: Astruc’s Contribution,” in ibid., 204–19; Rudolf Smend, From Astruc to Zimmerli: Old Testament Scholarship in Three Centuries (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 1–14; Ana M. Acosta, Reading Genesis in the Long Eighteenth Century: From Milton to Mary Shelley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 9–12, and “Conjectures and Speculations: Jean Astruc, Obstetrics, and Biblical Criticism in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 2 (2002): 256–66; Pierre Gibert, introduction to Jean Astruc, Conjectures sur la Genèse (Paris: Noêsis, 1999), 9–119; and Jean-Robert Armogathe, “Sens littéral et orthodoxie,” in Le siècle des Lumières et la Bible, ed. Yvon Belavel and Dominique Bourel (Paris: Beauchesne, 1986), 436–38.

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nence, was the reason he played such an important role in this history and is likewise the reason he is remembered in introductory Bible textbooks up to the present day. Astruc’s Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le Livre de la Genese attempted to identify sources upon which Moses relied in composing Genesis, as obviously Moses could not have been an eyewitness to the events recorded in Genesis, which all took place long before his birth.11 Astruc isolated two major sources, which scholars would build upon in later years, and he also identified a number of minor sources. Key to his work, however, was his identification of sources based upon literary styles, for example, his two major sources, A and B, were based upon the different names used for God, Yahweh and Elohim. This distinction alone would have a compelling influence for more than a century, laying the foundation for the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch, which remains, in one form or another, to this very day the primary hypothesis for Pentateuchal composition. Indeed Aulikki Nahkola thus identifies Astruc with the origin of method in biblical studies.12 While at the same time insisting upon Mosaic authorship, Astruc convincingly argued that Moses was himself an editor, compiling and redacting sources already in existence. Johann David Michaelis: The Creation of Modern Biblical Studies We could list other figures before, during, and after Astruc’s time that played a pivotal role in this history prior to Wellhausen, 11. Jean Astruc, Conjectures sur les memoires originaux dont il paroit que Moyse s’est servi pour composer le Livre de la Genese. Avec des Remarques, qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces Conjectures (Brussels [Paris]: Fricx, 1753). The most up-to-date critical edition of Astruc’s work is Conjectures sur la Genèse, introduction and notes by Pierre Gibert (Paris: Noêsis, 1999). 12. Nahkola, “Memoires of Moses,” 204.

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but I would point to two specific individuals next as essential to understanding the history of the tradition in which Loisy would stand. The first is Johann David Michaelis (1717–91). Michael Legaspi has identified Michaelis as one of the most central figures involved in the wholesale transformation of biblical studies from a primarily theological discipline to a more cultural and historical discipline, shorn of explicit theological interest.13 We could also mention Johann Salomo Semler (1725–91) in this regard, as he intended something similar to Michaelis, but it was Michaelis’s transformation of the study of scripture into modern biblical 13. On Michaelis’ biblical exegesis in the context of this broader history, see, e.g., Legaspi, Death of Scripture; John Sandys-Wunsch, “Early Old Testament Critics on the Continent,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament II, 980–84; Smend, From Astruc to Zimmerli, 30–42; Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 184–92 and 199–220; Jonathan M. Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (2000): 56–101; Anna-Ruth Löwenbrück, Judenfeindschaft im Zeitalter der Aufklärung: Eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Antisemitismus am Beispiel des Göttinger Theologen und Orientalisten Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995), “Johann David Michaelis und Moses Mendelssohn. Judenfeindschaft im Zeitalter der Aufklärung,” in Moses Mendelssohn und die Kreise seiner Wirksamkeit, ed. Michael Albrecht, Eva J. Engel, and Norbert Hinske (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1994), 315–32, and “Johann David Michaelis’ Verdienst um die philologisch-historische Bibelkritik,” in Historische Kritik und biblischer Kanon in der deutschen Aufklärung, ed. Henning Graf Reventlow, Walter Sparn, and John Woodbridge (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), 157–70; Gustav Ineichen, “Johann David Michaelis: Orientalist und Sprachgelehrter in Göttingen (1717–1791),” in Lingua et Traditio: Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und der neueren Philologien: Festschrift für Hans Helmut Christmann, ed. Richard Baum (Tübingen: Gunther Narr, 1994), 259–72; William Baird, History of New Testament Research Volume One: From Deism to Tübingen (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1992), 127–38; J. C. O’Neill, The Bible’s Authority: A Portrait Gallery of Thinkers from Lessing to Bultmann (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1991), 28–38; Friedrich Schaffstein, Johann David Michaelis als Kriminalpolitiker: ein Orientalist am Rande der Strafrechtswissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988); Rudolf Smend, “Johann David Michaelis und Johann Gottfried Eichhorn—zwei Orientalisten am Rande der Theologie,” in Theologie in Göttingen: Eine Vorlesungsreihe, ed. Bernd Moeller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1987), 58–71; Anna-Ruth Löwenbrück, “Johann David Michaelis et les débuts de la critique biblique,” in Le siècle des Lumières, ed. Belaval and Bourel, 113–28; and Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Neukirchen: Erziehungsvereins, 1956), 97–103.

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studies at the University of Göttingen that would prove so highly influential in the German academy, and then throughout the European scholarly world and the United States.14 Michaelis built upon the model of the study of classical antiquity at Göttingen under the earlier pioneering work of Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761)15 and the contemporary work of Gesner’s successor Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812).16 What they did for classi14. On Semler’s biblical exegesis in the context of this broader history, see, e.g., Marianne Schröter, Aufklärung durch Historisierung: Johann Salomo Semlers Hermeneutik des Christentums (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012); Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological AntiSemitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 39–49; John H. Hayes, “Historical Criticism of the Old Testament Canon,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament II, ed. Sæbø, 995–1005; Roberto Bordoli, L’illuminismo di Dio: Alle origini della “mentalità liberale”: Religione teologia filosofia e storia in Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791): Contributo per lo studio delle fonti teologische, cartesiane e spinoziane dell’ ‘Aufklärung’ (Florence: Olschki, 2004); Martin Laube, “Die Unterscheidung von öffentlicher und privater Religion bei Johann Salomo Semler: Zur neuzeittheoretischen Relevanz einer christentumstheoretischen Reflexionsfigur,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 11 (2004): 1–23; Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung IV, 175–89; Gottfried Hornig, Johann Salomo Semler: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Hallenser Aufklärungstheologen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1996); Baird, History of New Testament Research 1, 117–27 and 174–77; O’Neill, Bible’s Authority, 39–53; Hartmut H. R. Schulz, Johann Salomo Semlers Wesensbestimmung des Christentums: Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Theologie Semlers (Würtzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1988); Gottfried Hornig, “Hermeneutik und Bibelkritik bei Johann Salomo Semler,” in Historische Kritik, ed. Reventlow, Sparn, and Woodbridge, 219–36; Hans-Eberhard Hess, Theologie und Religion bei Johann Salomo Semler: Ein Beitrag zur Theologiegeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Augsburg: Blasaditsch, 1974); Gottfried Hornig, Die Anfänge der historisch-kritischen Theologie: Johann Salomo Semlers Schriftverständnis und seine Stellung zu Luther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1961); and Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen, 103–13. 15. On Gesner’s work in classical studies see, e.g., Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 61–68; Reinhold Friedrich, Johann Matthias Gesner: Sein Leben und sein Werk (Roth: Genniges, 1991); and Ulrich Schindel, “Johann Matthias Gesner, Professor der Poesie und Beredsamkeit 1734–1761,” in Die Klassische Altertumswissenschaft an der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen: Eine Ringvorlesung zu ihrer Geschichte, ed. Carl Joachim Classen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989), 9–26. 16. On Heyne’s work in classical studies see, e.g., Tanja S. Scheer, “Heyne und der griechische Mythos,” in Christian Gottlob Heyne: Werk und Leistung nach zweihundert Jahren, ed. Balbina Bäbler and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 1–28; Gustav Adolf Lehmann, “Christian Gottlob Heyne und die Alte Geschichte,” in Christian Gottlob Heyne, ed. Bäbler and Nesselrath, 63–74; Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, “Christian Gottlob Heyne und die Göttinger Akademie—Leistung und Wahrnehmung,” in Christian Gottlob Heyne, ed. Bäbler and Nesselrath, 159–77; Sotera Fornaro, “Christian

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cal studies, Michaelis attempted for biblical studies, thus carving out a space for the study of the Bible at the newly founded or reconstructed Enlightenment universities in Germany and abroad. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn: Pioneer of Modern Source Criticism The second figure that is essential to understanding Loisy’s tradition is Michaelis’s student Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752– 1827).17 Eichhorn is important in this story for several reasons. First, he mediated Heyne’s views of myth and history into the world of biblical scholarship.18 Secondly, he continued the source Gottlob Heyne dans l’histoire des études classiques,” Revue germanique internationale 14 (2011): 15–26; Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 68–76; Marianne Heidenreich, Christian Gottlob Heyne und die Alte Geschichte (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2006); Sotera Fornaro, I Greci senza lumi: L’antropologia della Grecia antica in Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) e nel suo tempo (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004); Martin Vöhler, “Christian Gottlob Heyne und das Studium des Altertums in Deutschland,” in Disciplining Classics— Altertumswissenschaft als Beruf, ed. Glenn W. Most, 39–54 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002); and Jochen Bleicken, “Die Herausbildung der Alten Geschichte in Göttingen: Von Heyne bis Busolt,” in Die Klassische Altertumswissenschaft, ed. Classen, 98–127. 17. On Eichhorn’s biblical exegesis in the context of this broader history, see, e.g., Gibert, L’invention critique, 305–6, 322–25, 327–31, 340–43; Henning Graf Reventlow, “Towards the End of the ‘Century of Enlightenment’: Established Shift from Sacra Scriptura to Literary Documents and Religion of the People of Israel,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament II, ed. Sæbø, 1051–57; Van Seters, Edited Bible, 191–96; Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung IV, 209–26; Giuseppe D’Alessandro, L’illuminismo dimenticato: Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827) e il suo tempo (Naples: Liguori, 2000); Luigi Marino, “Der ‘Geist der Auslegung’: Aspekte der Göttinger Hermeneutik (am Beispiel Eichhorns),” Aufklärung 8, no. 2 (1994): 71–89; Bodo Seidel, Karl David Ilgen und die Pentateuchforschung im Umkreis der sogenannten Älteren Urkundenhypothese: Studien zur Geschichte der exegetischen Hermeneutik in der Späten Aufklärung (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 192– 210; Baird, History of New Testament Research 1, 148–53; O’Neill, Bible’s Authority, 78–94; Rudolf Smend, Deutsche Alttestamentler in drei Jahrhunderten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1989), 25–37; Bodo Seidel, “Bibelkritik in der Aufklärung,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Martin-Luther-Universität. Gesellschaft- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe 38, no. 1 (1989): 81–90; Smend, “Johann David Michaelis,” 71–81; Fausto Parente, “La Urgeschichte di J.G. Eichhorn e l’applicazione del concetto di ‘mito’ al Vecchio Testamento,” Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa 16, no. 2 (1986): 535–67; Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 121–26; and Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen, 120–43. 18. See, e.g., the comments in Reventlow, “Towards the End,” 1051–57; Van Seters,

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critical work of Astruc and thereby solidified the foundation upon which the Documentary Hypothesis could be built. My reflections in the previous chapter showed how Loisy viewed the Old Testament as containing myths, yet also showed at the same time that for Loisy myths were not flatly equivalent to falsehood, but could contain historical kernels within them. This is very close to the mythic school’s approach (i.e., Heyne and Eichhorn). Furthermore, Eichhorn was exposed to Astruc’s work via his teacher Michaelis’s criticisms of Astruc. Michaelis feared that Astruc’s work cast Moses in too negative a light by making him reliant upon such hypothetical sources. Obviously, Michaelis conceded that Moses must have used some sources, but he thought the Mosaic genius was greater than what Astruc’s method appeared to permit.19 Eichhorn, meanwhile, took Astruc’s work further, as he did not limit his division of sources to the Book of Genesis, but rather extended it to encompass the entire Pentateuch. Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette and the Deuteronomist From Eichhorn we could turn to many figures. Arguably the most important would prove to be Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780–1849), who became one of the early professors at the newly founded University of Berlin, a premier German research institute.20 Between Eichhorn and de Wette a sort of Edited Bible, 194; Williamson, Longing for Myth, 32–33 and 152–53; Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung IV, 209; Baird, History of New Testament Research 1, 148–53; O’Neill, Bible’s Authority, 81; Parente, “La Urgeschichte,” 541 and 543–44; Grafton, “Prolegomena,” 124; and Christian Hartlich and Walter Sachs, Der Ursprung des Mythosbegriffes in der Modernen Bibelwissenschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1952), 20–38. 19. Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 137–39 and 156; Van Seters, Edited Bible, 192; Smend, “Jean Astruc,” 170–71; Nahkola, Double Narratives, 9; Parente, “La Urgeschichte,” 539 and 542–43; and Armogathe, “Sens littéral,” 437. 20. On de Wette’s biblical exegesis in the context of this broader history, see, e.g., Thomas Römer, “ ‘Higher Criticism’: The Historical and Literary-Critical Approach—with

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fragmentary hypothesis began to develop in response to the more documentary-type hypothesis represented by Eichhorn and others. Key among the early proponents of a fragmentary hypothesis was the Catholic priest Fr. Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) of Scotland.21 Geddes maintained that the Pentateuch (and the Book of Joshua) originated from many disparate fragmentary sources (rather than a few documentary sources) which were later combined into their present form by an editor or redactor. This English scholarly view grew in the GermanSpecial Reference to the Pentateuch,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation Volume III: From Modernism to Post-Modernism (The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) Part 1: The Nineteenth Century—A Century of Modernism and Historicism, ed. Magne Sæbø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2013), 393–400; Smend, From Astruc to Zimmerli, 43–56; James Pasto, “W.M.L. De Wette and the Invention of PostExilic Judaism: Political Historiography and Christian Allegory in Nineteenth-Century German Biblical Scholarship,” in Jews, Antiquity, and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, ed. Hayim Lapin and Dale B. Martin (Bethesda: University Press of Maryland, 2003), 33–52; Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung IV, 227–39; Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); J. W. Rogerson, “Synchrony and Diachrony in the Work of De Wette and Its Importance for Today,” in Synchronic of Diachronic?: A Debate on Method in Old Testament Exegesis, ed. Johannes C. de Moor (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 145–58, W.M.L. de Wette: Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), and Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1984), 28–49. 21. For Geddes’s contributions in historical context see, e.g., Mark Goldie, “Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment,” Historical Journal 53 (2010): 61–86; Thomas M. Devine, “Alexander Geddes: The Scottish Context,” in The Bible and the Enlightenment: A Case Study—Alexander Geddes 1737–1802, ed. William Johnstone (London: T and T Clark, 2004), 35–43; Catharina F. M. van Dijk, “Alexander Geddes and his Unpublished Papers,” in Bible and the Enlightenment, ed. Johnstone, 44–60; Gerard Carruthers, “Scattered Remains: The Literary Career of Alexander Geddes,” in ibid., 61–77; Bertram Eugene Schwarzbach, “Geddes in France,” in ibid., 78–118; Charles Conroy, “The Biblical Work of Alexander Geddes against the Background of Contemporary Catholic Biblical Scholarship in Continental Europe,” in ibid., 135–56; John W. Rogerson, “Was Geddes a ‘Fragmentist’? In Search of the ‘Geddes-Vater Hypothesis,’ ” in ibid., 157–67; Jean-Louis Ska, “Alexander Geddes between Old and New: Story and History in the Book of Numbers,” in ibid., 168–80; A. Graeme Auld, “Alexander Geddes on the Historical Books of the Hebrew Bible,” in ibid., 181–200; and Reginald C. Fuller, Alexander Geddes 1737–1802: Pioneer of Biblical Criticism (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1984).

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speaking world through scholars like Johann Severin Vater (1771– 1826). This is where de Wette entered the story. De Wette’s addition to the fragmentary hypothesis is what brought the theory back around to a documentary hypothesis, and he enabled later scholars to push the dating of the Pentateuch later in history. De Wette believed he could detect an early primary document beneath the layers of the Pentateuch’s first two books, Genesis and Exodus. The remainder of the Pentateuch, in de Wette’s view, was composed of fragments, akin to what Vater had argued. Thus, de Wette’s view has been described as a supplementary hypothesis. The key move that de Wette made was placing the Book of Deuteronomy last of all the Pentateuchal source material. Deuteronomy, for de Wette, represented its own relatively complete independent source, D, the Deuteronomist. Prior to de Wette, the main stumbling block that scholars like Eichhorn had to dating the bulk, or any, of the Pentateuch after the Babylonian exile was the evidence from the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritans are descendants of the northern tribes of Israel that separated from the south prior to the Babylonian exile. If, as Eichhorn and others recognized, portions of the Pentateuch were dated after the exile, then one would expect the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch would only contain those portions that pre-dated the exile, while they were still unified to the south. In fact, however, with the exception of a few details (like the naming of the mountain for the central sanctuary in Deuteronomy), the Pentateuch among Jews and Samaritans is identical, containing all the same passages. Thus, Eichhorn and others prior to de Wette tended to date the Pentateuch as a whole prior to the exile, even when they dated it beyond the time of Moses.22 It was de Wette, however, who came up with 22. Initially, Eichhorn adhered to the notion that Moses was the compiler of the Pentateuch, although he backed away from this position in the later editions of his work.

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a story renarrating this history, proposing favorable commerce and inspiration between the northern and southern tribes, even after the Babylonian exile. He argued that this paved the way for placing the Pentateuch in its final form. Many of its original documentary sources were then dated to after the Babylonian exile. This would be a story Loisy himself would take up later as well. Unlocking the Keys to the New Documentary Hypothesis: Hermann Hupfeld The next important stage for our history is the work of Hermann Hupfeld (1796–1866).23 In 1853, a century after Astruc’s famous work was published, Hupfeld built upon de Wette’s work. He argued that the work of the Elohist, which Astruc earlier had labelled as source A, was actually composed of two distinct and earlier sources, what he labelled E1 and E2, or simply the earlier Elohist and the later Elohist. This had already been argued more than fifty years before by Karl David Ilgen (1763–1834), who had succeeded Eichhorn at the University of Jena.24 Ilgen had built upon the work of Eichhorn and Astruc, but was apparently not followed in the scholarly literature. Although Hupfeld argued along a similar trajectory, his work was apparently independent of Ilgen’s earlier work. This division of E into two sources prepared the way for a four-source Documentary Hypothesis, similar to that maintained by Loisy.

23. On Hupfeld’s contribution in historical context see, e.g., Otto Kaiser, “An Heir of Astruc in a Remote German University: Hermann Hupfeld and the ‘New Documentary Hypothesis,’ ” in Sacred Conjectures, ed. Jarick, 220–48; Van Seters, Edited Bible, 221–23; and Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 130–34. 24. On Ilgen’s contributions in historical context see, e.g., Seidel, Karl David Ilgen.

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Édouard Guillaume Eugène Reuss and Karl Heinrich Graf: A Late Priestly Source The Documentary Hypothesis is known by other names. Sometimes it is designated in relation to its greatest and most popular exponent, and thus called the Wellhausen Hypothesis, or the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis. The reason for this latter name stems from the work of Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–69), who is important not so much for his own arguments, but in publicizing the arguments of his teacher, Édouard Guillaume Eugène Reuss (1804–91), whose works represent one of the most important early sources of influence for Loisy’s appropriation of historical criticism.25 Reuss had been a student of Eichhorn while the latter was still at the University of Göttingen. Reuss published his main works while he was teaching Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern languages at the University of Strasbourg. Prior to Reuss, scholars had assumed that a text such as Genesis 1, appearing as it did at the Bible’s very opening pages, included some of the earliest Pentateuchal material. Whether identified as Astruc’s source A, or later simply as the Elohist, or as Hupfeld’s E1, it was assumed that this source, which would soon be identified as P, the Priestly source, was relatively early. Coupled with this was a view that the Priestly material that was explicitly legalistic in nature (e.g., in Leviticus) was likewise early. Reuss demurred, seeing it as much later. It was Graf, however, who published this argument.26 Ini25. On Reuss’s contributions in historical context see, e.g., Jean Marcel Vincent, “Un combat pour le progrès des sciences théologiques en France au XIXe siècle: La correspondance Edouard Reuss—Michel Nicolas,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 83 (2003): 89–117; E. Jacob, “Edouard Reuss, un théologien indépendant,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 71 (1991): 427–33, and “Edouard Reuss et l’Alsace,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Française 128 (1982): 517–36. 26. On Graf ’s contributions in historical context see, e.g., Joachim Conrad, Karl Heinrich Grafs Arbeit am Alten Testament: Studien zu einer wissenschaftlichen Biographie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011).

