ABSTRACT
Early modern Protestant critics were brought up to believe in the superiority of the Hebrew text of the Bible. Where they challenged this, for the most part they tried to substitute one authoritative text for another. Thus, for the translators of the English Authorised Version (1611), both the Greek Old Testament (the ancient translation of the Septuagint) and the Latin Vulgate attributed to St Jerome had value because they were versions in the vernacular of the times that had themselves been made from the original languages of Scripture.2 Given these assumptions, Jean Morin’s Exercitationes biblicae de hebraei graecique textus sinceritate, published at Paris in 1633, represented a new and potentially worrying development for Protestant critics.
