ABSTRACT
In the first half of the nineteenth century, philological readings of the Scriptures and new approaches in geology – set down, most importantly, in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-1833) – uncovered the various strata of the Book of Books and the Book of Nature, respectively. The result of applying the historical-critical method to the Scriptures was precisely the discovery of its historicity: as philologists and – mainly Protestant – theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and David Friedrich Strauss – whose The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835-1836) was disseminated in Britain in George Eliot’s influential translation (1849) – could show, the various books of the Bible had been composed at different points in time and by different authors. 1 The empirical study of geological formations resulted not only in the realization that the age of the earth by far surpassed the six thousand years allotted by the Bible, but also that geological processes were dynamic albeit often infinitesimally slow. 2 As Lyell stated, ‘this planet’ could no longer be regarded ‘as having remained unaltered since its creation’, since modern geologists had ‘proved that it had been the theater of reiterated change, and was still the subject of slow but never ending fluctuations’. 3 Neither the earth nor the Scriptures were static, neither had emerged through a single act of creation or revelation; rather, both were the result of slow processes of loss (erosion, textual corruption) and accretion (sedimentation in a geological as well as a philological sense). In a parallel process in the humanities and the sciences, divine authority was undermined by the emergence of new methodologies: the Book of Nature was found to be author-less; natural phenomena emerged under the influence of secondary causes; any reference to a first mover had become dispensable. The authorship of the Book of Books, conversely, now appeared as decentered, not revealed by the Holy Spirit, but composed by various human authors.