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tially, like Reuss, Graf focused on the Priestly portions of the post-Genesis Pentateuchal material. The Dutch scholar Abraham Kuenen (1828–91), however, was able to convince Graf that this late dating of P should include E1 material in Genesis, and thus Genesis 1.27 Hence, sometimes the Documentary Hypothesis is even known as the Graf-Kuenen-Wellhausen Hypothesis. This became the key that Wellhausen used to unlock the new telling of the history of Israel and of the Documentary Hypothesis, which he would make famous throughout the world of biblical scholarship up to the present day. Julius Wellhausen and the New Documentary Hypothesis In his highly influential Prolegomena to the History of Israel, Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) described his evolution of thought on the matter of the history of Israel, which became foundational for his understanding and articulation of the Documentary Hypothesis: In my earliest student days I was attracted by the stories of Saul and David, Ahab and Elijah; the discourses of Amos and Isaiah laid strong hold on me, and I read myself well into the prophetic and historical books of the Old Testament. . . . but at the same time [I] was troubled with a bad conscience, as if I were beginning with the roof instead of the foundation; for I had no thorough acquaintance with the Law, of which I was accustomed to be told that it was the basis and 27. On Kuenen’s contributions in historical context see, e.g., Rudolf Smend, “The Work of Abraham Kuenen and Julius Wellhausen,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament III/1, ed. Sæbø, 424–36, and From Astruc to Zimmerli, 76–90; M. J. Mulder, “Abraham Kuenen (1828–1891),” in Abraham Kuenen (1828–1891): His Major Contributions to the Study of the Old Testament, ed. P. B. Dirksen and A. van der Kooij (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 1–7; J. A. Emerton, “Abraham Kuenen and the Early Religion of Ancient Israel,” in ibid., 8–28; R. Smend, “Kuenen and Wellhausen,” in ibid., 113–27; and Simon J. De Vries, “The Hexateuchal Criticism of Abraham Kuenen,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1963): 31–57.

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postulate of the whole literature. At last I took courage and made my way through Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers. . . . But it was in vain that I looked for the light which was to be shed from this source on the historical and prophetical books. On the contrary, my enjoyment of the latter was marred by the Law; it did not bring them any nearer me, but intruded itself uneasily, like a ghost that makes a noise indeed, but is not visible and really effects nothing. . . . I found it impossible to give a candid decision in favour of the priority of the Law. . . . At last, in the course of a casual visit in Göttingen in the summer of 1867, I learned through [Albrecht] Ritschl [1822–89] that Karl Heinrich Graf placed the Law later than the Prophets, and, almost without knowing his reasons for the hypothesis, I was prepared to accept it; I readily acknowledged to myself the possibility of understanding Hebrew antiquity without the book of the Torah.28

There were many more stages leading to Wellhausen’s formulation, but this basic overview helps provide the overall contours of the most important stages along the history of the development of Pentateuchal source criticism, which proved foundational to the history of biblical scholarship, of both the Old and New Testaments. Wellhausen’s basic formulation was a bit more complicated than is usually communicated in introductory textbooks on the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible today.29 Build28. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, with a reprint of the article Israel from the Encyclopedia Britannica (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2003 [1878]), 3–4. 29. The literature on Wellhausen is absolutely staggering. For a sample of important works situating his contributions in historical context see, e.g., Aly Elrefaei, Wellhausen and Kaufmann: Ancient Israel and Its Religious History in the Works of Julius Wellhausen and Yehezkel Kaufmann (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016); Paul Michael Kurtz, “The Way of War: Wellhausen, Israel, and Bellicose Reiche,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 127 (2015): 1–19, and “Axes of Inquiry: The Problem of Form and Time in Wellhausen and Gunkel,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 29 (2015): 247–95; Jean Louis Ska, “The ‘History of Israel’: Its Emergence as an Independent Discipline,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament III/1, ed. Sæbø, 337–41; Rudolf Smend, “William Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen,” in William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, ed. William Johnstone (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 226–42, “In the Wake of Wellhausen: The Growth of a Literary-Critical School and Its Varied Influence,” in Hebrew Bible/Old

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ing on the history of scholarship that came before, Wellhausen argued that the southern source J was the earliest of the sources, followed by the northern source E. An editor or redactor, RJE, then combined both J and E sources. Contrary to how this segment of the Documentary Hypothesis is typically taught today, Wellhausen identified this redactor of J and E as the Yahwist. The Yahwist redactor also added in new material beyond simply the editorial activity involved in combining J and E. Next, prior to the Babylonian exile, the Deuteronomist’s work, D, was edited together with JE. What has come to be labelled the Priestly source, or P, Wellhausen originally labelled as Q , representing the Latin Quatuor, or “four” as in “four covenants.”30 Q , or P, for Wellhausen, originated after the Babylonian exile. The Priestly code portion of Leviticus was composed later, and then added to this expanding Priestly source, which was added to the JE and D material. We could add many points to this genealogical narrative of the history of Pentateuchal source criticism up to Wellhausen and Loisy’s day, as the two were contemporaries.31 One point Testament III/1, ed. Sæbø, 474–76, From Astruc to Zimmerli, 91–102, and “Work of Abraham Kuenen,” 436–53; Machinist, “Road Not Taken,” 469–532; Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung IV, 302–15; Reinhard Gregor Kratz, “Die Entstehung des Judentums. Zur Kontroverse zwischen E. Meyer und J. Wellhausen,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 95 (1998): 169–84; Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, 257–72; Arnaldo Momigliano, “Religious History Without Frontiers: J. Wellhausen, U. Wilamowitz, and E. Schwartz,” History and Theory 21 (1982): 49–64; Douglas A. Knight, “Wellhausen and the Interpretation of Israel’s Literature,” Semeia 25 (1982): 21–36; John H. Hayes, “Wellhausen as Historian of Israel,” Semeia 25 (1982): 37–60; Patrick D. Miller, “Wellhausen and the History of Israel’s Religion,” Semeia 25 (1982): 61–73; Lou H. Silberman, “Wellhausen and Judaism,” Semeia 25 (1982): 75–82; Rudolf Smend, “Wellhausen und das Judentum: In dankbarer Erinnerung an Isac Leo Seeglimann (1907–1982),” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 79 (1982): 249–82, and “Wellhausen in Greifswald,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 78 (1981): 141–76. 30. Wellhausen initially called P the “Book of the Four Covenants.” 31. Very helpful surveys of the history of the Documentary Hypothesis leading up to Wellhausen can be found in Ernest Nicholson, The Pentateuch in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Julius Wellhausen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6–11; and Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism, esp. 257–72.

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that should be noticed was the way in which, contrary to and in spite of developments in Assyriology and ancient Near Eastern studies in general, biblical source criticism basically developed in a vacuum hermetically sealed off from developments in ancient Near Eastern studies. The actual Pentateuchal source critical theories mirrored, at virtually every stage, trends that were developing (from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries) in classical studies, and in Homeric scholarship in particular, but that history is beyond the scope of what I am attempting in this book.32 The point is that even though Wellhausen was competent in Assyriology—and, like Loisy, could read Akkadian—unlike Loisy, Wellhausen did not follow comparative methods like those Assyriologists were then engaging.33 This is one point that makes Loisy’s work so interesting. As we saw in the previous chapter, Loisy engaged in both a comparative method like that he learned from his study of Assyriology—which provided him with ample material for comparison—as well as the more internal literary developments of the cutting-edge source criticism of Reuss, Graf, Wellhausen (and others), upon whose works he relied extensively in his own biblical scholarship, as we shall see in the next chapter. This also sets the stage for the argument Loisy will make concerning the inclusion of modern historical biblical criticism in Catholic exegesis, which I will examine in chapter 7. 32. For more on the parallels and influences between seventeenth- to nineteenthcentury developments in classical and biblical studies, and in particular, Homeric and Pentateuchal source criticism, see, e.g., Van Seters, Edited Bible, 133–243; Jean-Louis Ska, “The Yahwist, a Hero with a Thousand Faces: A Chapter in the History of Modern Exegesis,” in Abschied vom Jahwisten: Die Komposition des Hexateuch in der jüngsten Diskussion, ed. Jan Christian Gertz, Konrad Schmid, and Markus Witte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002), 5 and 11–12; Stroumsa, “Homeros Hebraios,” 87–100; Yamauchi, Composition and Corroboration; and Cassuto, Documentary Hypothesis, 11–14. 33. See Machinist, “Road Not Taken,” 469–532.

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Loisy’s Engagement with Biblical Scholarship Fr . Richard Simon as Heroic Symbol

As should be apparent by now, Loisy’s familiarity with the relevant biblical scholarly literature, as well as that of the ancillary discipline of Assyriology, was impressive. He was upto-date and conversant with the relevant scholarship not only within the francophone world, but also in the broader Germanand English-speaking world. We can catch a clearer glimpse of this through his use of sources in his varied texts. In this chapter, I focus on Loisy’s use of the seventeenth-century pioneering biblical scholar Fr. Richard Simon. In order to better understand this, however, I first examine a few of Loisy’s earliest forays in biblical studies, all of which were written prior to his excommunication. I focus on his books concerning the Bible, and not his many articles, in order to provide a sense of the breadth of his engagement with biblical scholarship. Most of these books originated as scholarly articles. While Loisy cited many scholars, it is not necessary to note

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Richard Simon as Heroic Symbol every single scholar and source he relies upon. The crucial point is that Loisy was exceptionally conversant with scholarship from a broad range of centuries, spanning a number of languages. For Loisy, Simon’s work in particular was important. Simon served as a symbol of Loisy himself amidst the controversies in which he found himself embroiled, but this was not until later in his career, after his excommunication. Furthermore, Simon is one of the few scholars whose works Loisy used prior to his excommunication, who continues to appear in Loisy’s works long after his excommunication.

History of the Old Testament Canon Histoire du canon de l’Ancien Testament (History of the Canon of the Old Testament), written for a scholarly audience and published in 1890, was one of Loisy’s earliest works on the Bible.1 Loisy’s use of sources in this early volume contains an astonishing abundance of references to classical biblical interpreters: Church Fathers, Jewish sources, medieval theologians, etc. This is in sharp contrast with his later works, which he published after his excommunication. An analysis of his source material indicates that Loisy’s references to Jewish sources increased as his engagement with the Church Fathers decreased in the years prior to his excommunication. Because his initial volume pertained especially to the history of the biblical canon, it makes sense that Loisy made reference to so many Church Fathers. If we limit our survey of his use of Church Fathers and other classical biblical interpreters to his footnotes alone (as opposed to including his main text where they abound in even greater frequency), we find an impressive group of citations: six references 1. A. Loisy, Histoire du canon de l’Ancien Testament (Paris: Letouzey, 1890).

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each to Jerome and Josephus; five references to Irenaeus and the Talmud; four references to Augustine, Justin Martyr, Origen, and Eusebius; three references to Clement of Alexandria and Philo; two references to Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Hugh of St. Victor, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Tertullian, and Theodoret; as well as references to Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzus, Cyprian, Isidore, Bede, and Thomas Aquinas. When we turn to an evaluation of his sources drawn from more modern scholarship, we find his inclusion of sources from the end of the medieval period during the transition to modernity—for example, John of Salisbury, William of Ockham, and Tostatus. We also find key seventeenth-century biblical scholars like Antoine Augustin Calmet, whom he cites ten times, and Richard Simon, whom he cites or mentions three times. This is already a quite substantial list for a nineteenth-century biblical scholar. Loisy also shows his familiarity with the history of scholarship in his use of important eighteenth-century exegetes like Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, to whom he provides a single mention, Johann Salomo Semler, whom he references four times, and Edouard Reuss, whose work proved so influential on Loisy and whom he cited or referenced an astounding thirty-three times in this volume. Finally, Loisy did not neglect his contemporaries, such as Adolf von Harnack and Loisy’s own teacher Vigouroux.

Solomon’s Proverbs Also in 1890, Loisy published his commentary on the Book of Proverbs, which he intended for specialists.2 Many of his sources in this work are not at all unusual for a Catholic scholar; as might be expected in such a commentary, Loisy made 2. A. Loisy, Les proverbes de Salomon (Amiens: Rousseau-Leroy, 1890).

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reference to many classical biblical interpreters, such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Origen, Melito of Sardis, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, Eusebius, and the Talmud. However, Loisy also engaged the scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the eighteenth century he referenced Eichhorn (three times) and Reuss (seven times), as he had in his previous work. In this work, however, he included two references to Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, whose work spanned the first half of the nineteenth century. When it came to the nineteenth century, Loisy included four references to Heinrich Ewald, who was one of Julius Wellhausen’s teachers. He also mentioned Vigouroux, as before, but this time he also included Friedrich Delitzsch (six times), upon whom he had relied for so much of his Assyriological work.

History of the New Testament Canon In the following year, when Loisy turned to the study of the canon of the New Testament, which he published for other scholars, he again included numerous classical biblical interpreters, such as Polycarp, Bede, Justin, Jerome, Eusebius, Origen, and Irenaeus.3 He also included Reformation figures like Erasmus, Luther, and Zwingli. Loisy included Richard Simon in twenty-two references and citations, and he again included Calmet, albeit in a solitary reference. Loisy again relied highly upon Reuss, who was referenced twenty-five times. Among nineteenth-century critics Loisy cited Vigouroux, but also Renan, Ferdinand Christian Baur, David Friedrich Strauss, and B. F. Westcott, as well as the church historians Louis Duchesne, with whom Loisy had studied, and Adolf von Harnack. 3. A. Loisy, Histoire du Canon du Nouveau Testament (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1891).

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The Book of Job The following year saw Loisy’s commentary on the Book of Job, primarily intended for Old Testament scholars.4 In it he continued to juxtapose modern and classical authors. Alongside a reference to Augustine, a reference to Nicholas of Lyra, a reference to Gregory the Great, three references to Thomas Aquinas, three references to Origen, and five references to Jerome, Loisy included three references to Vigouroux, three references to Renan, four references to Delitzsch, and four references to the Sulpician Arthur-Marie Le Hir, who taught both Renan and Vigouroux. Critical History of the Text and Versions of the Bible In the same year that saw the publication of Loisy’s commentary on the Book of Job, he produced the first volume of a critical history of the text and versions of the Bible, again intended primarily for an audience of biblical scholars.5 Within this first volume, Loisy demonstrated his continued reliance upon traditional sources as well as more modern sources. In the category of traditional sources, he cited the Talmud nineteen times, Jerome nine times, Justin Martyr six times, Origen three times, Augustine twice, and included solitary references to Irenaeus, John Chrysostom, Josephus, the Mishnah, Pirke Avot, Nicholas of Lyra, Tacitus, Tertullian, the Targum of Ezekiel, as well as later figures like Louis Cappel (nine citations) and the Jewish convert Paul of Burgos (a single reference). Turning to more modern sources we find that Richard Simon received quite a bit of attention—thirty-four citations. This should come 4. A. Loisy, Le livre de Job (Amiens: Rousseau-Leroy, 1892). 5. A. Loisy, Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible I: Histoire du texte hébreu de l’Ancien Testament (Amiens: Rousseau-Leroy, 1892).

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as no surprise, as the title of Loisy’s volume—Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible (Critical History of the Text and Versions of the Bible)—can be seen as a tribute to Simon, who wrote both a Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, 1689) as well as a Histoire critique des versions du Nouveau Testament (Critical History of the Versions of the New Testament, 1690).6 Exploring Loisy’s use of modern sources further, we discover that Joseph Scaliger and Marin Mersenne are both referenced once, whereas Elias Levita is mentioned twice. When it comes to more recent as well as contemporary scholars, Loisy’s citations are quite extensive. Julius Wellhausen receives twenty-two citations, Gaston Maspero and Sir Flinders Petrie are each mentioned ten times, Paul de Lagarde appears seven times, Friedrich Delitzsch receives six citations, there are two citations for both Heinrich Ewald and Theodor Nöldeke, and there are solitary references to Wilhelm de Wette, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Wilhelm Gesenius, Karl Heinrich Graf, François Lenormant, Friedrich Max Müller, Johann Salomo Semler, and Sylvestre de Sacy. He cites his own teachers Renan twenty-two times, Vigouroux fourteen times, and Joseph Halévy twice. Loisy published a second volume the following year.7 In that second volume there appear far fewer citations in general. For the ancients we have sixteen citations of Jerome, seven references to the Talmud, five citations of Targum Onqelos, four references to Eusebius, three citations both for Josephus and Origen, and single references for Clement of Alexandria, Herodotus, John Chrysostom, Justin, Philo, and Targum of Ezekiel. 6. Richard Simon, Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam: Leers, 1689); Simon, Histoire critique des versions du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam: Leers, 1690). 7. A. Loisy, Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible II: Histoire critique des versions de l’Ancien Testament (Paris: L’Auteur, 1893).

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For scholars from the seventeenth and more recent centuries, we have twenty-three citations of de Lagarde, seven each of Maspero and of Richard Simon, two of Vigouroux, and solitary citations of Friedrich Delitzsch, Gesenius, Nöldeke, and Wellhausen. The Synoptic Gospels In 1894, the year after Loisy published the second volume of his Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible, he published the first volume of his study on the Synoptic Gospels, again for a scholarly audience, which cited far less scholarship in comparison with his earlier works.8 There are a handful of references to Le Maistre de Sacy, Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen, Renan, and Bernhard Weiss. Loisy’s second volume appeared two years later in 1896.9 Loisy’s indebtedness to Heinrich Julius Holtzmann, whom he cites eight times, is clearer in this volume. Biblical Studies The third edition of Études bibliques was published in 1903 with scholars as the intended audience.10 Apart from two citations of Richard Simon, solitary citations of Jerome, Erasmus, Cornelius à Lapide, and Louis Cappel, Loisy primarily engages scholars from after the seventeenth century. In fact, most of them were his contemporaries: Baron Friedrich von Hügel (whom he references seventeen times), Hermann Gunkel, Paul Haupt, Holtzmann, Maurice d’Hulst (six citations), Abraham Kuenen, Marie-Joseph Lagrange (twenty-two citations), Lenormant (nine citations), Lucien Méchineau (thirty-seven ci8. A. Loisy, Les Évangiles synoptiques I (Amiens: Rousseau-Leroy, 1894). 9. A. Loisy, Les Évangiles synoptiques II (Amiens: Rousseau-Leroy, 1896). 10. A. Loisy, Études bibliques, 3rd ed. (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1903).

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tations), Renan (twenty-nine citations), Vigouroux (seven citations), John Henry Newman (five citations), and Wellhausen. This level of engagement with modern biblical scholarship already set Loisy apart from most of his contemporaries, although there were a few exceptions. Clearly he was conversant with recent and earlier modern biblical scholarship as well as more traditional sources. This juxtaposition of ancient and modern sources was likewise less common—at least to the extent that Loisy engaged both interpretive traditions. For the remainder of this chapter I will look more carefully at Loisy’s uses of Richard Simon, but I do not limit myself to his pre-excommunication writings, nor even to his biblical scholarship. As we shall see, Loisy continued to bring up the figure and writings of Richard Simon for most of his professional career. Simon went from serving as one among many scholarly sources, albeit a privileged one, to a symbol of Loisy’s own struggle with the Magisterium. In the figure of Simon, Loisy was able to find a heroic exemplar, whom he compared to himself, in his struggle to bring modern biblical criticism into the realm of Catholic exegesis.

