The contribution of Jewish Literature to 'Sacred History' in Late 17th-century Cambridge

因此，这个项目与新兴的奖学金对现代早期的“基督教希伯来主义”的主题，这已被肯尼斯奥斯汀的犹太人和改革的新动力。奥斯汀认为，犹太人和基督徒之间的适当关系是改革时代破裂的基础。我想写这个故事的下一章，特别关注17世纪后期英国学者在寻求理解“异教”时受到犹太学术指导的方式。这似乎是一个肥沃的，但尚未开发的领域，赫胥黎奖学金，这是普遍认为已进入终端下降，在这一时期，这是证明了工作的雅各布Abolafia，埃里克纳尔逊，安东尼格拉夫顿和蒂莫西双胞胎以及萨克利夫。虽然这些学者正确地指出了这一时期犹太人学术的边缘化，但我认为这种学术并没有消亡，而是成为更广泛的多语言对话的一部分，包括更多的语言和文化，因为这些成为圣经年表和语言学的一部分。在这样做的时候，我将跟随祖尔·沙莱夫和乔纳森·希恩以及列维京的脚步，他们认为这一时期出现了一个独特的“偶像崇拜史”，这一历史构成了启蒙运动“宗教史”的基础。我希望在更广泛的东方主义背景下解释卡斯特尔的工作，这看到他的椅子在阿拉伯语捐赠超过一百年后，第一个希伯来语教授任命。我的论点是，早期现代希伯来教的发现需要对古代近东语言进行更广泛的研究，这构成了“神圣历史”的基础。学者们倾向于假设“基督教希伯来教”是天主教，路德教和加尔文主义的倡导者在他们相互辩论中的工具。虽然这是许多希伯来人的情况下，这不是故事的结束。通过多语学者的研究，民族间关于《希伯来圣经》、《圣经》地位和《圣经》元音点的历史性的争论变得复杂和扩大。研究多种语言的《圣经》需要认识到它的多重含义。这些可能会被发现作为寻求恢复“原始”文本或支持特定神学立场的一部分。虽然有一个丰富的学术文献的用法犹太文本，以支持基督教的自白索赔，承认的方式，其中犹太奖学金通知基督徒的信仰，并在某些情况下，采取了这些界限的“正统”，并进入“宗教史”，是最近。需要并排阅读多个版本的《圣经》是基于一个重要的假设，这个假设触及了赫布里底学派关于《旧约》历史特殊性的见解的核心。对圣经的多语言研究假设了一个不同的历史背景，一个多文化的年表，这不能通过一本单一的“圣书”来理解。这种认识并不意味着把《圣经》仅仅变成古代历史的片段，而是使用历史语言学的方法来揭示它的意义。正是这种探索形成了“神圣历史”的基础，而“神圣历史”又演变成了“宗教历史”。这个启蒙时代的学科，并不像以前所说的那样，代表着与改革时代圣经学术的决裂，而是它的发展。

This project thus engages with the burgeoning scholarship on the subject of early modern 'Christian Hebraism', which has been given new impetus by Kenneth Austin's The Jews and the Reformation. Austin argues that the proper relationship between Jews and Christians is fundamental to the ruptures of the Reformation-era. I would like to write the next chapter of this story, with a particular focus on the ways in which late seventeenth-century English scholars were guided by Jewish scholarship in their quest to understand 'paganism'. This appears a fertile and yet, under-explored area of Hebraic scholarship, which is widely understood to have gone into terminal decline in this period, as is evidenced by the work of Jacob Abolafia, Eric Nelson, Anthony Grafton and Timothy Twinning as well as that of Sutcliffe. Whilst these scholars are correct to point out the marginalisation of specifically Jewish scholarship in this period, I would posit that such scholarship does not die out, but rather becomes part of a broader, polyglottal conversation encompassing more languages and cultures, as these become part of biblical chronology and philology. In doing so, I will be following in the footsteps of Zur Shalev and Jonathan Sheehan, as well as Levitin, who have posited that a distinct 'history of idolatry' emerges in this period, which goes on to form the basis of Enlightenment 'histories of religion'.I wish to situate the work of Castell within a broader orientalist context, which saw his chair in Arabic endowed over one-hundred years after the appointment of the first Regius Professor of Hebrew. It is my contention that the findings of early modern Hebraism necessitated the broader study of ancient Near-Eastern languages, which forms the basis of 'sacred history'. Scholars have tended to assume that 'Christian Hebraism' was instrumentalised by advocates of Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism in their debates with one another. Whilst this was the case for many Hebraists, it is not the end of the story. Through polyglottal scholarship, inter-denominational debates about the Hebrew Bible, its' status and the historicity of its' vowel points, are complicated and expanded. The study of the Bible in multiple languages entails a recognition of its' multiple meanings. These might be uncovered as part of a quest to recover the 'original' text or to endorse a particular theological position. Whilst there is a rich scholarly literature on the usages of Jewish texts to buttress Christian confessional claims, recognition of the ways in which Jewish scholarship informed the beliefs of Christians, and in some cases, took those to the bounds of 'orthodoxy' and into the 'history of religion', is more recent. The need to read multiple versions of the Bible side-by-side is based on an important assumption, which gets to the heart of the insights derived from Hebraic scholarship as to the historical specificity of the Old Testament. A multi-lingual approach to the Scriptures assumes a diverse historical context, a multi-cultural chronology, which cannot be made sense of through a single 'holy book'. This recognition does not entail turning the Bible into mere fragment of ancient history but rather using historical-philological methodology to uncover its' meanings. It is this quest which formed the basis of 'sacred history', which evolved into the 'history of religion'. This Enlightenment-era discipline, does not, as previously argued, represent a break with Reformation-era biblical scholarship, but is rather a development of it.