Roman Catholic Biblical Scholarship in the Age of Confessions
Roman Catholic Biblical Scholarship in the Age of Confessions
The Case of Lucas Holstenius and the Barberini Circle
This chapter considers the confessional and institutional factors that shaped the development of biblical criticism in seventeenth-century Rome. It concentrates on the German convert and noted scholar of Greek manuscripts, Lucas Holstenius, and his efforts to encourage the study of the ancient Greek version of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. These efforts were variously helped and hindered by Holstenius’s patrons and the Roman ecclesiastical authorities, depending on the extent to which they suited their religio-political ambitions. The same ambitions also had a bearing on the genres, publication formats and other modes of dissemination which Roman scholars used for their research, driving them to adopt habits of anonymity, discretion and dissimulation which were out of keeping with the practices of other participants in the contemporary republic of letters, and which differentiated them from later generations of Catholic scholars who advanced their intellectual agenda more openly and aggressively.
Keywords: Bible, biblical criticism, Rome, Lucas Holstenius, Barberini, censorship, Septuagint, Catholicism, manuscripts, republic of letters
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