Jonathan Edwards’ French Connection

Robert E. Brown focuses on Jonthan Edwards’ engagement with the emerging criticism of the early modern period, when the question of who authored the Pentateuch occupied many a biblical interpreter. Influenced by the more rationalistic approach of the Jewish scholar Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164), several writers—including Thomas Hobbes, Isaac La Peyrère, Benedict Spinoza, Richard Simon, and Jean Le Clerc—argued against the traditional belief that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. One leading responder to this view was Louis Ellie Du Pin, a French Catholic ecumenist, and Edwards, interestingly enough, drew substantially on Du Pin in his own discussion of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Brown uses this episode to show that Edwards was a creative consumer of European ideas, which illustrates that early modern biblical interpretation was more complex and layered than often recognized.