Loisy’s Use of Richard Simon as a Type With the publication of his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Critical History of the Old Testament), the Oratorian priest Fr. Richard Simon ignited a veritable powder keg that had been gathering combustible material for over two decades.11 11. Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Paris: Billaine, 1678). The edition I use in this book is the recent scholarly edition, Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, suivi de Lettre sur l’inspiration: Nouvelle édition, annotated and with an introduction by Pierre Gibert (Montrouge: Bayard, 2008). As Simon’s original text was unpaginated, pages cited will likewise be aligned with Gibert’s scholarly edition. The “over two decades” refers to the turmoil which erupted in the wake of Isaac La Peyrère’s publishing Prae-Adamitae. La Peyrère’s text was first published anonymously as

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Simon ushered in a new era of biblical interpretation, although his work gained a following primarily among “heterodox” Protestant exegetes after it was suppressed in the Catholic world. Nearly two hundred years later, Loisy would engage in similar historical critical biblical exegesis to that of Simon, and like Simon, would find himself at odds with the Catholic hierarchy. For the remainder of this chapter, I examine Loisy’s use of Simon, which is interesting because he is one of the few figures who appear throughout the volumes Loisy published both prior to his excommunication and afterward. In Loisy’s early works, prior to the 1893 controversies over the biblical question that resulted in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus, Simon had served as an important scholarly source. Simon appeared as one scholar among many that Loisy utilized to support his points. The works of Simon’s used by Loisy often covered the same terrain as Loisy’s, and thus Simon proved to be a useful secondary source. After the controversies that resulted in Loisy’s excommunication, however, Simon functioned as an important symbol for Loisy. Simon served as a symbol of the scholar persecuted by the church for attempting to help the church make progress through historical scholarship in the march toward the kingdom of God. Simon was the only biblical scholar to function in this symbolic way for Loisy. Their biographies were sufficiently similar that Simon served as a significant rhetorical device for Loisy when he was defending himself in his work. We begin with a look at Simon. At the outset of Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, he attributed the motivation Prae-Adamitae: Sive Exercitatio super Versibus duodecimo, decimotertio, & decimoquarto, capitis quinti Epistolae D. Pauli ad Romanos: Quibus Inducuntur Primi Homines ante Adamum conditi (n.p.: 1655) and was bound together with his other, far more extensive, anonymous work, Systema Theologicum, ex Prae-Adamitarum Hypothesi (n.p.: 1655).

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for his taking up quill and parchment to Baruch Spinoza. Along with Thomas Hobbes and Simon’s friend Isaac La Peyrère, Spinoza is often associated with the early development of modern biblical criticism.12 Spinoza’s importance emerged with his attempt to develop a historical method for biblical interpretation, a method that is critical and patterned on the then newly forming natural sciences.13 He does this especially in the seventh chapter of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.14 Spinoza proposed that the biblical exegete must master all of the relevant biblical languages and thus study the biblical texts in those languages.15 This is a step in which both Simon and Loisy eclipsed most of their contemporaries. Simon’s purpose in marking out the terrain of historical biblical criticism differed from Spinoza. In fact, he saw himself as offering a response to Spinoza, whom he saw as a dangerous skeptic. Simon was in frequent dialogue with Protestant theologians and exegetes, so he also saw his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament as a response to the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura. Simon thus put forward Catho12. See Morrow, Three Skeptics and the Bible; Henning Graf Reventlow, Epochen der Bibelauslegung Band IV: Von der Aufklärung bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2001), 39–57; and Arrigo Pacchi, “Hobbes and Biblical Philology in the Service of the State,” Topoi 7 (1988): 231–39. 13. On Spinoza’s biblical hermeneutic and his place within the history of modern biblical criticism, see Morrow, “Spinoza and Modern Biblical Hermeneutics,” Three Skeptics and the Bible, 104–38, “Spinoza’s Use of the Psalms,” 1–18, and “Secularization, Objectivity, and Enlightenment Scholarship,” 14–32; Hahn and Wiker, Politicizing the Bible, 339–93; Travis L. Frampton, Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible (London: T and T Clark, 2006); J. Samuel Preus, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics II: The Adventures of Immanence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 14–19. 14. The most recent critical edition of the Latin text of Spinoza’s Tractatus can be found in Spinoza, Œuvres III: Tractatus Theologico-Politicus/Traité théologico-politique, 2nd ed., ed. Pierre-François Moreau, text established by Fokke Akkerman, trans. and notes by Jacqueline Lagrée and Pierre-François Moreau (Paris: Universitaires de France, 2012). Citations here will be to the page number and line of the Latin text. 15. Spinoza, Tractatus, 282.23–25.

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lic tradition as the one guarantor of scripture’s inspiration. Indeed, although Simon’s work was condemned in the Catholic world of his day, it also bore the wrath of “orthodox” Protestant intellectuals throughout Europe; in fact, published Protestant refutations of Simon outnumber Catholic ones. When we come to the question of method, there remains little doubt as to the obvious parallels between Simon’s program and Spinoza’s. Simon maintained that an exegete must first establish the Hebrew text.16 This took further Spinoza’s initial and final steps; Simon here brought in the matter of textual criticism, which was part of the final step in Spinoza’s method, but on which Simon exerted far more effort. Next, Simon echoed the call of both La Peyrère and Spinoza to examine the Bible as one would any other ancient text.17 Afterward, we find a departure from Spinoza, but one which naturally springs forth from such a method, namely to translate the established text, including marginal translations of variant readings.18 This was a task close to Simon’s heart, as he spent much time working on a French translation of the Bible, following just such a method as he outlined here. Finally, Simon detailed a history of scholarship, what Bible scholars now refer to as Forschungsgeschichte.19 Simon encouraged future exegetes to do the same. This was far more thorough than anything Spinoza had articulated eight years earlier in his Tractatus. Nevertheless, Simon’s method emerges as a revised and expanded form of Spinoza’s; more finely tuned, more precise, and more thorough. When it came to his response to Protestants, however, Si16. Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, 543–45. Simon is concerned here with the Old Testament. He deals with the New Testament in his later works, but it is here in his first Histoire critique that he deals most with methodology. 17. Ibid., 545. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid.

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mon’s articulation and defense of Catholic tradition was part of what landed him in trouble with Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704). Throughout his text, Simon not only conceded the many textual corruptions, contradictions, inconsistencies, and other problems similar to, and in many cases identical to, those mentioned by La Peyrère and Spinoza, but he multiplied them exponentially.20 In effect, Simon greatly extended precisely those portions of Spinoza’s Tractatus that their contemporaries saw as laying bare Spinoza’s perilous skepticism, and meriting the Tractatus’s ill repute as “a book forged in hell.”21 Bossuet fought Simon at every corner. He detected the stench of heresy as soon as he saw “that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch” in the table of contents. Simon’s work was placed on the Index, confiscated, and consigned to bonfires. Later, Renan and Loisy would both blame Bossuet’s oppression of Simon as directly responsible for creating religious skeptics like Voltaire, the French Enlightenment writer who argued against the church. As Renan wrote: “Bossuet, in persecuting Richard Simon, had thought to deliver the church from a great danger. He prepared for Voltaire. You had not wanted a serious science, autonomous [libre] and weighty [grave]; instead you had buffoonery, mocking incredulity and superficial. The success of Voltaire avenged Richard Simon. If experience counted for something in the conduct of human affairs, this lesson would be well worth contemplating.”22 Had Bossuet found someone to engage and argue with Simon, things might have gone differently. Without this, however, Bossuet turned to sup20. See, e.g., Morrow, “Faith, Reason, and History,” 658–73. 21. See Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011). 22. Ernest Renan, “L’Exégèse biblique et l’esprit français,” Revue des deux mondes 60 (1865): 245. This volume’s table of contents mistakenly lists the article title as “L’Exégèse religieuse et l’esprit français.”

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pressing Simon, a move that would make others want to fight against the church. Likewise, Loisy later remarked, “If Richard Simon had been able to stem orthodox criticism, Voltaire would not have been so amused with the exegesis of Don Calmet.”23 Fast-forwarding in time, we find Loisy studying scripture from Vigouroux. As we have already seen, Loisy found Vigouroux’s courses to be deeply unsatisfying. Vigouroux attempted to decapitate the asp of modern historical biblical criticism; but, as with the head of any dead viper, historical criticism retained its potent bite for the student Loisy. Loisy began to sit in Renan’s courses in biblical studies at the Collège de France, and it was with Renan that Loisy imbibed historical biblical criticism directly from one of its leading nineteenth-century French fonts. Loisy, however, was not uncritical of Renan; if Vigouroux’s concordist apologetics appeared too facile to Loisy, so did Renan’s skeptical criticism. In many ways Loisy’s biography parallels that of Simon’s. Simon was the son of a laborer, perhaps a tailor or smith. Loisy was the son of peasants. Both became highly skilled in ancient languages and in reading ancient historical texts as a result of education they pursued on their way toward priestly ordination, and which they continued as Catholic priests. As Simon depicted his biblical criticism as a faithful response to Spinoza, by mastering Spinoza’s method and using it against him, so too Loisy retold his curriculum vitae as an attempt to respond to Renan’s rationalist skepticism by mastering Renan’s method and defeating him on his own ground. Both took further the work of their intellectual contender. Both landed in trouble with the Catholic 23. Loisy, Mémoires I, 474. Loisy took this line from his unpublished Essais, in the section La raison et la foi, which can now be found in François Laplanche, Alfred Loisy: La crise de la foi dans le temps présent (Essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 422.

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hierarchy because they were viewed as little more than doppelgangers of their adversary: Simon as a new Spinoza, and Loisy as a new Renan. Simon was expelled from the Oratorians and Loisy was excommunicated. Loisy’s overall goal was to completely transform Catholic theology. He attempted what after the Second Vatican Council we might call aggiornamento, a bringing the church up-to-date. Part and parcel of this project was his desire for Catholic scholars to appropriate the methods of historical biblical criticism. In this, Loisy was similar to Renan, but with significant nuances. Whereas Renan, with an explicitly skeptical intent, tried to popularize historical criticism, Loisy worked to get Catholic scholars to engage in historical criticism, which he argued was for the good of the church, and should not simply be dismissed with Vigouroux-type apologetics. We can see this goal at work, for example, in Loisy’s Firmin articles.24 Loisy mentioned Simon in a number of books, including those mentioned above, as we already saw. In reading Loisy’s works in light of the historical context of the times, two dates emerge as significant regarding how Loisy used Simon. The first is 1893 and the second is 1900. A shift occurred in Loisy’s use of Simon after 1893. This shift was likely influenced both by a number of events that occurred that year, making 1893 a sort of watershed for Loisy, and also by a less significant event in 1900. We will examine the second date first. The year 1900 marked the publication of Henri Margival’s book Essai sur Richard Simon.25 Margival’s volume is composed of fourteen articles originally published between 1896 and 1900.26 Margival’s work on 24. I will discuss the Firmin articles further in chapter 7. 25. Henri Margival, Essai sur Richard Simon et la critique biblique au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Maillet, 1900). 26. Margival, “Richard Simon et la critique biblique au XVIIe siècle” (I–XIII), in

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Simon and biblical criticism is significant because he used the seventeenth-century conflict between Bossuet and Simon as a symbol for describing the plight of Catholic biblical scholars in France at the end of the nineteenth and dawn of the twentieth century.27 Indeed, Margival situated Loisy within this context. It is possible that Loisy’s use of Simon, and particularly of the conflict between Bossuet and Simon, in his books published from 1903 onward was in part inspired by Margival’s symbolic use of Simon. Regardless of the influence, Loisy began to use Simon symbolically in a way he had not prior to Margival’s work, and, more importantly, prior to the momentous year 1893. Before 1893, Loisy primarily used Simon as an important scholarly secondary source supporting various aspects of Loisy’s arguments. This is how he used Simon in his 1890 Histoire du Canon de l’Ancien Testament, on issues particularly related to the canonization process of scripture and the role of Ezra the scribe.28 This is also how Loisy used Simon in his 1891 Histoire du Canon du Nouveau Testament on a number of issues including the authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and he included some praise of Simon for his advances in biblical criticism.29 thirteen articles (respectively) published in Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 1 (1896): 1–28, 159–87; 2 (1897): 17–42, 223–48, 525–52; 3 (1898): 117–43, 338–65, 508–32; 4 (1899): 122–39, 193–216, 310–31, 435–57, 514–36. See also Margival, “Richard Simon et la critique biblique au XVIIe siècle: Introduction,” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 5 (1900): 9–30. Loisy wrote about Margival’s volume in Mémoires I, e.g., 397, 533, 535, 546, 558, and Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire religieuse de notre temps II: 1900–1908 (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1931), e.g., 11 and 21. 27. On Margival’s work here, and particularly for the way in which it used Simon symbolically in support of Loisy and his contemporary French Catholic Bible scholars, see C. J. T. Talar, “Rehabilitating Richard Simon, Legitimating Alfred Loisy,” in The Rise of Historical Consciousness Among the Christian Churches: Studies in Religion and the Social Order, ed. Kenneth L. Parker and Erick H. Moser (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2013), 47–63. 28. Loisy, Histoire du Canon de l’Ancien Testament, 27–28, 28n1, 228–30. In this volume, Loisy only makes explicit reference to Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. 29. Loisy, Histoire du Canon du Nouveau Testament, 229, 229n2, 232n3, 260n1, 275–76,

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Loisy’s use of Simon steadily increased in his 1892 publication of the first volume of his Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible focusing on the Old Testament, and thus relying heavily upon Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, where he included more praise of Simon’s work as a pioneering biblical critic.30 In 1893 Loisy published the second volume in which Simon functioned, again, almost exclusively as one among other secondary sources, albeit a very significant and even privileged source for Loisy.31 In 1894, Loisy republished a collection of earlier articles within a single volume entitled Études bibliques.32 Although this book was published after the momentous year 1893, the chapter that used Simon was simply a reprint of his journal article, “De la critique biblique” (“On Biblical Criticism”), from 1892.33 This chapter, now entitled simply, “La critique biblique,” was reproduced in all subsequent editions of Études bibliques. In it, Loisy singled out Simon, along with Louis Cappel, as “masters of scriptural criticism.”34 The year after this article arrived in print was the year 1893. Renan had died the year before. Three months after Renan’s 275nn4–5, 278, 280, 280n1, 286–90, 286n4, 287n1, 289n1, 289n3, 290n2, 299. In this volume, Loisy explicitly references both Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament as well as his Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament. 30. Loisy, Histoire critique du texte I, 6, 6n1, 31–32, 32n1, 89n4, 128–30, 129n1, 130n4, 171, 171n1, 173nn2–3, 176, 176n2, 178n4, 181, 181n1, 186–88, 187n1, 188nn1–2, 189nn1–2, 191–93, 191nn1–2, 192n1, 219, 243, 243n1, 307–8, 308n1. His study concludes with a lengthy quotation from Simon (307–8). Loisy exclusively cites from Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament here. 31. Loisy, Histoire critique du texte II, 17n2, 196, 196n2, 210n1, 217n1, 218, 218n3, 220n3. As with most of his work, Loisy only explicitly cites Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. 32. Alfred Loisy, Études bibliques (Amiens: Rousseau-Leroy, 1894). I have been unable to gain access to this first edition. This volume was expanded in two subsequent editions: Études bibliques, 2nd ed. (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1901), and Études bibliques, 3rd ed. Here I will cite from the third edition of 1903, identical to the second edition except for pagination. 33. Loisy, “De la critique biblique,” L’Enseignement biblique 6 (1892): 1–16. 34. Loisy, Études bibliques, 97–98.

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death, Maurice d’Hulst, then rector of the Institut Catholique, published his infamous article, “La question biblique,” in which he criticized the type of scripture courses that Renan and Loisy had taken from the Sulpicians, courses that he saw as anemic apologetics. Renan’s recent death was not the only impetus for d’Hulst’s article, but “La question biblique” was an attempt to defend Loisy, one of d’Hulst’s faculty members. Loisy’s lectures on the Bible in his scripture courses at the Institut had infuriated the Sulpicians. Upon learning that students were denouncing Loisy’s lectures to Sulpician superiors behind his back, d’Hulst was likewise enraged. Within ten months of d’Hulst’s article, Leo XIII promulgated Providentissimus. This encyclical was in large part a response to d’Hulst and Loisy. It was in the wake of Providentissimus that Loisy’s use of Simon began to shift. At first merely a significant secondary source, a privileged voice within the history of scholarship that Loisy praised, now Simon functioned primarily as a symbol of the very conflict over the biblical question in which Loisy would be embroiled until his excommunication fifteen years later.35 In an unpublished manuscript that Loisy wrote and revised between 1898 and 1899, he praised Simon and then used him in symbolic form, representing the repressed scholar punished in the attempt to advance the cause of truth.36 In 1899 Loisy published pseudonymously a significant article on Pentateuchal source criticism, entitled “Opinions catholiques sur l’origine du Pentateuque” (“Catholic Opinions about the Or35. There are a few exceptions to this, where Loisy only mentions Simon in passing in some of his later books, e.g., Loisy, A propos d’Histoire des religions (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1911), 90; Guerre et Religion, 2nd ed. (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1915), 188; De la discipline intellectuelle (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1919), 68; and Mémoires III, 305. 36. Loisy, La crise de la foi, 228, 323, 331, 373, 422, 455. These latter symbolic uses of Simon occur in the sections entitled Le régime intellectuel de l’Église catholique, Le dogme et la science, La raison et la foi, and La religion et la vie.

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igin of the Pentateuch”), in the journal Revue du clergé français.37 He republished this article in both the second and third editions of Études bibliques. Loisy emphasized Simon’s pivotal role in establishing the Pentateuch’s post-Mosaic composition, and particularly Simon’s notion of Israelite public scribes.38 The year 1903 saw the publication of Loisy’s autobiographical Autour d’un petit livre, wherein Loisy, for the first time in published form, explicitly situated his own plight in the context of the battle between Bossuet and Simon.39 Loisy’s autobiographical work was intended for a much broader reading public than his more specialized scholarly work. That same year, Giuseppe Sarto was elected Pope St. Pius X and unleashed a war against modernism, and was canonized a mere three days prior to the fourteenth anniversary of Loisy’s death. In 1907, the Holy Office published Lamentabili Sane Exitu, in which it condemned sixty-five modernist propositions as heretical. Later that same year, Pius X solemnly condemned modernism in Pascendi Dominici Gregis. In the following year, 1908, Loisy published his book response to both documents.40 In his published response he mentioned the importance of Simon for biblical criticism, and again situated his present conflict with the Magisterium in the context of Simon’s conflict with Bossuet.41 On March 7 of the same year, Pius X excommunicated Loisy. Five years later Loisy would publish another autobiography, 37. Isidore Després (Alfred Loisy), “Opinions catholiques sur l’origine du Pentateuque,” Revue du clergé français 17 (1899): 526–57. 38. Ibid., 540, and Loisy, Études bibliques, 224. 39. Loisy, Autour d’un petit livre (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1903), xxxiii, 23–24, 31–32, 211–12, 279. A slightly larger second edition was published the very same year, and includes these same reflections unchanged, including the same pagination. 40. Loisy, Simples réflexions sur le Décret du Saint-Office Lamentabili sane exitu et sur l’Encyclique Pascendi dominici gregis (Ceffonds: L’Auteur, 1908). He published an only slightly longer second edition that same year. 41. Ibid., 112–13, 223, 280. The first is a quotation from Autour d’un petit livre.

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Choses passées, in which the struggle between Bossuet and Simon was iconic of his own struggle with the church.42 Bossuet was first a symbol of Cardinal Richard, the archbishop of Paris who had censured a number of Loisy’s publications and had denounced him to Rome, but later could stand for Pius X. In 1926, in his volume on religion and humanity, Loisy mentioned Simon only briefly, but Simon’s function as a symbol continued to be rich in meaning.43 In the first two volumes of his extensive three-volume autobiographical memoirs published in 1930–31, Loisy most extensively used Simon as a symbol for his own situation.44 He relied heavily here on Margival’s work. What emerged throughout his Mémoires was the resounding sense that the persecution of Simon and of Loisy retarded biblical criticism and thus theological progress and reform. Finally, in his 1936 book on George Tyrrell and Henri Bremond, Loisy only briefly mentioned Simon, but Simon continued to serve as an important symbol for Loisy, and Loisy continued to use that seventeenth-century conflict to emphasize how Bossuet’s attack on Simon served little purpose, while also tragically slowing the advance of biblical criticism, the underlying idea being that the same process was occurring again as history repeated itself in his own condemnation nearly thirty years before.45 To conclude, Simon and Loisy had remarkably similar biographies, and this makes the use of Simon as a stand-in for Loisy, in both Margival’s and Loisy’s own works, quite fascinating. In 42. Loisy, Choses passées, 59, 86, 120–21, 185, 255, 260, 275–76. 43. A. Loisy, Religion et humanité (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1926), 119. 44. Loisy, Mémoires I, 173, 228–29, 291, 397, 428, 437, 466, 474, 533, 535, 546, 558, and Mémoires II, 11–12, 16, 21–22, 250, 291. 45. A. Loisy, George Tyrrell et Henri Bremond (Paris: Librairie Émile Nourry, 1936), 61, 88, 96, 98–99.

