Richard Simon

Richard Simon founded the critical study of the Bible as a set of documents with a history, and Bossuet had the book pulped within weeks of publication. He was born at Dieppe, joined the Oratory, and learned Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and enough rabbinic literature to read the Jewish commentators, which almost no Catholic scholar of his generation had done. In 1678 he published the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, arguing from the text itself that Moses could not have written the whole Pentateuch, that the books had been compiled and edited by later scribes, and that the surviving manuscripts contained ordinary human variation. His purpose was Catholic and polemical: if scripture alone was uncertain, then tradition and the church's authority were necessary, which he intended as an argument against the Protestants. Bossuet, shown the table of contents, had the edition seized and destroyed - about thirteen hundred copies burned - and Simon was expelled from the Oratory. The book was reprinted in Amsterdam and read across Europe anyway, and Protestant scholars, who were the targets, were the first to take it up. He spent the rest of his life as a parish priest and then in retirement at Dieppe, publishing critical histories of the New Testament text, of the versions and of the commentators, each of them attacked. He quarrelled with almost everyone, including the Protestant Jean Le Clerc. Jean Astruc and the German scholars of the next century built on him. He is the reason the documentary hypothesis has a seventeenth-century Catholic ancestor.

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