ABSTRACT
The rarity of knowledge of ancient Greek and its strange alphabet gave the language a mystique in the popular imagination. In low-class circles, more often than Latin, Greek was associated with extreme, other-worldly intellectual prowess and arcane, even sinister arts. When in the 16th century Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, long the officially recognized Bible of the Catholic Church, began to be seriously rivalled by vernacular versions in English, the Greek New Testament attracted sustained attention. The mystical potency of Greek was certainly sometimes associated by Anglicans with ‘papists’. Greek, however inauthentic, did work that many of Place’s contemporaries would have regarded as diabolical. For Place said that it was learning from its scientific description of the process of human conception that made him doubt forever the whole Biblical tradition of the Virgin Birth. The ancient Greek savant’s spurious manual lay behind one radical’s questioning of Christian dogma, full circle back to the issue of the Bible.