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the early stages of Loisy’s work, prior to the 1893 controversy over d’Hulst’s “La question biblique” and Leo XIII’s Providentissimus, Loisy employed Simon as a privileged scholarly voice. After 1893, Loisy shifted in the use of his seventeenth-century compatriot. Now, Simon, and particularly his conflict with Bossuet, became symbolic of Loisy’s own conflict with Cardinal Richard, Leo XIII, and later Pius X. Loisy hoped his lesson to be clear: preventing Catholic engagement with historical criticism at this point in time would not aid the faith any more than it had in the seventeenth century. Rather, such suppression would be horrifically corrosive to faith and would cause a very real crisis. Using Simon in this way was just one of the many attempts Loisy made to defend Catholic appropriation of historical critical methodology.

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Loisy’s Defense of Historical Biblical Criticism

In this final chapter, I examine the biblical method for which Loisy became an apologist. Indeed, all of his work covered in previous chapters leads up to his hope that the Catholic church would fully incorporate the historical critical method of biblical interpretation. Loisy played a pivotal role in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic attempts to appropriate the methods of historical biblical criticism. It is to this effort that I now turn, with specific reference to a set of articles (and a book) that formed part of the background to L’Évangile et l’Église. From 1898 to 1900, Loisy wrote six articles pseudonymously under his middle name, Firmin, in an attempt to defend the use of historical biblical criticism.1 1. These articles originated in an unpublished manuscript Loisy entitled “La crise de la foi dans le temps présent: Essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses.” An edition of this manuscript has been published from its dual redactions with critical notes and introductory essays in Laplanche (ed.), Alfred Loisy: La crise de la foi. The Firmin articles refer to: A. Firmin (Alfred Loisy), “Le développement chrétien d’après le cardinal Newman,” Revue du clergé français 17 (1898): 5–20; “La théorie individualiste de la religion,” Revue du clergé français 17 (1899): 202–15; “La définition de la religion,” Revue du clergé français 18 (1899): 193–209; “L’idée de la revelation,” Revue du clergé français 21 (1900): 250–71; and “Les preuves et l’économie de la revelation,” Revue du clergé français 22 (1900): 126–53.

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Historical Biblical Criticism Loisy intended the final Firmin article, entitled “The Religion of Israel,” to be merely the first of three installments.2 Thus, for the purposes of this chapter, I will use the book version, which represents his more complete argument.3 I begin These articles were published in English in Prelude to the Modernist Crisis: The Firmin Articles of Alfred Loisy, trans. Christine E. Thirlway, ed. C. J. T. Talar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The original sixth Firmin article was “La religion d’Israël,” Revue du clergé français 24 (1900): 337–63. Loisy’s more complete treatment was published the following year in the form of a small book, Alfred Loisy, La religion d’Israël (Paris: Letouzey et ané, 1901). Seven years later, the same year he was excommunicated, Loisy greatly revised and expanded this volume as La religion d’Israël, 2nd ed. (Paris: Alfred Loisy, 1908), which was subsequently published in English as The Religion of Israel, trans. Arthur Galton (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910). In what follows, page references will be given first to the original texts and then to the relevant English translation; the English translation is generally accepted, though it will be noted where this has been modified. 2. Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 5 (ET, xix). Loisy stopped writing for the Revue du clergé français after Cardinal François Richard, the archbishop of Paris, condemned the article version of “La religion d’Israël,” and thus Loisy only published the full argument in book form, which he initially circulated privately. He claimed that La religion d’Israël represented a continuation of his Firmin articles (ibid., 6 [ET, xx]). On the background to the censure of Loisy, and especially the role of Cardinal Richard, see Claus Arnold, “Le cas Loisy devant les Congrégations Romaines de l’Index et de l’Inquisition (1893–1903),” in La censure d’Alfred Loisy (1903): Les documents des Congrégations de l’Index et du Saint Office, ed. Claus Arnold and Giacomo Losito (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009), 9–65; and Giacomo Losito, “L’‘affaire’ Loisy entre la France et Rome: Mentalités et pratiques des antimodernistes français,” in La censure d’Alfred Loisy, ed. Arnold and Losito, 71–74, 77– 78, 92–94, 103–9, 112–13. Significantly for this chapter, Claus Arnold and Giacomo Losito have demonstrated how central La religion d’Israël was in the censure of Loisy; it was the work that really sparked the controversy that led to his excommunication. See Arnold, “Le cas Loisy,” 16–30; and Losito, “L’‘affaire’ Loisy,” 72, 72n26, 74, although, as Arnold points out, it was Loisy’s book on Job that first came to the attention of the Congregation of the Index (“Le cas Loisy,” 11). 3. Loisy changed little of his material from Essais when he published the article version of “La religion d’Israël” in 1900. Moreover, when he significantly expanded Essais into the first edition of La religion d’Israël in 1901, the first portion of the book incorporated, word-for-word, the 1900 Revue du clergé français article. The second edition of the book La religion d’Israël of 1908, however, greatly expanded upon the work completed in the initial book. Loisy changed the forewords—the 1901 edition situated his work in light of Pope Leo XIII’s 1893 Providentissimus Deus and Vatican I’s decree Dei Filius, whereas the 1908 edition situated the work in light of what had transpired since he wrote the first edition. The first chapter of the 1908 edition is completely new, none of it having appeared in the 1901 edition. Loisy added new introductions to each subsequent chapter. The second chapter of the 1908 edition is an expanded version of the 1900 Firmin article which had also appeared in the first book. The remaining chapters (3–6) of the 1908 edition represent

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with an examination of the way in which Loisy used John Henry Newman’s concept of the development of doctrine to lay the groundwork for his own developmental approach to the Bible, one that we have already seen at work in previous chapters.4 In the second part of this chapter, I examine Loisy’s biblical criticism in La religion d’Israël (The Religion of Israel), which builds on the earlier biblical and ancient Near Eastern work mentioned earlier. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of how the Firmin articles and La religion d’Israël help to clarify how Loisy attempted to bring historical criticism into the world of Catholic biblical studies. Loisy’s first five Firmin articles offered a critique of the work of Adolf von Harnack and Auguste Sabatier. At the same time, the articles defended Newman’s concept of the development of doctrine while insisting upon the need to take Newman’s thought further. Newman’s one limitation, Loisy claimed, was that Newman did not take his method far enough; Loisy believed that the development Newman highlighted within church history was also apparent in the Bible itself, as we have significant expansions of the material in the 1901 edition. I have chosen to use the larger 1908 edition because I think it represents a more complete form of the argument expressed in his Firmin article, and, unlike his third edition of 1933, the 1908 edition still dates from the time of his modernist writings before his main work in the history of religions at the Collège de France. His later edition is Alfred Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 3rd ed. (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1933). Although Loisy includes more detail, citations, and information than he had in his Essais, the basic arguments remain the same. 4. Baron Friedrich von Hügel introduced Loisy to Newman’s work in 1896. See, e.g., Harvey Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église in Light of the ‘Essais,’ ” Theological Studies 67 (2006): 75. See Loisy’s own comments about this in Loisy, Choses passées, 164. In addition to his familiarity with Newman’s written work, von Hügel corresponded with Newman on several occasions. Twenty letters that von Hügel wrote to Newman remain extant, as well as notes which von Hügel took when he interviewed Newman in person. See C. J. T. Talar, “The Laity as a Factor of Progress: John Henry Newman and Friedrich von Hügel,” Newman Studies Journal 3 (2006): 61; O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 47–48, 50, 55; and Lawrence F. Barmann, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Modernist Crisis in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 5–6.

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already seen. Loisy thus defended the inclusion of historical criticism of the Bible, which he had been using all along, by showing how this method studied the very development in the biblical texts that Newman had described in church history. My argument is that Loisy’s La religion d’Israël was his attempt at tracing this developmental history within the Bible, along the lines of a specific strain of German historical criticism that rapidly became normative in the biblical scholarship of the academy. As we saw in chapter 6, above, Loisy was exceptionally well-versed in such scholarship. His point was, as he explains, to transform the entirety of the Catholic church: “Therefore I did not limit myself to criticizing M. Harnack, I implied discretely but really an essential reform of biblical exegesis, of the entirety of theology, and even of Catholicism in general.”5

Newman Applied to the Bible Under the guise of A. Firmin, Loisy marshaled Newman’s idea of doctrinal development to explain and defend the use of historical criticism in Catholic study of scripture. Newman’s work was not so much the origin of Loisy’s notions concerning development, but rather served as justification for Loisy’s own biblical criticism.6 Loisy first encountered Newman’s work in 1896. Although the roots of Loisy’s work in his Firmin articles and in his La religion d’Israël reach back to his draft Essais (1897–99)—well within the timeframe of his encounter with 5. Loisy, Choses passées, 246. Later he would amend this to: “Therefore I did not limit myself to criticizing Harnack, I implied with discretion, but actually, an essential reform of the received exegesis, of the official theology, of the ecclesiastical government in general.” Mémoires II, 168. 6. C. J. T. Talar, “Receiving Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine,” in Discourse and Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of John Henry Newman, ed. Gerard Magill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), 172–76.

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Newman—the main developmental arguments that he makes regarding the Bible were already in place, as shown above.7 In other words, the very developmental historical critical arguments that Loisy claims Newman inspired in him were in fact already present prior to his reading of Newman.8 Indeed, we 7. Carl-Friedrich Geyer, Wahrheit und Absolutheit des Christentums—Geschichte und Utopie: «L’Évangile et L’Église» von Alfred F. Loisy in Text und Kontext (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2010), 20–23; C. J. T. Talar, introduction to Prelude, ed. Talar, xii, xiv, xviii, “Newman and the ‘New Apologetics,’ ” Newman Studies Journal 6, no. 2 (2009): 49–56, “Receiving Newman’s Development,” 172–76, and “Newman in France During the Modernist Period: Pierre Batiffol and Marcel Hébert,” Newman Studies Journal 2, no. 1 (2005): 56–57; Hill, Politics of Modernism, 78n60, 91, 105–6, 108–11, 117; Francesco Turvasi, “The Development of Doctrine in John Cardinal Newman and Alfred Loisy,” in John Henry Newman: Theology and Reform, ed. Michael Allsopp and Ronald Burke (New York: Garland, 1992), 145–87; Nicholas Lash, “Newman and ‘A . Firmin,’ ” in John Henry Newman and Modernism, ed. Arthur Hilary Jenkins (Sigmaringendorf: Glock and Lutz, 1990), 56–73; Henry Wansbrough, “Newman, the Modernists and Biblical Inspiration,” in John Henry Newman, ed. Jenkins, 105–17; Ronald Burke, “Was Loisy Newman’s Modern Disciple?” in Newman and the Modernists, ed. Mary Jo Weaver (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 139–57; W. J. Wernz, “Loisy’s ‘Modernist’ Writings,” Downside Review 92 (1974): 25–45; and William John Wernz, “The ‘Modernist’ Writings of Alfred Loisy: An Analysis” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 1971), e.g., 68–75. 8. My survey of his engagement with critical scholarship in chapter 6 shows us as much. We see this, e.g., in Loisy, Histoire du canon de l’Ancien Testament, 27–28, 46, 48–49, 228–30, with his use of Richard Simon’s early partially developmental model, as well as of Edouard Reuss (Karl Heinrich was Graf ’s teacher and an important precursor to both Graf ’s and Wellhausen’s formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis). See also Loisy, Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible I: Histoire du texte hébreu de l’Ancien Testament (Amiens: Imprimerie Générale Rousseau-Leroy, 1892), 13, 66n4, 89, 109n1, 143n1, 159n2, 194, 197n1, 198, 223n2, 225n1, 225n4, 226n2, 228n1, 229n2, 230n2, 231n1, 287n1, 296n1, 303n1, 307–8, and Histoire critique du texte et des versions de la Bible II: Histoire critique des versions de l’Ancien Testament (Paris: L’Auteur, 1893), 15n2, with his use of Renan’s developmental approach (particularly Renan’s five-volume Histoire du peuple d’Israël where he follows Reuss, Graf, and Wellhausen), his use again of Simon, and his familiarity with Wellhausen whom he cites. See Ernest Renan, Histoire du peuple d’Israël (I–V) (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1887–93). Loisy was familiar with Wellhausen’s developmental approach prior to ever having encountered Newman’s work. Indeed, his close friend Friedrich von Hügel recognized Wellhausen’s influence on this early work. Friedrich von Hügel was himself very influenced by Wellhausen and by Wellhausen’s disciple and friend William Robertson Smith with whom Friedrich von Hügel met. See Barmann, Baron Friedrich von Hügel, 13–15 and 32. Regarding Wellhausen’s influence, Lawrence Barmann writes that “from 1890 until Wellhausen’s death in 1918 he [von Hügel] was a very careful and critical student of nearly everything Wellhausen wrote” (Baron Friedrich von Hügel, 13–14).

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could argue they go back to his courses with Duchesne and Renan in 1881 and 1882. Moreover, Newman’s ideas were quite different from those of Loisy.9 One need only compare Loisy’s works on the Bible with Newman’s comments on scripture in his article, “On the Inspiration of Scripture,” to see the contrast.10 Newman not only espouses a traditional view of biblical inspiration, but challenges the sort of historical critical methods and conclusions that Loisy espouses. Loisy first defended Newman’s developmental notion against detractors, and then sought to show how such development worked in religious history and in the Bible. The key work of Newman’s for Loisy was the 1845 edition of An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.11 Loisy argued that Newman’s proposal for explaining how doctrine develops over time was a brilliant description of the various historical processes by which religions evolve through the ages. Like Newman, Loisy recognized the possibility of “true” and “false” developments within the history of Christianity.12 Thus, Loisy could write: “The general condition for true development is unity of type, which must persist through all transformations which may be as considerable in their order as, in the physiological order, 9. See, e.g., the insightful comments of Keith Beaumont, “The Reception of Newman in France at the Time of the Modernist Crisis,” in Receptions of Newman, ed. Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 167: “Where Newman seeks to articulate change or innovation and permanence of identity, Loisy simply sees development in terms of adaptation to changing circumstances and of logical necessity.” See also Ricardo Miguel Mauti, “La recepción de Newman en la teología del siglo xx,” Revista teología 42 (2005): 420–21. 10. John H. Cardinal Newman, “On the Inspiration of Scripture,” The Nineteenth Century 15 (1884): 185–99. 11. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey, 1845). See, e.g., Geyer, Wahrheit und Absolutheit, 20–23; Talar, “Receiving Newman’s Development,” 172–76; Turvasi, “Development of Doctrine,” 145–87; Lash, “Newman and ‘A . Firmin,’ ” 56–73; Wansbrough, “Newman,” 105–17; Burke, “Was Loisy,” 139– 57; Wernz, “Loisy’s ‘Modernist’ Writings,” 25–45, and “ ‘Modernist’ Writings,” 68–75. 12. Firmin, “Le développement chrétien,” 6–7 (ET, 3–4).

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are those of animal life from its embryonic to its perfect state.”13 Here Loisy sounded very much like Newman. Immediately following this sentence, however, Loisy explains, “It should be noted that one of the most common causes of corruption [d’altération] or false development in the religious order is the fixed determination not to follow the idea in its evolution and to enclose oneself blindly in the tradition of the past.”14 This statement demonstrates a contrast, however. For Newman, a “false” development, which he also called an “unfaithful” development, was a “corruption” not because it was a refusal to develop, but rather precisely because its development was “unfaithful to the ideas from which it started.”15 Hence Loisy was elucidating his own understanding of doctrinal development and not simply relying upon Newman’s argument. One purpose of Loisy’s comment here was to criticize his detractors who eschewed any notion of doctrinal development; this definition of development showed these critics, not as the preservers of tradition, but rather tradition’s corrupters—they were the representatives of a “false development in the religious order.”16 Loisy praised Newman throughout the first of his Firmin articles, “The Development of Christianity According to Cardinal Newman.”17 He also provided a number of examples within the history of Catholic doctrinal development that he thought would allay the fears of his Catholic audience, not so much about the idea of development, but about the inclusion of scientific hypotheses within the realm of theological inquiry. Loisy was well aware that his opponents were concerned about the use 13. Ibid., 6 (ET, 4). 14. Ibid., 6–7. 15. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, chap. 1, section II.1. 16. Firmin, “Le développement chrétien,” 7 (ET, 4). 17. See also comments in Lash, “Newman and ‘A . Firmin,’ ” 56–73.

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of historical biblical criticism in Catholic studies of scripture.18 Loisy attempted to explain to his opponents that they had nothing to fear from modern biblical criticism. As with many of his contemporary Bible scholars, Loisy spoke of historical criticism as a scientific method. He explained to his readers, however, that virtually all dogmas began as scientific hypotheses, much like the conclusions of historical criticism. Only later did they develop into the church’s official teaching. He provided numerous examples, from the dogma of the consubstantiality of God the Father and God the Son to that of transubstantiation. Loisy asserted that these were scientific hypotheses before they were accepted by the church, and afterwards, the church no longer used earlier hypotheses that were found to be inadequate explanations.19 He concluded this discussion in dialectical fashion, by imposing a dichotomy intended to help his readers understand that they had a stark choice before them: either remain Catholic and accept Newman’s account of the development of doctrine, or else leave the church: The theory of development provides, and is alone in providing, a satisfactory explanation of the changes which have occurred in Catho18. Loisy was aware that Pope Leo XIII’s 1893 Providentissimus Deus was partly directed against him (as well as against Maurice D’Hulst). Hill, “Leo XIII, Loisy, and the ‘Broad School,’ ” 40 and 46; V. Fusco, “Un secolo di metodo storico nell’esegesi cattolica (1893– 1993),” Studia Patavina 41 (1994): 341–98; and Parente, “Monsignor D’Hulst,” 837–85. On the manner in which the composition of both Pope St. Pius X’s 1907 Pascendi Dominici Gregis and the Holy Office’s 1907 Lamentabili Sane Exitu was affected by the controversy over Loisy, see Claus Arnold, “ ‘Lamentabili sane exitu’ (1907). Das Römische Lehramt und die Exegese Alfred Loisy,” Journal for the History of Modern Theology/Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 11 (2004): 24–51; “Antimodernismo e magistero romano: la redazione della Pascendi,” Rivista di storia del cristianesimo 5 (2008): 345–64; and “Le cas Loisy au début du pontificat de Pie X (1903),” in La papauté contemporaine (xixe–xxe siècles). Hommage au chanoine Roger Aubert, professeur émérité à l’Université catholique de Louvain, pour ses 95 ans, ed. J.-P. Delville and M. Jacoˇv (Louvain-la-Neuve: Erasmus College; Leuven: University Library; Vatican City: Vatican Secret Archive, 2009), 231–43. 19. Firmin, “Le développement chrétien,” 16–18 (ET, 12–14).

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lic Christianity since the beginning and which occur daily under our very eyes and demand that rational and scientific explanation; otherwise all these changes would turn into invincible [insolubles] objections against a Church whose glory is to have preserved intact the deposit of the Gospel, uncorrupted [sans altération] and always keeping the same identity.20

Taking Newman Further Loisy’s laudatory appraisal of Newman was not without a caveat; Newman did not go far enough with his theory of development. This, then, was Loisy’s project in his Firmin articles, and later in L’Évangile et l’Église—to take Newman and apply his developmental notion to the scriptures themselves.21 Loisy explained that, since the time of Newman, the new world of which he spoke has become yet larger and has been explored still further; the scientific knowledge of the origins of Christianity, and indeed of the origins and history of all the religions, has made enormous progress; the conquest dreamed of by his apostolic soul has not yet been accomplished, for it is a conquest which needs to be constantly pursued, but it may be said that thanks to him it is carried on under more advantageous conditions.22

In light of this, Loisy proposed taking Newman further, examining the development of religion in general, from the dawn of hu20. Ibid., 18 (ET, 14). Compare his comments here with those, this time against the Protestant scholars Sabatier, von Harnack, et al., in Firmin, “La théorie individualiste,” 212–13 (ET, 26–27). 21. Alfred Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 2nd ed. (Paris: Alfred Loisy, 1903). This book was published in English as The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912). A more readily available recent English edition has been published as The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976). 22. Firmin, “Le développement chrétien,” 15 (ET, 12).

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man history. Newman’s developmental model would and should be applied to the Gospels and to the Old Testament.23 Before going into the religious development in scripture, Loisy entered the growing discussion of the phenomenological history of religion. Contrary to his Protestant interlocutors, Auguste Sabatier and Adolf von Harnack, whom Loisy envisioned as upholding a notion of religion that focused on the individual believer, Loisy emphasized religion’s communal quality. He objected, “To say religion is to say the opposite of individualism.”24 Although he was critical of Durkheim, whose colleague he would soon become, Loisy joined Durkheim in emphasizing the essentially social nature of religion. In his essay dealing specifically with a definition of religion, Loisy explained: “Both reason and history force us to include the character of a social institution in the definition of religion.”25 Indeed, Loisy explained the apparent necessity of both tradition and priesthood within religion on the basis of religion’s fundamentally social nature.26 Loisy remained cautious, however, about adopting specific evolutionary models of religion, and one of his major complaints about von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) was that Christianity is a constantly evolving religious tradition, and thus it does not have a pristine essence discoverable through some sort of historical investi23. See his comments in ibid., 12–13 (ET, 9); and Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 12–15, 17– 19, 61–62, 64–67, 100–101, 104, 163–64, 234–35, 293–94 (ET, xxiv–xxvi, xxix, 43–44, 46–48, 80–81, 84, 143–44, 215, 274). 24. Firmin, “La théorie individualiste,” 204 (ET, 18). 25. Firmin, “La définition de la religion,” 200 (ET, 37). Despite the similarity here with Durkheim, in his review of Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse Loisy did not agree with Durkheim that the social and the religious are completely identical. See Alfred Loisy, “Sociologie et religion,” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 4 (1913): 76. Durkheim’s work is available as Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie, 4th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1960 [1912]). 26. Firmin, “La définition de la religion,” 201 (ET, 37–38).

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gation.27 Christianity was not a static artifact from a long dead past, but rather was alive and thus continually developing.28

Development in the Old Testament Loisy mentioned, throughout his Firmin articles, the need to bring Newman’s notion of development into scripture and the history of Israel.29 Loisy explained why he thought Newman did not address this issue in his own time: On the manner in which revelation itself enters into the development and fastens itself to it, Newman is less than explicit. This is certainly not because he was afraid to come to grips with the problem; it was rather that the question did not present itself to him in the terms in which it now presents itself to contemporary theology following the critical effort of the last fifty years. The biblical question seems to have been among the least of his preoccupations, unless at the end of his life, and it is in relation to the Bible that the problem of divine revelation demands the attention of the philosopher and the historian.30 27. Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1900). For an English translation see What Is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901). It is important to keep in mind that although he did in fact disagree with von Harnack and Sabatier, as well as with the other liberal Protestants with whose works he engaged, Loisy exaggerates his differences with them in L’Évangile et l’Église and in these earlier Firmin articles, and he was in reality much closer to their position. In fact, in many ways his biblical criticism, indebted to liberal German Protestant exegesis, was more radical than theirs, as he concedes in his autobiographical writings. Loisy admits that, with regard to publishing his Firmin articles in Revue du clergé français, “All was permitted to me in the critique of Protestant exegetes, on the condition that I did not express my personal conclusions, which were more radical” (Loisy, Choses passées, 209). See also ibid., 246; and Wendell S. Dietrich, “Loisy and the Liberal Protestants,” Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 14 (1985): 303–11. 28. Firmin, “La théorie individualiste,” 209–10 (ET, 24). 29. See, e.g., Firmin, “Le développement chrétien,” 8–9 (ET, 5–6). This was the purpose as Loisy expressed it in Choses passées, 174–75 (ET, 173). 30. Firmin, “Le développement chrétien,” 13 (ET, 10).

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In the discussion of divine revelation in his essay, “The Idea of Revelation,” Loisy emphasized the importance of bringing the results of modern science, which for him included historical criticism, to bear on religious doctrine.31 Although Loisy maintained that theological doctrine must be adjusted in light of the findings of contemporary science in order for the faith to survive, he insisted that religion “must seize on science and master it in order to put it to the service of faith.”32 Contrary to Loisy’s speculations, Newman was in fact aware of such developmental models and biblical interpretive frameworks, although Loisy may not have been aware of this.33 Newman addressed just such historical methods engaged by those to whom he referred as representatives of the “critical school.”34 Newman very clearly articulated his own view of the history of Israel as it unfolded in the canonical narratives of the Old Testament in his Grammar of Assent.35 Moreover, in his essay, “On the Inspiration of Scripture,” Newman specifically addressed the “critical school,” and in particular, he focused on Renan, Loisy’s own teacher.36 Although Newman was aware of challenges to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, for example, he preferred to understand Moses as incorporating earlier sources.37 Newman conceded that “we have no reason to be surprised, nor is it against the faith to hold, that a canonical book may be composed, not only from, but even of, pre-existing documents.”38 31. E.g., Firmin, “L’idée de la revelation,” 253–54 (ET, 48). 32. Ibid., 254 (ET, 48). 33. Whether or not Loisy was aware of this work of Newman’s, von Hügel was intimately familiar with Newman’s work here, and specifically with this essay, about which von Hügel and Newman exchanged letters. O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 55. 34. Newman, “On the Inspiration of Scripture,” 195. 35. Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1903 [1870]), 432–59. 36. Newman, “On the Inspiration of Scripture,” 185–99. 37. Ibid., 195. 38. Ibid.

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To this, he added the caveat, however: “It being always borne in mind, as a necessary condition, that an inspired mind has exercised a supreme and an ultimate judgment on the work, determining what was to be selected and embodied in it, in order to its truth in all ‘matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine,’ and its unadulterated truth.”39 In contrast to Loisy, Newman maintained that the ultimate judge of even historical matters was the church’s Magisterium.40 Newman’s fundamental orientation toward scripture included a profound docility to Magisterial pronouncements. This contrasted with Loisy’s orientation toward scripture, which emphasized history and science over the Magisterium. Newman’s view can be captured in his answer to Catholics of the “critical school”: Such then is the answer which I make to the main question which has led to my writing. I asked what obligation of duty lay upon the Catholic scholar or man of science as regards his critical treatment of the text and the matter of Holy Scripture. And now I say that it is his duty, first, never to forget that what he is handling is the Word of God, which, by reason of the difficulty of always drawing the line between what is human and what is divine, cannot be put on the level of other books, as it is now the fashion to do, but has the nature of a Sacrament, which is outward and inward, and a channel of supernatural grace; and secondly, that, in what he writes upon it or its separate books, he is bound to submit himself internally, and to profess to submit himself, in all that relates to faith and morals, to the definite teachings of Holy Church.41

This statement of Newman indicates the disingenuousness with which Loisy used the concept of development as applied to biblical studies; Newman would never have used the concept in such a way. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 189–90, 192, 197. 41. Ibid., 192.

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Scripture and Its Senses Before turning our attention to Loisy’s La religion d’Israël, a few comments are in order about Loisy’s defense of the spiritual sense of scripture in his penultimate Firmin article, entitled “The Proofs and the Economy of Revelation.”42 Early in this essay, Loisy criticized biblical scholars, including his own teacher Renan, as biblical rationalists, against whom he envisioned the First Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution Dei Filius directing its aim.43 Loisy proceeded to discuss the problem of prophecy in scripture, namely that so-called Old Testament prophecies, as they are used in the New Testament, appear to be completely misappropriated and misunderstood by the New Testament authors. As Loisy explains: One could take them [prophecies in the Bible] one after the other, all those cited in the New Testament, all those which have kept their place in the books of apologetics, from the serpent’s curse in Genesis up to the symbolic descriptions of the Apocalypse, without finding more than a few which, for those who wrote them down, clearly bore the precise meaning attributed to them by tradition, or which would obviously be predictions, that is to say, miracles of prescience [prévision], in the strict sense of the word.44

Loisy sought to account for this difficulty through the logic of spiritual interpretation. He began by explaining: “The liberty which we see taken by the New Testament in its interpretation of the Old, and the use of an exegesis which allowed the discovery in 42. Firmin, “Les preuves,” 126–53 (ET, 63–86). 43. Ibid., 130–31 (ET, 67). In 1913 Loisy wrote that “Renan was truly my master [teacher, maître]” (Choses passées, 373). On Renan’s influence on Loisy, see ibid., 65–66, 75, 372–74; Harvey Hill, “Loisy’s ‘Mystical Faith’: Loisy, Leo XIII, and Sabatier on Moral Education and the Church,” Theological Studies 65 (2004): 75–76, and Politics of Modernism, 3–4, 6, 25–28, 31. 44. Firmin, “Les preuves,” 133–34 (ET, 69–70).

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certain passages, taken out of context, of messianic prophecies in the most precise sense, may be explained, from a historical point of view, by habits of mind very remote from our own.”45 Against Protestant scholars like Sabatier who ridiculed the spiritual sense as used by the Church Fathers, Loisy defended the logic of recourse to the spiritual sense, even where at first blush patristic exegesis might appear to be little more than special pleading.46 His defense centered on the recognition of the unity within the history of doctrinal development, that is, of its continuity despite having evolved over time, which spiritual interpretation implied.47 This is not all, but, contra the likes of scholars from Durkheim and his followers to von Harnack and those critics of the Catholic faith for whom Loisy’s work appeared to be a Catholic apologetic, Loisy emphasized the limits of reason, separating reason and science on the one hand, and faith and grace on the other, in order that they might be united in a useful way.48

La religion d’Israël and la critique biblique Loisy’s La religion d’Israël did not pretend to be an exhaustive scholarly treatment of the subject, with the requisite engagement with available secondary literature and attention to fine details and sustained argument and so on. Rather, in La religion d’Israël Loisy attempted to summarize the main points of modern biblical criticism that were generally shared by Protestant scholars in particular, and those Catholic scholars like himself who were engaged in historical critical investigations. By this point in his academic career, Loisy had already established 45. Ibid., 134 (ET, 70). 46. Ibid., 134–35 (ET, 70–71). 47. See his comments in, e.g., ibid. 48. Ibid., 138–39 and 141–44 (ET, 73–74 and 76–78).

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himself as an authority on the Old Testament and on its ancient Near Eastern environment, as we saw in the first few chapters of this book.49 He did not engage much in Assyriological studies for this work, but he used the skill sets he learned from his earlier Assyriological and historical critical training in his examination of the religion and history of Israel in this volume. Loisy had originally written the first portion of La religion d’Israël as the last of his Firmin articles published in Revue du clergé français, and it was intended to be the first of three installments. In Loisy’s methodological discussion, he prioritized source criticism; he maintained that la critique des sources (the criticism of the sources) was the necessary first step in any scientific study of the Bible.50 He defended this assertion by explaining: We have been forced to recognize that the Bible is not a book composed in extra-human conditions, but is a rather disparate collection, although it is dominated by the same religious spirit in which for the benefit of the faith, historical data, legendary traditions, pure myths had been exploited, all of which can be discerned as with any other book from antiquity, by the methods commonly applied in text criticism [la critique des textes].51

In his discussion of the problem of sources Loisy included a discussion of historicity. He made it abundantly clear that, in 49. E.g., Loisy, Études bibliques, 2nd ed., and Les mythes babyloniens. 50. Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 7–8 (ET, xxi). 51. Author’s translation from ibid., 9–10 (ET, xxii). Earlier, Loisy explained that the first notion that had to be abandoned was the idea that the scriptures were exempts de toute erreur (exempt from all error) (ibid., 8 [ET, xxi]). According to Loisy, any theologians or historians who retained such an outmoded view, untenable in light of the historical criticism that Loisy advocated, had all “shut their eyes to their [the scriptures’] contradictions, improbabilities, the mythical or legendary character of many narratives” (author’s translation from ibid.). He then provided a lengthy list of familiar biblical stories and events he found simply unbelievable, including (1) that God led Abraham from Ur to Canaan, (2) that God rescued the Israelites from Egypt, (3) that God fed Israel with manna for forty years, (4) that God made Balaam’s donkey talk, (5) that God fed Daniel in the lions’ den, etc. (ibid., 8–9 [ET, xxi–xxii]).

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his estimation, prior to the time of the monarchy there was no reliable historical information in the Bible. He claimed that the biblical material concerning figures like Moses and Samuel was too intertwined with legend to be credible historically, or ever to be profitable to the student of history. The situation was even bleaker when he turned to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Unsurprisingly, Loisy envisioned Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Noah as firmly planted in the ahistorical realm of mythology.52 Loisy’s discussion of the history and religion of Israel is thus conditioned by his acceptance of what were rapidly becoming viewed as the assured results of historical criticism, in its source critical mode.53 According to Loisy, the historical books and the Pentateuch were compilations, perhaps based in part on older material, but reworked, edited, and, in most cases, written much later than the events they purported to describe, justifying the politics of various parties within the history of later Israel (after the kingdom’s split into north and south) and, in many cases, during and after the Babylonian exile.54 Loisy was very much in line with the most up-to-date findings of source critical scholarship. A good example of this is where Loisy implicitly linked the Sinaitic and Deutoronomic covenants to52. Ibid., 11 (ET, xxiv). 53. Significantly, Loisy viewed the Old Testament as the primary and most important source for understanding the history of Israel, and when it came to examining sources for understanding the religion of Israel, Loisy included in his discussion non-canonical sources like the Assumption of Moses, 1 Enoch, Psalms of Solomon, Sibylline Oracles etc. (ibid., 38 [ET, 18]). Even though he thought much of the Old Testament was little more than fiction, legend, or mythology, he maintained the significance of such sources for understanding the religious sensibilities of the times in which they were composed and edited. As he explained: “Narratives like Esther and Judith, Jonah and Tobit, if they are accepted to the letter, give us only false ideas touching on the relations of Israel with Nineveh and the kings of Assyria, with the kings of Persia and the court at Susa: however they are precious testimonies of the religious and moral sentiment, of family life, or of the exasperation of the national sentiment, in certain epochs, in the Jewish community” (my own translation from ibid., 40 [ET, 20]). 54. Ibid., 10–11 (ET, xxiii).

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gether, when he wrote: “The Law, proclaimed by God from Sinai or in the plains of Moab, was all elaborated in the last years of the monarchy, or after the captivity: the Mosaic revelation was nothing more than a theological fiction [fiction de théologiens].”55 Many of the foundational core principles guiding this research had been long established in scholarly circles, especially Loisy’s arguments against the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, against Joshua’s authorship of the Book of Joshua and against Samuel’s authorship of the Book of Judges.56 These positions had, of course, been quite widespread among scholars since the seventeenth century, and remain ubiquitous today. Ever since the seventeenth century, the issue of the Pentateuch’s composition had become something of a litmus test— both among critical scholars who pushed its composition later in Israelite history and, since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, began to see multiple sources behind the text, as well as by more traditional readers of the Bible who maintained an earlier date of composition and a primarily unitary view of Mosaic authorship.57 In 1906, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, whose secretary was none other than one of Loisy’s former teachers, Vigouroux, affirmed the role of Moses as the principal inspired author of the Pentateuch, a position soon to be vigorously defended by Augustin Bea.58 Although far from a lone Catholic 55. Ibid., 11–12 (ET, xxiv, translation altered). 56. Ibid., 10 and 24–25 (ET, xxiii and 4). 57. Morrow, “Acid of History,” 169–80, Three Skeptics and the Bible, and “Faith, Reason, and History,” 658–73; Jean Bernier, La critique du Pentateuque de Hobbes à Calmet (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010); Gibert, L’invention critique, 111–13 and 169; Legaspi, Death of Scripture, 137–40; and Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 383–86. 58. Pontifical Biblical Institute, “De mosaica authentia Pentateuchi,” Acta Sanctae Sedis 39 (1906): 377–78; and Augustin Bea, De Pentateucho (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1928). Bea, who studied under Eduard Meyer (among others) at the University of Berlin in 1913, eventually republished this work in a revised edition as De Pentateucho (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1933) after he became the rector of the Pontifical

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voice, Loisy’s work was significant in this context because he was bringing into the world of Catholic biblical studies what had become commonplace, and was rapidly becoming even more so in the broader scholarly community—namely, a documentary account of the Pentateuch’s composition. As was then fairly standard, Loisy dated the final composition or redaction of the Pentateuch to approximately 400 B.C.59 He also followed the then current source critical trend dividing the Pentateuch into primarily four major documentary sources, J, E, D, and P.60 Although this theory, made internationally famous in Wellhausen’s classic formulation, was criticized by Bible professors of the old vanguard (such as Vigouroux), Loisy’s attributions of authorship, editorial process, and dating was by then fairly standard.61 Some such documentary hypothesis prevailed among Bible scholars writing in German, French, and English, especially in mainstream Protestant scholarly circles. A growing number of Catholic Bible scholars, like Loisy himself, and also, albeit to a lesser degree, some Jewish scholars, particularly those who were studying at historically Protestant instiBiblical Institute (1930–49). On these matters, see Maurice Gilbert, The Pontifical Biblical Institute: A Century of History (1909–2009), trans. Leo Arnold (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2009), 9, 67, 118, 185, and “Le Cardinal Augustin Bea: 1881–1968: La Bible, rencontre des Chrétiens et des Juifs,” Nouvelle revue théologique 105 (1983): 369–83. For an important discussion of the context of this debate during Loisy’s and Bea’s time, see Jean-Louis Ska, “L’Institut Biblique et l’hypothèse documentaire: un dialogue difficile. À propos du Pentateuque,” in Biblical Exegesis in Progress: Old and New Testament Essays, ed. J. N. Aletti and J. L. Ska (Rome: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2009), 1–32. On the history of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, see Albert Vanhoye, “Passé et présent de la Commission Biblique,” Gregorianum 74 (1993): 261–75. On Vigouroux’s relationship to Loisy, who began as Vigouroux’s student and later served as his teaching assistant, see Loisy, Choses passées, 55–60; and Hill, Politics of Modernism, 27–28, 31, 34–35. 59. Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 24 (ET, 4). 60. Loisy explained: “The sources, moreover, are not individual compositions, but collections which had already been tampered with before they were submitted to a common editorship” (ibid., 29 [ET, 9]). Loisy even postulated an earlier author prior to J and E (ibid., 29–30). 61. Loisy dated the earliest portions of J and E to the ninth century B.C.

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tutions such as the University of Pennsylvania, were likewise operating on such a documentary model.62 Loisy followed scholars like Wellhausen (whom he did not cite in the second edition of La religion d’Israël) in placing J earliest among the Pentateuchal sources.63 Although J may derive from prior to the exile, he detected Babylonian influence on J. Such Babylonian influence, he maintained, did not relegate its Sitz im Leben to the exile, as he believed Babylonian culture had long exerted influence in Canaan. He demurred against the idea that J and E were wholly independent of each other, asserting that portions of E derived from an even earlier period, although Loisy followed the by then standard northern/southern distinction, where J represented the political concerns of Judah in the south, and E represented the political concerns of Israel in the north. As had been standard since at least Wilhelm de Wette’s doctoral dissertation, D derived from Josiah’s reforms, and the Books of Judges through Kings were at the very least revised in light of Deuteronomy.64 P, including the Holiness 62. See, e.g., Alan T. Levenson, The Making of the Modern Jewish Bible: How Scholars in Germany, Israel, and America Transformed an Ancient Text (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 158–60; and Yaacov Shavit and Mordechai Eran, The Hebrew Bible Reborn: From Holy Scripture to the Book of Books: A History of Biblical Culture and the Battles over the Bible in Modern Judaism (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 405–7. However, some of the most vigorous and careful criticisms of the Documentary Hypothesis and its dating have come from the pen of Jewish scholars, e.g., Cassuto, La questione della Genesi; Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel: From Its Beginning to the Babylonian Exile, abridged and trans. Moshe Greenberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), and History of the Religion of Israel vol. 4: From the Babylonian Captivity to the End of Prophecy, trans. C. W. Efroymson (New York: Ktav, 1977); Gary A. Rendsburg, The Redaction of Genesis (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1986); and Joshua Berman, “CTH 133 and the Hittite Provenance of Deuteronomy 13,” Journal of Biblical Literature 130 (2011): 25–44. 63. The omission of Wellhausen here in the second edition of La religion d’Israël and its English translation, Religion of Israel, is striking because, although Wellhausen is absent from the section of Essais which would become La religion d’Israël, Loisy does explicitly cite Wellhausen in his first book-length edition of La religion d’Israël of 1901, on 58n3. 64. De Wette’s University of Jena doctoral dissertation was entitled “Dissertatio critica qua a prioribus Deuteronomium pentateuchi libris diversum, alius cuiusdam recentioris

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Code as well as the first creation account, came out of the Babylonian exile.65 Turning to the patriarchal narratives in Genesis, Loisy wrote: “Although the patriarchal legends, for example, teach us nothing about the personages who figure in them, for the good reason that they never existed; yet they do inform us, not only about the spirit of ancient Israel, but about its origins.”66 Following the work of Eduard Meyer (1855–1930), Loisy believed that the connection of Abraham and Sarah with the sanctuaries at Hebron showed an earlier history behind the text. He hypothesized that the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis originated as Canaanite auctoris opus esse monstratur” (1805), and was a mere sixteen pages in length; see Wilhelm M. L. de Wette, Opuscula Theologica (Berlin: G. Reimerum, 1830), 149–68. See Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 38–40; and John W. Rogerson, W.M.L. de Wette: Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), 39–42. 65. Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 28–32, 41–42, 56–57, 189–93, 229–30 (ET, 8–11, 21–22, 36–37, 169–72, 210–11). Loisy followed many of the standard arguments concerning dating and composition of the prophets as well. He placed Amos as the earliest among the prophets. Isaiah he divided into two major parts (Isaiah 1–39 and 40–66), with none of the second part deriving from the historical Isaiah (ibid., 32–34 [ET, 12–13]). Loisy singles out Ezekiel as the book that “has the most regular construction, and has suffered least from re-editing in traditional interests” (ibid., 33 [ET, 13]). Loisy mentioned that Ezekiel may very well have been one of the editors of the Pentateuch (ibid., 214 [ET, 196]). This is especially interesting in light of the recent work which has shown Ezekiel’s awareness of traditions in D, P, and H, e.g., Scott Walker Hahn and John Sietze Bergsma, “What Laws Were ‘Not Good’? A Canonical Approach to the Theological Problem of Ezekiel 20:25–26,” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004): 201–18. Significantly, Loisy anticipated later criticisms—like those in J. Iverach Munro, The Samaritan Pentateuch and Modern Criticism (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1911), esp. 4, 58–60, 90—which would point to problems with Wellhausenian-style documentary hypotheses for understanding Pentateuchal composition. The basic argument concerns the Samaritan Pentateuch. Munro and others posed the challenge that if something like what Wellhausen envisioned were true, then the Samaritan Pentateuch would only be expected to contain E, but in fact it contains all the texts linked with J (southern), E, D, and P. Anticipating such criticism, Loisy explained that the Samaritans derived from the banished priests during the time of Nehemiah, but that Judaeans in Samaria retained close relations with southerners, and, moreover, that these ancestors to Samaritan priests accepted the Torah in its successive stages of development, including as it was edited (Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 236–38 [ET, 217–18]). 66. Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 44–45 (ET, 24–25, translation altered).

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gods whom the Israelites appropriated as their patriarchal and matriarchal forebears.67 Israel’s prior adoption of Yahweh as its God, who Loisy was convinced was originally the local deity of Sinai (perhaps a snake God), and their subsuming the Canaanite deities as patriarchs and matriarchs subservient to Yahweh is what distinguished Israel from the nations, making it a nation in its own right.68 It was only later, in David’s “train” (la suite) that Yahweh became the master deity of Jerusalem.69 At the heart of this historical reconstruction for Loisy, as for the scholars he followed, were the political machinations of those responsible for composing, compiling, and editing the biblical sources. As Loisy explained: No one disputes the general outlines of Israelite history after the establishment of the Kingdom: a short period of unity, under David and Solomon; a schism between Ephraim and Judah under Solomon’s successor, and an ensuing period of hostility; Ephraim then threatened by Damascus, and soon after destroyed by Assyria; Judah overthrown a little later by Babylon; but its remnant forming itself again into a community with religious autonomy under the sovereignty of Persia, Greece, and Rome. Now this frame-work of political history may be reconstructed from our existing documents; and, in a similar way, our documents are fitted into this frame-work. So also is the evolution of the religious history, which was always in the closest relation with the political history.70

In the end, Loisy saw the tragedy of the exile with its destruction of the Jerusalem Temple as the historical event that made a written Pentateuch necessary for Israel. While the Temple 67. Ibid., 45–48 and 59 (ET, 25–27 and 39). 68. Ibid., 49–50 and 81–82 (ET, 29–30 and 62–63). 69. Ibid., 142 (ET, 121). 70. Ibid., 41 (ET, 21). See also his comment that “Religious unity went parallel with national unity” (141 [ET, 120]).

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was still standing, with its sacrificial cult in place, primarily oral traditions were all that were necessary.71 The priests were best suited for this task of writing the details of the cult because they were the ones who had been primarily responsible for its performance.72

Loisy and Biblical Criticism in the Nineteenth Century Loisy remains historically significant for bringing modern biblical criticism into the Catholic world, even though he was not alone in this endeavor.73 One of the key figures here who remained unnamed in the Firmin articles, including the second edition of La religion d’Israël, is Wellhausen.74 This is the more striking because, in the initial published version of La religion d’Israël in 1901, Loisy does in fact cite Wellhausen.75 It is likely Loisy omitted Wellhausen in the book’s second 71. Ibid., 213–14 (ET, 195). 72. Ibid., 214. 73. On Loisy’s influence in later twentieth-century biblical criticism in both the Catholic world and beyond (for example in the work of the important Protestant exegete Rudolf Bultmann) see Ronald Burke, “Loisy’s Faith: Landshift in Catholic Thought,” Journal of Religion 60 (1980): 140 and 145–46; Diether Hoffman-Axthelm, “Loisy’s ‘L’Évangile et l’Église’: Besichtigung eines zeitgenössischen Schlachtfeldes,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 65 (1968): 291–328; and Rosemary Radford Reuther, “Loisy: History and Commitment,” Continuum 3 (1965): 152–67. 74. Loisy claimed that he would not cite sources outside the Bible in La religion d’Israël (15 [ET, xxvii]), but he proceeded to cite a handful of scholars, primarily Germans. 75. Loisy, La religion d’Israël (1901), 58n3. The reference is to Wellhausen’s Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte. Wellhausen originally published Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte in 1894 (Berlin: Reimer, 1894); three years later the book was already in its third edition (Berlin: Reimer, 1897). Loisy possibly used the original 1894 edition, as that is the one he cites in the beginning of his draft of Essais (37n3). On the development of Wellhausen’s Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte, which reached a seventh edition in his lifetime (Berlin: Reimer, 1914), see Rudolf Smend, “Israelitische und Jüdische Geschichte. Zur Entstehung von Julius Wellhausens Buch,” in Geschichte – Tradition – Reflexion. Festchrift für Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag, I: Judentum, ed. Peter Schäfer (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1996), 35–42.

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edition (the first he desired to make public) because of how infamous Wellhausen’s name was by this point in the Catholic world. Even though Loisy would cite Wellhausen in his more scholarly texts, for the purposes of this book, which he wanted to have a broader influence, he wanted his argument to be accepted by his readers, and perhaps feared many would reject it out of hand at the mention of someone like Wellhausen, who was known for his anti-Catholic sentiments. Nevertheless, Wellhausen marked “out much of the territory within which later scholarship [was] to operate.”76 Wellhausen’s absence should come as a surprise to us, especially because Loisy cited one of Wellhausen’s intellectual sparring partners, Eduard Meyer, who was lesser known, and because of the presence of Wellhausen in the less-widely circulated first edition of Loisy’s volume.77 Meyer himself was in some regards indebted to Wellhausen’s work, which he took further, but in places where the two disagree, Loisy often appears closer to Wellhausen than to Meyer.78 Unlike 76. Nahkola, Double Narratives, 14. 77. Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 7. Wellhausen saw Meyer’s work, especially his Die Entstehung des Judentums (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1896), as an attack on his own source critical analysis. See the helpful discussion in Joseph Blenkinsopp, Judaism, the First Phase: The Place of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Origins of Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2009), 28–32. 78. Indeed, Loisy had been reading Wellhausen’s works for quite some time, as his various citations of Wellhausen in early publications makes clear. For example, Loisy cited Wellhausen in Les mythes babyloniens (published the same year as the first edition of religion d’Israël), 80n1, as well as Wellhausen’s disciples Bernhard Duhm (1847–1928) and William Robertson Smith (1846–94) on 29n1, 31n2, 35n1, 36nn3–4; he cited Wellhausen in Études bibliques, 207, and Histoire critique du texte I, 66n4, 109n1, 143n1, 159n2, 194, 196, 197n1, 198, 223n2, 225n1, 225n4, 226n2, 228n1, 229n2, 230n2, 231n1, 287n1, 296n1, 303n1, and Histoire critique du texte II, 15n2. That Wellhausen, and German biblical criticism in general, had been influential on Loisy’s work has been noted by scholars. See Rosanna Ciappa, “La réforme du régime intellectual de l’Église catholique,” in Alfred Loisy, ed. Laplanche, 561–63. See Loisy’s own comments on the influence of German biblical criticism, and the work of Edouard Reuss (1851–1911), whom he explicitly mentions, as well as his acknowledged familiarity with Wellhausen’s work, in Loisy, Choses passées, 77–78 and 170. Also refer to chapter 6 of this book.

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many who followed Wellhausen, however, Loisy did not attempt to build upon Wellhausen’s classic formulation of the Documentary Hypothesis.79 In Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prolegomena to the History of Israel), Wellhausen explained his joy at discovering that the prophets should be dated prior to the Pentateuch.80 Wellhausen learned this from Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–69). Loisy likewise taught: “Instead of the prophets having come after the Law, it was they who inspired it.”81 By the time Loisy wrote these words in La religion d’Israël, this view had become commonplace, and it remains the dominant view among scholars today, over a century later. As we have seen, Loisy likewise dated much of the Pentateuchal source material to the Babylonian exile, and to Babylonian influence more broadly speaking.82 Some critics might be tempted to criticize Loisy as influenced by the Pan-Babylonian movement that reigned among many of the German sources Loisy was reading at that time, as epitomized in the work of Friedrich Delitzsch.83 Loisy, however, explicitly condemned all forms 79. Classic examples of Loisy’s contemporaries who built upon Wellhausen are Bruno Baentsch and Otto Eissfeldt. Baentsch divided the Priestly source into P, Ps, Ps*, Pss, Ph, Po, Pr, Px, R, Rp, and then had tentative redactors as Po1, Po1s, Po2, Po2s, Pha, Phb, Phc, Phs, Pra, Prs, Prss, Rpo, Rpo1, Rpo2, Rph, Rps. See Bruno Baentsch, Exodus-Leviticus-Numeri (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1903). Six years before Loisy died, Otto Eissfeldt, in his Einleitung in das Alte Testament unter Einschluss der Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934), divided the major sources into L, J, E, B, D, H, P. 80. J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Berlin: Reimer, 1883), 4. 81. Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 12 (ET, xxiv). 82. See Loisy’s comments about the Babylonian origin of the Flood story in ibid., 28 and 47–48 (ET, 8 and 27), as well as about circumcision and the Sabbath (213 [ET, 194– 95]). Significantly, Loisy denied that there was any noticeable Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch (49 [ET, 29]). Since Loisy’s time, a host of studies have come out emphasizing Egyptian influence on the Pentateuch, e.g., James K. Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); John D. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1997), esp. 53–155; and Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt. 83. Arnold and Weisberg, “Delitzsch in Context,” 37–45, and “A Centennial Review of

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of Pan-Babylonism, which he saw as often little more than the result of lazy scholarship.84 One key to Loisy’s appropriation of the historical critical method is the importance he laid on historical scholarship as a science that was indispensable to theology. In order to be useful for theology, however, history and science must be free from prior theological commitments, and must proceed according to their own canons. Harvey Hill explains that “Loisy had insisted historical scholarship be free of theological or philosophical presuppositions and instead rely on those facts that historians could ascertain based on the available evidence. Philosophy and theology followed from history, in his view, not the reverse.”85 Of course, Loisy showed no indication that such a position evidenced his own prior theological commitments, against theology. Loisy’s developmental approach to biblical history was a result of the historical criticism he learned from Renan, which enabled him to use the concept of doctrinal development and apply it to the Bible.86 It is this developmental and historical Friedrich Delitzsch’s ‘Babel und Bibel’ Lectures,” Journal of Biblical Literature 121 (2002): 441–57; and Chavalas, “Assyriology and Biblical Studies,” 21–22 and 31–34. 84. Loisy, La religion d’Israël, 16–17 and 39 (ET, xxviii and 19). 85. Harvey Hill, “Henri Bergson and Alfred Loisy: On Mysticism and the Religious Life,” in Modernists and Mystics, ed. C. J. T. Talar (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 120. 86. On Renan’s important role as a Semitic philologist and his influence, see Joan Leopold, “Ernest Renan (1823–1892): From Linguistics and Psychology to Racial Ideology (1840s to 1860s),” Historiographia Linguistica 37 (2010): 31–61; Marchand, German Orientalism, 117, 129, 174, 177, 268, 327–28; Perrine Simon-Nahum, “L’Orient d’Ernest Renan: de l’étude des langues à l’histoire des religions,” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008): 157–68; Karla Mallette, “Orientalism and the Nineteenth-Century Nationalist: Michele Amari, Ernest Renan, and 1848,” Romanic Review 96 (2005): 233–52; Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 171–78; Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Renan et l’histoire des langues sémitiques,” Histoire Epistémologie Langage 23 (2001): 59–75; and Alan Pitt, “The Cultural Impact of Science in France: Ernest Renan and the Vie de Jésus,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 79–101. On Renan as historical biblical critic, see Römer, “Renan et l’exégèse historico-critique,” 145–62; and Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Le scandale de la

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approach that Loisy considered so necessary for the study of the Bible, a study which would be scientific. This is what Loisy claimed Newman had done. In his words, “Cardinal Newman may be said to have provided a scientific theory of Catholic Christianity.”87 That it was scientific implied that there was something objective and neutral in its workings; such a historical method was not hindered by prior theological commitments. Consider the example of this mentality in the words of Gabriel Oussani, one of Loisy’s contemporaries in the United States: My learned teacher, Dr. Paul Haupt, of the Johns Hopkins University, is in the habit of asking, occasionally, his advanced students, whether there is any difference between Catholic and Protestant mathematics, or between Christian and Jewish physics, or between Episcopal and Presbyterian chemistry; and then he would add: “Why then is there so much divergence between Catholic and Protestant theology and exegesis?” Evidently only one interpretation of the Bible can be correct; and the very existence of so many different Christian denominations shows that the Bible is not studied scientifically and is not rightly understood, although its study may be made just as exact and just as scientific as any other branch of science. Consequently this lack of unanimity in interpreting the Bible is infinitely more apparent and real in the ranks of devout and conservative theologians than among the higher critics.88

In his study of the discipline of history in the United States, Peter Novick questions this claim of objectivity: “At the very center of the professional historical venture is the idea and ideal Vie de Jésus de Renan: Du succès littéraire comme mode d’échec de la science,” Mit neuf cent 25, no. 1 (2007): 61–74. 87. Firmin, “Le développement chrétien,” 5 (ET, 3). 88. Gabriel Oussani, “Is the Bible in Danger? An Appreciation and Criticism,” The Open Court 18 (November 1904): 651.

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of ‘objectivity.’ It was the rock on which the venture was constituted, its continuing raison d’être. It has been the quality which the profession has prized and praised above all others—whether in historians or in their works.”89 Thus Loisy’s views on the nature of history, participating in what we might call (following Alasdair MacIntyre) encyclopedic rationality, should not come as a surprise.90 Loisy’s work in his Firmin articles was an attempt to bring the concept of historical development, like Newman’s notion of doctrinal development, into the realm of Catholic biblical studies. This indeed was his intent from the beginning, to effect what he called a “reform in Biblical exegesis.”91 He did this by utilizing the work of modern biblical scholars, using historical critical research which had by then become standard in mainstream biblical scholarship. His discussion on the benefits of Newman, religious history, and revelation paved the way for his examination of the development of the religion of Israel. Through work such as this, Loisy contributed in a very significant way to the eventual appropriation of the historical critical method in later twentieth-century Catholic biblical scholarship. In the conclusion that follows, I will tie all of this together, and show how this prepared for what would happen at the Second Vatican Council and the controversies within Catholic biblical scholarship in the Council’s wake. 89. Novick, That Noble Dream, 1. Novick likens this quest for objectivity to “nailing jelly to the wall” (1). Insightfully, Novick shows how “Objectivity was valued not as the outcome of professional conflict, but as prophylactic against it” (60). 90. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990). 91. Loisy, Choses passées, 246 (ET, 228).

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Conclusion

The Second Vatican Council did not emerge ex nihilo. It was the result of many factors, including the various renewals (biblical, patristic, liturgical) within Catholicism of the early part of the twentieth century, the growing Catholic concern for ecumenism, as well as the increasing interest in the role of the laity in the church’s life. Among these developments stands the controversy over modernism which helped shape Catholic culture prior to the Council. The concern over modernism as well as the many juridical guidelines and norms (e.g., the Oath against Modernism) created an antimodernist infrastructure that could not but affect the Catholic climate, at least in Europe and in the United States. The specific concern over Catholic engagement with modern historical biblical criticism curbed to a great extent Catholic engagement with that method. Loisy’s work, as we have seen, was at the very heart of this controversy. In the first chapter I situated Loisy within the broader history of the modernist controversy, which had earlier roots in the nineteenth century. In the second and third chapters, I situated Loisy’s biblical work in the context of his prior Assyriological studies on ancient Mesopotamian history, religion, and culture. This has been a largely unknown area of Loisy’s scholarship, and yet it was very important to his work on the Bible. Loisy even attempted to chart a career path in As-

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Conclusion syriology. In the fourth chapter, I showed how Loisy’s Assyriological work affected his biblical criticism by taking a look at his comparative approach to the creation and flood narratives in the Book of Genesis. Loisy was one of the few biblical scholars at that time who employed both a comparative ancient Near Eastern studies approach as well as the more literary historical critical approach to biblical exegesis. In the fifth and sixth chapters, I placed Loisy’s work in the context of the history of biblical scholarship. First, in chapter 5, I traced the genealogical history of the source critical approach to the Pentateuch, which was the most significant and far-reaching development in the history of the development of historical biblical critical methodology. Then, in chapter 6, I identified the major biblical critical scholars upon whom Loisy relied in his own biblical scholarship. I zeroed in on Richard Simon, one of the key figures for Loisy. Simon was not only a scholar upon whose work Loisy relied, but later became a symbol for Loisy’s own plight with the Catholic hierarchy. Finally, in chapter 7, I examined Loisy’s originally pseudonymous apologetic Firmin articles for inclusion of the historical critical method in Catholic exegesis. Loisy believed that including historical biblical criticism would be able to effect a transformation of Catholicism. A number of lessons can be learned from the case of Alfred Loisy. For those scholars who wish to remain in the barque of Peter, Karl Rahner’s reminder from the eve of the Second Vatican Council is instructive: You exegetes often forget that you are Catholic theologians. . . . The doctrines and directives of . . . [church] authority are not merely a negative norm for exegesis, a boundary not to be transgressed if one wishes to remain a Catholic. They are rather a positive intrinsic principle guiding research itself in scientific work. . . . I often have the im-

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pression that you often go gaily and complacently about your work, as if it were pure philology and profane history. . . . The exegete has, then, to keep the expressions of the teaching authority before his eyes.1

At the same time, there is the legitimate question of which questions of historical background, authorship, etc.—some of the major areas of historical scholarship for which exegetes questioned as modernist landed in trouble—are related to doctrinal matters. As just an example, Pope St. John Paul II’s use of the designation “Yahwist” in his Theology of the Body, would have been inadmissible during the modernist controversy.2 Moreover, the official shift in disciplinary and juridical positions, from forbidding these historical critical debates to permitting them, has allowed for a wide range of historical engagement among Catholic exegetes, some of which has been quite fruitful and beneficial. Certainly dangers exist of a rationalist and secularized exegesis. The inclusion of the comparative approach to the Bible utilizing ancient Near Eastern materials, similar to that advocated by Loisy, has been incredibly helpful in shedding light on the broader cultural background in which the Bible was written. Alfred Loisy was excommunicated on March 7, 1908, one day before the six-month anniversary of Pascendi Dominici Gregis. By that point, Loisy had published more than twenty books. He would proceed to almost triple what he had published, adding nearly forty more books, by his death. He continued to be a prolific scholar, but his focus shifted to the history of religion, the chair of which he held at the secular Collège de France from 1. Karl Rahner, SJ, “Exegesis and Dogmatic Theology,” in Dogmatic vs. Biblical Theology, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (Baltimore, Md.: Helicon, 1964 [1962]), 34–36, 40, 56. 2. John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. and introduction by Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006), e.g., 134. John Paul uses “Yahwist” more than sixty times in Theology of the Body.

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1909 until his retirement in 1931. Even after retirement, Loisy continued to write and publish. He published until 1939, the year before he left this world for the next, and never made any even apparent attempt at reconciliation with the Catholic church. Initially, there was nothing on his tombstone identifying that Loisy’s remains were below. A year later were inscribed the following words: “Alfred Loisy, prêtre.”3 The full epitaph reads: “Alfred Loisy / prêtre / Retiré du Ministère / et de l’Enseignement / Professeur au Collège de France / 1857–1940 / Tuam in Votis / tenuit Voluntatem.” The translation of this is subject to subtleties, as should not surprise us insofar as the bulk of Loisy’s written corpus was subtle and often ambiguous. The first part reads “Alfred Loisy.” The second portion also, “priest.” After that we have, Retiré du Ministère, “retired from ministry,” or is it “removed from ministry”? The French could go either way. Then is added, et de l’Enseignement, “and from teaching”—but is it, “and retired from teaching,” or “and removed from teaching”? Both are true. Then we have, “Professor at the Collège de France,” which makes it more likely retiré is to be understood, “retired,” except that he was not simply “retired” from priestly ministry, but removed by way of excommunication. Perhaps the intent is, “Removed from ministry and retired from teaching.” Or perhaps the double entendre is intended for both. Then comes the dates which bookend his life, his birth and death. But after this comes a somewhat more challenging Latin expression: tuam in votis voluntatem. Marvin O’Connell writes the following about these final words: “tuam in votis tenuit voluntatem” . . . is difficult to translate literally, or rather . . . it admits of different shades of meaning. . . . The words at 3. O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 2. Prior to this inscription, the name of the woman buried there before him was the only thing inscribed on the stone.

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any rate came from the Catholic requiem liturgy, specifically from the oration the priest recited just before the body was interred. An acceptable translation, in context, might be something like the following: “Grant, O Lord, this mercy to thy departed servant, that he who held fast to thy will in his intentions, may not receive punishment in return for his deeds.” Votum in its plural form may indeed mean “intentions” or, more likely, “wishes,” but its primary meaning is “vows,” so that the clause could reasonably be rendered, “he who did thy will by keeping his solemn promises.” This ambiguity . . . was compounded by the concluding and hortatory part of the prayer: “As the true faith joined [the deceased] to the throngs of the faithful on earth, may thy mercy unite him to the choirs of angels in heaven.” That faith was precisely what Loisy had formally and publicly long rejected, and that rejection lasted till the end.4

What makes this reflection on the epitaph especially interesting is that Loisy wrote the epitaph himself, and instructed it to be inscribed on his tombstone. What does this mean about what was going on inside Loisy’s heart and soul as he approached his final moments this side of the grave? We ourselves may never know in this life. Studying the modernist controversy can elicit different responses in different individuals. Some read about modernism and are angered by the theological and spiritual dangers they find in figures like Tyrrell and Loisy, lauding St. Pius X for the way he fought against the demonic forces threatening the church and the world. They may even see modernism as a present danger, and not simply of historical interest. Others study the time period and are angered by antimodernist responses, the repression, coercive measures, even calumny. They may be saddened by the tragic stories of the time. Others are reminded 4. Ibid., 3.

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of events from their own lives; they may see a close kinship with the modernists or at least with the choices they made and the situations in which they found themselves. For others, a combination of the above may arise. For those of us for whom Catholicism is an essential part of who we are, and who treasure the priesthood and the sacraments, it is difficult to read about Loisy’s life without coming away with the sense of the tragic. William Portier put it well when he noted, “The modernist crisis makes the self-involving nature of theological inquiry unavoidable even to the obtuse. Remembering the modernist crisis takes on a certain moral cast that puts the inquirer at risk. One is drawn to take sides and to consider one’s obligations.”5 Among the many things studying Loisy’s life and work elicits from me is prayer. Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen. 5. Portier, Divided Friends, 39.

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Emerton, J. A. “Abraham Kuenen and the Early Religion of Ancient Israel.” In Abraham Kuenen (1828–1891): His Major Contributions to the Study of the Old Testament, edited by P. B. Dirksen and A. van der Kooij, 8–28. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Fleyfel, Antoine. “Richard Simon, critique de la sacralité biblique.” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 88, no. 4 (2008): 469–92. Fogarty, Gerald P., SJ. American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989. Fornaro, Sotera. I Greci senza lumi. L’antropologia della Grecia antica in Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) e nel suo tempo. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004. ———. “Christian Gottlob Heyne dans l’histoire des études classiques.” Revue germanique internationale 14 (2011): 15–26. Frampton, Travis L. Spinoza and the Rise of Historical Criticism of the Bible. London: T and T Clark, 2006. Freedman, R. David. “The Father of Modern Biblical Scholarship.” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 19 (1989): 31–38. Friedrich, Reinhold. Johann Matthias Gesner: Sein Leben und sein Werk. Roth: Genniges, 1991. Fuller, Reginald C. Alexander Geddes 1737–1802: Pioneer of Biblical Criticism. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1984. Fusco, V. “Un secolo di metodo storico nell’esegesi cattolica (1893–1993).” Studia Patavina 41 (1994): 341–98. Gabbey, Alan. “Spinoza’s Natural Science and Methodology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, edited by Don Garrett, 142–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. García de Haro, Ramón. Historia teológica del modernism. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1972. Garrido, Juan José. “El método histórico–crítico de interpretación de la Escritura según Spinoza.” In El método en teología. Actas del primer Simposio de Teología e Historia (29–31 mayo 1980), edited by The Faculty of Theology of Saint Vincent Ferrer, 269–81. Valencia: The Faculty of Theology of Saint Vincent Ferrer, 1981. Garrido Zaragoza, J. “La desmitificación de la Escritura en Spinoza.” Taula 9 (1988): 3–45.

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Gerdmar, Anders. Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Gertz, Jan Christian. “Jean Astruc and Source Criticism in the Book of Genesis.” In Sacred Conjectures: The Context and Legacy of Robert Lowth and Jean Astruc, edited by John Jarick, 190–203. London: T and T Clark, 2007. Geyer, Carl-Friedrich. Wahrheit und Absolutheit des Christentums—Geschichte und Utopie: ‘L’Évangile et L’Église’ von Alfred F. Loisy in Text und Kontext. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2010. Gibert, Pierre. “Introduction.” In Jean Astruc, Conjectures sur la Genèse, 9–119. Paris: Noêsis, 1999. ———. “De l’intuition a l’evidence: La multiplicite documentaire dans la Genese chez H. B. Witter et Jean Astruc.” In Sacred Conjectures: The Context and Legacy of Robert Lowth and Jean Astruc, edited by John Jarick, 174–89. London: T and T Clark, 2007. ———. L’invention critique de la Bible: XVe – XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. Gilbert, Maurice. “Le Cardinal Augustin Bea: 1881–1968: La Bible, rencontre des Chrétiens et des Juifs.” Nouvelle revue théologique 105 (1983): 369–83. ———. The Pontifical Biblical Institute: A Century of History (1909–2009). Translated by Leo Arnold. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2009. Giovino, Mariana. The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2007. Goldie, Mark. “Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment.” Historical Journal 53 (2010): 61–86. Gordis, Robert. “The Life of Professor Max Leopold Margolis: An Appreciation.” In Max Leopold Margolis: Scholar and Teacher, edited by Robert Gordis, 1–16. New York: Bloch, 1952. Gordon, Cyrus H. “Higher Critics and Forbidden Fruit.” Christianity Today 4 (November 23, 1959): 3–6. ———. Forgotten Scripts: Their Ongoing Discovery and Decipherment. New York: Basic Books, 1968. ———. A Scholar’s Odyssey. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000. Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe. “The Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Rise, Decline, Rebirth.” Journal of Biblical Literature 102 (1983): 365–99.

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Hallo, William W. “New Viewpoints on Cuneiform Literature.” Israel Exploration Journal 12 (1962): 13–26. Harbsmeier, Michael. “Before Decipherment: Persepolitan Hypotheses in the Late Eighteenth Century.” In The Construction of the Ancient Near East, edited by Ann C. Gunter, 23–58. Copenhagen: Academic, 1992. Harnack, Adolf. Das Wesen des Christentums. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1900. ———. What Is Christianity? Translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901. Hartlich, Christian, and Walter Sachs. Der Ursprung des Mythosbegriffes in der Modernen Bibelwissenschaft. Tübingen: Mohr, 1952. Hassoulier, Bernard. “Notice sur la vie et les oeuvres de M. Jules Oppert, membre de l’Académie.” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 50 (1906): 567–92. Hauerwas, Stanley. The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Hayes, John H. “Wellhausen as Historian of Israel.” Semeia 25 (1982): 37–60. ———. “Historical Criticism of the Old Testament Canon.” In Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, edited by Magne Sæbø, 995–1005. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2008. Hazard, Paul. La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715. Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1935. Heidenreich, Marianne. Christian Gottlob Heyne und die Alte Geschichte. Munich: K. G. Saur, 2006. Hennesey, James, SJ. “Leo XIII’s Thomistic Revival: A Political and Philosophical Event.” Journal of Religion 58, supplement (1978): S185–S197. Hess, Hans-Eberhard. Theologie und Religion bei Johann Salomo Semler: Ein Beitrag zur Theologiegeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Augsburg: Blasaditsch, 1974. Hess, Jonathan M. “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in EighteenthCentury Germany.” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 2 (2000): 56–101. Hess, Richard S. “One Hundred Fifty Years of Comparative Studies on Genesis 1–11: An Overview.” In “I Studied Inscriptions from before the Flood”: Ancient Near Eastern, Literary, and Linguistic Approaches to Genesis 1–11, edited by Richard S. Hess and David Toshio Tsumura, 3–26. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1994.

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———. (A. Firmin). “La théorie individualiste de la religion.” Revue du clergé français 17 (1899): 202–15. ———. (A. Firmin). “L’idée de la revelation.” Revue du clergé français 21 (1900): 250–71. ———. (A. Firmin). “Les preuves et l’économie de la revelation.” Revue du clergé français 22 (1900): 126–53. ———. (A. Firmin). “La religion d’Israël.” Revue du clergé français 24 (1900): 337–63. ———. Études bibliques. Second edition. Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1901. ———. Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse. Paris: Picard, 1901. ———. “Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse I.” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 6 (1901): 111–50. ———. “Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse II.” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 6 (1901): 193–234. ———. “Les mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse III.” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 6 (1901): 318–84. ———. La religion d’Israël. Paris: Letouzey et ané, 1901. ———. L’Évangile et l’Église. Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1902. ———. Autour d’un petit livre. Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1903. ———. Études bibliques. Third edition. Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1903. ———. L’Évangile et l’Église. Second edition. Paris: Alfred Loisy, 1903. ———. La religion d’Israël. Second edition. Paris: Alfred Loisy, 1908. ———. Simples réflexions sur le Décret du Saint-Office Lamentabili sane exitu et sur l’Encyclique Pascendi dominici gregis. Ceffonds: L’Auteur, 1908. ———. “Le récit du deluge dans la tradition de Nippour.” Revue archéologique 15 (1910): 209–11. ———. “Le récit du deluge dans la tradition de Nippour.” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses N.S. 1 (1910): 306–12. ———. The Religion of Israel. Translated by Arthur Galton. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910. ———. A propos d’Histoire des religions. Paris: Émile Nourry, 1911. ———. The Gospel and the Church. Translated by Christopher Home. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912. ———. Choses passées. Paris: Nourry, 1913.

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Mirri, F. Saverio. Richard Simon e il metodo storico-critico di B. Spinoza. Storia di un libro e di una polemica sulla sfondo delle lotte politico-religiose della Francia di Luigi XIV. Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1972. “Il modernismo: A rispetto della Chiesa.” La Civiltà cattolica 4 (1883): 539–48. Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Religious History Without Frontiers: J. Wellhausen, U. Wilamowitz, and E. Schwartz.” History and Theory 21 (1982): 49–64. Montagnes, Bernard, OP. Marie-Joseph Lagrange: Une biographie critique. Paris: Cerf, 2004. ———. “Marie-Joseph Lagrange frente a los teólogos hostiles a los exegetas.” Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia 16 (2007): 97–112. Morrison, Martha A. “A Continuing Adventure: Cyrus Gordon and Mesopotamia.” Biblical Archaeologist 59, no. 1 (1996): 31–35. Morrow, Jeffrey L. “The Modernist Crisis and the Shifting of Catholic Views on Biblical Inspiration.” Letter & Spirit 6 (2010): 265–80. ———. “The Enlightenment University and the Creation of the Academic Bible: Michael Legaspi’s The Death of Scripture and the Rise of Biblical Studies.” Nova et Vetera 11, no. 3 (2013): 897–922. ———. “Études Assyriologie and 19th and 20th Century French HistoricalBiblical Criticism.” Near Eastern Archaeological Society Bulletin 59 (2014): 3–20. ———. “The Untold History of Modern Biblical Scholarship’s PreEnlightenment Secular Origins.” Journal of Theological Interpretation 8, no. 1 (2014): 145–55. ———. “Cut Off from Its Wellspring: The Politics Behind the Divorce of Scripture from Catholic Moral Theology.” Heythrop Journal 56, no. 4 (2015): 547–58. ———. “Faith, Reason, and History in Early Modern Catholic Biblical Interpretation: Fr. Richard Simon and St. Thomas More.” New Blackfriars 96 (2015): 658–73. ———. “Secularization, Objectivity, and Enlightenment Scholarship: The Theological and Political Origins of Modern Biblical Studies.” Logos 18, no. 1 (2015): 14–32. ———. “Spinoza’s Use of the Psalms in the Context of His Political Project.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion 11 (2015): 1–18. ———. “Averroism, Nominalism, and Mechanization: Hahn and Wiker’s

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Selected Bibliography /  205

Index

Acosta, Ana M., 96n10 Adang, Camilla, 80n18, 92n3 Adler, Cyrus, 34n6 Adorno, Theodor W., 81n21 Aeterni Patris, 3, 22 Akkadian language, 40–42, 44, 46–48, 53n4, 55–56, 59–60, 62–65, 68, 73, 80, 84–85, 86n48, 109 Albenda, Pauline, 45n38 Algermissen, Ernest, 81n18 Americanism, 13n7, 15 Americanist controversy, xii, 3 Amiaud, Arthur, 49–50, 57–58, 60–61, 63, 67 Amsler, Frédéric, 5n13 André-Salvini, Béatrice, 32n2 Aquinas, Thomas, 2–3, 22, 112, 114 Armogathe, Jean-Robert, 91n2, 96n10, 101n19 Arnold, Bill T., 37n17, 154n83 Arnold, Claus, 11nn1–2, 30n59, 131n2, 137n18 Asad, Talal, 21 Assyriology, xiii, 4, 6–8, 10, 32–34, 36–38, 43, 45–50, 52–53, 55n6, 57–64, 66, 70, 72, 76, 78, 79n15, 80–81, 90–91, 109–110 Astruc, Jean, 8, 95–97, 101, 104–5 Auld, A. Graeme, 102n21 Auvray, Paul, 91n2, 94n8 Baentsch, Bruno, 154n79 Baird, William, 5n13, 98n13, 99n14, 100n17, 101n18 Barmann, Lawrence F., 19n23, 89, 132n4, 134n8

Barthélemy, Dominique, 94n8 Bastiaensen, Michel, 39n21 Baumgarten, Jean, 43n34, 46n40, 47, 60n16 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 113 Bea, Augustin, 61n21, 147, 148n58 Beaumont, Keith, 135n9 Behistun inscription, 40 Benedict XV, 18, 27 Benedict XVI. See Ratzinger, Joseph Bergamini, Giovanni, 46n38 Bergounioux, Gabriel, 48n46, 50n54, 62n24 Bergsma, John Sietze, 150n65 Berman, Joshua, 149n62 Bernardi, Peter J., 18n21 Bernhardsson, Magnus T., 45n38 Bernier, Jean, 147n57 Bianchi, Elisa, 48n47 Bleicken, Jochen, 100n16 Blenkinsopp, Joseph, 153n77 Bloch, Joshua, 54n5 Blondel, Maurice, 17–18 Bopp, Franz, 37 Bordoli, Roberto, 99n14 Borger, Rykle, 42n28, 65n37 Botta, Paul-Émile, 45–46, 77n8 Bottéro, Jean, 32n2 Bouillon, Émile, 60n20, 61n22 Brethauer, Karl, 42n28 Brown, Norman O., 93n5 Budge, E. A. Wallis, 32n2 Burke, Ronald, 134n7, 135n11, 152n73 Burtchaell, James Tunstead, 49n52 Buss, Martin J., 79n14

/  207

Index Calder, William M., 80n16 Calvert, Kenneth R., 53n4 Caplice, Richard, 63n33 Carruthers, Gerard, 102n21 Cassuto, Umberto, 56n8, 80n17, 109n32, 149n62 Cathcart, Kevin J., 40, 42n28, 42n30, 43nn32–33, 44n36 Cavallanti, Alessandro, 14 Cavanaugh, William T., 19n25 Champion, Justin A. I., 96n9 Charpin, Dominique, 59n16 Chavalas, Mark W., 32n2, 41n27, 155n83 Chen, Y. C., 56n9, 79n13 Ciappa, Rosanna, 153n78 Clay, Albert T., 50n55 Cohen, Ada, 45n38 Cohen, Julia Phillips, 48n47 Colin, Pierre, 5n13, 11n2, 13n7, 16 Collège de France, 4, 7, 30, 48, 59, 77, 122, 132n3, 160–61 Combs, Eugene, 93n5 Conrad, Joachim, 105n26 Conroy, Charles, 102n21 Cooper, Jerrold S., 46n40, 48n46, 48n49, 63n32 Cumont, Franz, 52, 66 cuneiform, 37–42, 43n34, 44, 45n37, 56, 60, 62–63, 65–66, 70, 73–74, 79 Currid, John D., 154n82 D’Alessandro, Giuseppe, 100n17 Daly, Gabriel, 2n3, 11nn1–2 Damrosch, David, 41n27 Daniels, Peter T., 43n32 David, Madeleine, 42n28 de Chaulnes, Vicomte G., 13n6 De Concilio, Januarius, 3n9 De Villiers, Pieter G. R., 79n14 De Vries, Simon J., 106n27 de Wette, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht, 8, 77n8, 101, 102n20, 103–4, 113, 115, 149, 150n64 Dei Filius, 131n3, 143 Dei Verbum, x, 4, 31

Index 208 

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Delitzsch, Friedrich, 37, 63, 66–67, 69, 77n8, 113–16, 154 della Valle, Pietro, 38, 46n39 Devine, Thomas M., 102n21 Dhorme, Edouard, 62n25 D’Hulst, Maurice, 116, 126, 129 Dieguez, Alejandro Mario, 14n14, 15n15 Dietrich, Wendell S., 140n27 Divino Afflante Spiritu, xi Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch, 9, 97, 101, 104–6, 108, 134n8, 149n62, 154 Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. See Dei Verbum Droge, Arthur J., 92n4 Duchesne, Louis, 28, 58–59, 77, 113, 135 Duffy, Eamon, 20n30 Durkheim, Émile, 139, 144 École pratique des hautes études, 29, 48, 50, 58, 60–61, 69n59 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried, 8, 77n8, 100–105, 112–13, 115 Eissfeldt, Otto, 154n79 Elazar, Daniel J., 93n5 Elliot, Walter, 13n7 Elliott, Lawrence, 27n53 Elrefaei, Aly, 107n29 Emerton, J. A., 40n23, 106n27 Enuma Elish, 68, 70, 79, 83–86 Epic of Gilgamesh, 41, 56, 67–70, 74, 78–79, 83, 85–86 Eran, Mordechai, 149n62 Ewald, Heinrich, 77n8, 113, 115 First Vatican Council, 131n3, 143 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecth, 37 Fleyfel, Antoine, 91n2 Fogarty, Gerald P., xin4, xii form criticism, 8, 90 Fornaro, Sotera, 99–100n16 Fowler, Robert L., 80n16 Frampton, Travis L., 93n5, 119n13 Freedman, David Noel, 36n13 Freedman, R. David, 80n18

Friedrich, Reinhold, 99n15 Fuller, Reginald C., 102n21 Fusco, V., 137n18 Gabbey, Alan, 94n7 Gabrielli, Timothy R., xin4 García de Haro, Ramón, 11n2, 77n10, 78n11, 88n58 Garrido, Juan José, 93n5 Garrido Zaragoza, J., 93n5 Geddes, Alexander, 102 Gerdmar, Anders, 99n14 Gertz, Jan Christian, 96n10, 109n32 Gesner, Johann Matthias, 99 Geyer, Carl-Friedrich, 134n7, 135n11 Gibert, Pierre, 36n13, 91n2, 93n5, 96n10, 97n11, 100n17, 117n11, 147n57 Gilbert, Maurice, 148n58 Gilgamesh. See Epic of Gilgamesh Giovino, Mariana, 45n38 Goldie, Mark, 102n21 Gordis, Robert, 54n5 Gordon, Cyrus H., 32n2, 39n22, 40n24, 41n27, 44n36, 54n5, 56 Goshen-Gottstein, Moshe, 35, 36n13 Gospel and the Church. See L’Évangile et l’Église Gottlieb, Claire, 54n5 Graf, Karl Heinrich, 8, 77n8, 105–7, 109, 115, 134n8, 154 Grafton, Anthony, 55n8, 80n17, 100n17, 101n18 Greenspoon, Leonard, 54n5 Grégoire, F. See Vigouroux, Fulcran Grégoire Greschat, Martin, 93n5 Grimm, Jacob, 75 Gross, George M., 93n5 Grotefend, Georg Friedrich, 41–42 Gunkel, Hermann, 52, 65, 69, 72, 79–81, 85, 88, 107n29, 116 Guralnick, Eleanor, 45n38 Gurney, J. D., 39n21

Hahn, Scott W., 35n13, 36n13, 91n2, 94n8, 119n13, 150n65 Halévy, Joseph, 48, 50n55, 57–58, 60–61, 63, 65–67, 115 Hallo, William W., 56 Harbsmeier, Michael, 39n22 Harnack, Adolf von, ix, 112–13, 132–33, 138n20, 139, 140n27, 144 Hartlich, Christian, 101n18 Hassoulier, Bernard, 43n34, 46n40 Hatch, Derek C., xin4 Hauerwas, Stanley, 21n32 Haupt, Paul, 34, 116, 156 Hayes, John H., 99n14, 108n29 Hazard, Paul, 91n2 Heidenreich, Marianne, 100n16 Hennesey, James, 23 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 84n33 Hess, Hans-Eberhard, 98n14 Hess, Jonathan M., 98n13 Hess, Richard S., 41n27 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 99–101 Hill, Harvey, 5n13, 28n56, 29n57, 30n58, 62n24, 77nn9–10, 78n11, 132n4, 134n7, 137n18, 143n43, 148n58, 155 Hilprecht, Hermann V., 34, 70, 71n62 Hincks, Edward, 40, 42–44, 45n37, 46 Hinz, Walther, 42n28 Hiwi al-Balkhi, 81 Hobbes, Thomas, 8, 35, 92, 95–96, 119 Hoffman-Axthelm, Diether, 152n73 Hoffmeier, James K., 55, 154n82 Holloway, Steven W., 32n2, 36n14, 40n24, 44n36 Holtzmann, Heinrich Julius, 116 Horkheimer, Max, 81n21 Hornig, Gottfried, 99n14 Howard, Thomas Albert, 102n20 Hupfeld, Hermann, 8, 77n8, 104–5 Ibn H.azm, 80, 92, 95 Ilgen, Karl David, 104 Ineichen, Gustav, 98n13 Institut Catholique, 28–29, 61–62, 126 Invernizzi, Antonio, 39n21

Index /  209

Iofrida, Manlio, 91n2 Izquierdo, César, 11n2, 12, 18n21 Jacob, Edmond, 105n25 Jastrow, Morris, 50, 63 Jaubert, Sabine, 48n49 Jensen, Peter, 66–67 Jiménez-Zamudio, Rafael, 39n22, 42n28 Joassart, Bernard, 18n21 Jodock, Darrell, 5n13, 11n2, 18n21, 24n41, 57n11 John XXIII, 18, 27 John Paul II, 160 Jones, Alan H., 59n14, 78n11 Jones, Andrew W., 20n26 Jones, Tom, 47n42, 63n32 Kaiser, Otto, 104n23 Kangas, Steven E., 45n38 Kaufmann, Yehezkel, 107n29, 149n62 Kerr, Fergus, 1–4 Knight, Douglas A., 108n29 Kofsky, Aryeh, 92n4 Komonchak, Joseph A., 22n33 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 39n22, 40n24, 41n26, 44n36, 47n42, 49n50, 62, 63n28 Kratz, Reinhard Gregor, 108n29 Kraus, Hans-Joachim, 98n13, 99n14, 100n17 Kuenen, Abraham, 77n8, 106, 116 Kugel, James L., 36n13 Kurtz, Paul Michael, 107n29 La Peyrère, Isaac, 8, 35, 77n8, 92, 95–96, 117n11, 119–21 Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, 17–18, 89n1, 116 Lahutsky, Nadia M., 5n13 Lambe, Patrick J., 96n9 Lamentabili Sane Exitu, 30, 127, 137n18 Lannoy, Annelies, xv, 52n2, 66n45, 82n22 Laplanche, François, 5n13, 49n52, 59n14, 60n17, 60n19, 76, 77n10, 78n11, 122n23, 130n1, 153n78 Larsen, Mogens Trolle, 39n22, 40n24, 41n26, 42n30, 46nn38–39

Index 210 

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Lash, Nicholas, 134n7, 135n11, 136n17 Laube, Martin, 99n14 Layard, Austen Henry, 41, 45 Lazarus-Yafeh, Hava, 36n13, 80n18, 92n3 Lease, Gary, 24n41 Legaspi, Michael C., 34, 36n13, 96n10, 99n15, 100n16, 101n19, 147n57 Lehmann, Gustav Adolf, 99n16 Lehmann, Reinhard G., 37n17 Lemche, Niels Peter, 153n77 Lenormant, François, 48–49, 60, 65, 72, 77n8, 115 Leo XIII, 2–3, 13n7, 14n10, 16, 21–22, 23n37, 29, 118, 126, 129, 131n3, 137n18, 143n43 Leopold, Joan, 155n86 Leroy, Pierre-Eugène, 60n19 L’Évangile et l’Église, ix, xviii, 10, 51, 130, 138, 140n27 Levenson, Alan T., 149n62 Lion, Brigitte, 43n34, 44n36, 45n38, 46n40, 47n42, 48n46, 60n16 Ljamai, Abdelilah, 92n3 Losito, Giacomo, 30n59, 131n2 Löwenbrück, Anna-Ruth, 98n13 Lubetski, Meir, 54n5 Lyon, D. G., 32n2, 41nn26–27 MacGrath, John A., 19n23 Machinist, Peter, 55n6, 80nn16–17, 108n29, 109n33 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 157 Maier, Paul L., 53n4 Maignen, Charles, 13n7, 15 Malcolm, Noel, 92n4, 147n57 Malet, André, 93n5 Mallette, Karla, 155n86 Mangold, Sabine, 36n14, 37nn15–16 Manrique Charry, Juan Francisco, 94n7 Marblestone, Howard A., 54n5 Marchand, Suzanne L., 32n2, 46n40, 155n86 Margival, Henri, 123–24, 128 Margolis, Max L., 54n5 Marino, Luigi, 100n17

Maspero, Gaston, 77n8, 115–16 Maspero, Henri, 62n25–26 Masson, Olivier, 49n49 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 155n86 Mauti, Ricardo Miguel, 135n9 McCool, Gerald A., 3n8 McKane, William, 91n2 McSorley, Joseph, xiin6 Meade, C. Wade, 32n2, 34nn6–7, 36n14, 40n24, 41n26, 44n36, 49 Melman, Billie, 45n38 Mesopotamia: ancient, 7, 32, 37, 52, 60, 78–79; archaeological excavations, 46n38; creation and flood traditions, 7, 79; culture, xiii, 60, 158; expedition, 46; history, 53n4, 54n5, 60, 158; literature, xiii, 64, 73, 79–80; religion, xiii, 60, 158; traditions, 8, 72 Meyer, Eduard, 77n8, 108n29, 147n58, 150, 153 Michaelis, Johann David, 8, 34, 39, 77n8, 97–101 Michel, Cécile, 43n34, 44n36, 45n38, 46n40, 47n42, 48n46, 60n16 Millard, Alan, 55n6 Miller, Patrick D., 108n29 Mirri, F. Saverio, 94n8 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 108n29 Montagnes, Bernard, 18n21 Morrison, Martha A., 54n5 Morrow, Jeffrey L., xin4, 35n11, 35n13, 92nn3–4, 93n5, 94nn7–8, 119nn12–13, 121n20, 147n57 Mulder, M. J., 106n27 Müller, August, 37n18 Müller, Manfred, 37n18 Müller, Sascha, 91n2 Munro, J. Iverach, 150n65 Muss-Arnolt, W., 43n34, 46n40, 47n41, 60n16 Nadler, Steven, 93n5, 121n21 Nahkola, Aulikki, 55n8, 96n10, 97, 101n19, 153n76 Nesselrath, Heinz-Günther, 99n16

Newman, John Henry, 4, 10, 19n22, 28n56, 88, 117, 130n1, 132–42, 156–57 Nichols, Aidan, 19n22, 28n56 Nichols, Francis W., 91n2, 96n9 Nicholson, Ernest, 108n31 Niebuhr, Carsten, 39, 46n39 Nöldeke, Theodor, 77n8, 115–16 Novick, Peter, 33, 34n5, 156, 157n89 Oath against Modernism, 2, 70, 158 O’Connell, Denis, xiin6 O’Connell, Marvin R., 11n2, 25–27, 28n56, 29n57, 30n58, 30n60, 59n14, 61n23, 62n24, 77nn9–10, 78n11, 132n4, 141n33, 161 O’Malley, John W., xn2 O’Meara, Thomas F., 3n6 O’Neill, J. C., 98n13, 99n14, 100n17, 101n18 Oppert, Jules, 6, 42–44, 45n37, 46–48, 50, 57–62, 64n34, 65–67 Orlinsky, Harry M., 54n5 Oussani, Gabriel, 156 Pacchi, Arrigo, 119n12 Pagano, Sergio, 14n14 Pallis, Svend Aage, 32n2, 39nn21–22, 40n24, 42n28, 42n30, 43n32, 43n34, 44n36, 46nn38–39 Pan-Babylonism, 67, 154–55 Parente, Fausto, 59n14, 77n10, 78n11, 100n17, 101nn18–19, 137n18 Pascendi Dominici Gregis, 3, 6, 11n1, 12–14, 16–17, 24, 27, 30, 127, 137n18, 160 Pasto, James, 102n20 Pattengale, Jerry, 53n4 Péries, G., 13n7 Périn, Charles, 12–13n6, 172 Perry, Bliss, 33 Petersen, Silke, 79n14 Pitt, Alan, 155n86 Pius VI, 20 Pius IX, 20–23 Pius X, 2–3, 6, 11–12, 14–18, 23–25, 28, 30, 127–29, 137n18 Pius XII, xi

Index /  211

Pope, Maurice, 37n15, 39n22, 40n24, 42n28, 42n30, 43n32, 44n36 Popkin, Richard H., 93n5 Portier, William L., xiin6, xv, 3–4, 11n2, 13n7, 18n21, 19n22, 19n24, 20, 22, 24nn40–41, 25n48, 27 Poulat, Émile, 12n2, 25n48, 28n56, 88n58 Powers, David S., 92n3 Praet, Danny, 52n2, 66n45 Preißler, Holger, 37n18 Preus, J. Samuel, 93n5, 94n7, 119n13 Prince, J. Dyneley, 48n48 Providentissimus Deus, 16, 22, 29, 118, 126, 129, 131n3, 137n18 Pulcini, Theodore, 80n18, 92n3 Rahner, Karl, 159, 160n1 Ratzinger, Joseph, 26–27 Rawlinson, Henry Creswicke, 39–42, 43n31, 44, 45n37, 46–47, 65n37, 77n8 Ray, John, 43n32 Reade, Julian, 45n38 redaction criticism, 90 Reid, Donald Malcolm, 45n38 Religion of Israel (Religion d’Israël), 9, 131–33, 143–44, 149, 152, 154 Renan, Ernest, 7, 52–53, 59, 72, 75–78, 81–82, 87–88, 114–17, 121–23, 125–26, 134n8, 141, 143, 155, 156n86 Rendsburg, Gary A., 54n5, 149n62 Reuss, Édouard Guillaume Eugène, 8, 77n8, 105–6, 109, 112–13, 134n8, 153n78 Reuther, Rosemary Radford, 152n73 Reventlow, Henning Graf, 35, 91n2, 96n9, 98n13, 99n14, 100–101nn17–18, 102n20, 108n29, 119n12 Rif ‘at, Nurshif, 80n18, 92n3 Rivière, Jean, 12n3, 14n12, 15 Robert, Louis, 13n7 Rocha, Biff, 3n9 Rogers, Robert William, 32n2, 37n15, 39n22, 40n24, 41n26, 42n28, 42n30, 43n32, 44n36, 46n39 Rogerson, John W., 91n2, 96n10, 102nn20– 21, 104n23, 108n29, 108n31, 150n64

Index 212  /

Röhrbein, Waldemar R., 42n28 Römer, Thomas, 52n3, 101n20, 155n86 Rosenthal, Judah, 81n19 Sabatier, Auguste, 132, 138n20, 139, 140n27, 144 Sachs, Walter, 101n18, 177 Sale, Giovanni, 13n8 Samaritan Pentateuch, 103, 150n65 Sandys-Wunsch, John, 98n13 Schaffstein, Friedrich, 98n13 Scheer, Tanja S., 99n16 Schindel, Ulrich, 99n15 Schipper, Bernd U., 79n14 Schröter, Marianne, 99n14 Schultenover, David G., 19n22 Schulz, Hartmut H. R., 99n14 Schwab, Raymond, 37nn15–16 Schwarzbach, Bertram Eugene, 96n9, 102n21 Second Vatican Council, x–xiii, 1–2, 4–5, 10, 16, 22, 24, 31, 123, 157, 158 Seidel, Bodo, 100n17, 104n24 Semler, Johann Salomo, 77n8, 98, 99n14, 112, 115 Shavit, Yaacov, 149n62 Sheehan, Jonathan, 98n13 Shelford, April G., 96n9 Silberman, Lou H., 108n29 Silvestre de Sacy, Antoine-Isaac Baron, 36–37, 45, 77n8, 115 Simon, Richard, 8–9, 35, 77n8, 91–92, 94–96, 110–29, 134n8, 159 Simon-Nahum, Perrine, 43n34, 48n47, 60n19, 155n86 Sinai, Nicolai, 93n5 Ska, Jean-Louis, 96n10, 102n21, 107n29, 109n32, 148n58 Slattery, John, xiin6 Smend, Rudolf, 96n10, 98n13, 100n17, 101n19, 102n20, 106n27, 107n29, 108n29, 152n75 Smith, George, 41, 74, 77n8, 78 Smith, William Robertson, 153n78 source criticism, 8–9, 55n8, 57, 60,

72, 80, 87n57, 88, 90–91, 95–96, 100–101, 107–9, 126, 145–46, 148, 153n77, 159 Speiser, Ephraim A., 54n5 Spinoza, Baruch, 8, 35, 77n8, 92–96, 119–23 Stein, Sarah Abrevaya, 48n47 Steinmann, Jean, 91n2 Strauss, David Friedrich, 113 Stroumsa, Guy G., 80n17, 109n32 Sullivan, William, xiin6 Sumer: culture, 62; flood narrative, 71; history, 62, 78; Sumerology, 49, 55–56, 62–63 Sumerian language, 47–49, 62–63, 66; controversy, 47–48, 61, 63, 66 Swiggers, Pierre, 42n28 Talar, C. J. T., xv–xvi, 5nn13–14, 11nn1–2, 12n4, 25n48, 26n50, 57n11, 59n14, 66n46, 72n65, 75n6, 77n9, 78nn11–12, 124n27, 131n1, 132n4, 133n6, 134n7, 135n11, 155n85 Talbot, William Henry Fox, 44, 45n37 Tavard, George H., 18n21 Théobald, Christoph, 5n13, 59n14, 77n9 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas Thureau-Dangin, François, 62–64 Tobi, Yosef, 48n47 Torrell, Jean-Pierre, 2n5 Torres Torres, Elena, 42n28, 42n30, 43n32, 43n34, 44n36 Tostivint, Désiré, 61n22 Tsumura, David Toshio, 41n27, 54n5 Turvasi, Francesco, 77n9, 134n7, 135n11 Tyrrell, George, 12, 18, 19n22, 128, 162 van Dijk, Catharina F. M., 102n21 Vanhoye, Albert, 148n58

Van Seters, John, 55n8, 80n17, 100nn17–18, 101n19, 104n23, 109n32 Vatican I. See First Vatican Council Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vigouroux, Fulcran Grégoire, 7, 58–59, 72, 75–77, 87–88, 112–17, 122–23, 147–48 Vincent, Jean Marcel, 105n25 Vöhler, Martin, 100n16 von Hügel, Friedrich, 18–19, 58, 116, 132n4, 134n8, 141n33 von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich, 80n16, 108 Wansbrough, Henry, 134n7, 135n11 Weisberg, David B., 37n17, 154n83 Wellhausen, Julius, 8, 19, 55, 57, 72, 75, 77n8, 80–81, 88, 91, 97, 105–9, 113, 115– 17, 134n8, 148–49, 150n65, 152–54 Wernz, W. J., 134n7, 135n11 Wiker, Benjamin, 35n13, 36n13, 91n2, 94n8, 119n13 Wilken, Robert L., 92n4 Williamson, George S., 74–75, 81, 84n33, 101n18 Wineland, John D., 53n4, 170, 187, 193 Wokoeck, Ursula, 36n14, 37, 38n19 Woodbridge, John D., 91n2, 94n8, 96n9, 98n13, 99n14 Yamauchi, Edwin M., xvi, 39n22, 40n24, 53–54, 55n8, 56, 80n17, 92n4, 109n32 Yocum Mize, Sandra, xin4 Younger, K. Lawson, Jr., 32n2, 36n14 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 119n13 Zac, Sylvain, 93n5, 94n7 Zimmermann, Frank, 54n5 Zumstein, Jean, 5n13

Index /  213

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