Geology Reference
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and contradictions had crept into the text as vowels, words, and whole passages were lost,
added, or modified over centuries of translation and transcription.
His attack on biblical inerrancy—the belief that the Bible held no errors whatso-
ever—shocked both the Calvinists it was supposed to shock and the Catholic Church that
commissioned the work. Simon believed scripture to be divinely inspired. He just did not
know which of the modern versions corresponded to the original one. As a reward for a job
done too well, his topic was banned and he was expelled from the Oratorians.
Half a century later, the censors of the Sorbonne ignored French physician Jean Astruc
when he advanced the same argument. Noting the striking repetition of events in the bib-
lical flood story and the use of two names for God, Astruc claimed that Moses compiled
Genesis from even then ancient accounts handed down from the patriarchs. Astruc's suspi-
cions were based on several lines of evidence. First there were the unnecessary repetitions,
like the two creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2. Then there was the story's awkward jump-
ing back and forth through time. Astruc saw these anomalies as originating when Moses
merged several original versions into a single story. The Bible was starting to be seen as a
topic that had evolved.
In the late 1700s, German intellectuals introduced more formal literary scholarship into
biblical criticism. Johann Eichhorn, the prominent professor of Oriental languages at Jena
University, compared biblical narratives and concluded that many of the stories in Genesis
were fanciful accounts of prehistoric events. Analyzing the style of different passages, he
sorted through and disentangled a literary stratigraphy that revealed Genesis to be a com-
posite story.
In revolutionary America, where conventional institutions were no longer sacred, Tho-
mas Paine took up the implications of Eichhorn's conclusion to attack the Bible in the name
of the Enlightenment in his pamphlet
The Age of Reason
.
Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word
of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis, but an anonymous topic of stories, fables and traditionary
or invented absurdities, or of down-right lies. The story of Eve and the serpent, and of Noah and his ark, drops to a
level with the Arabian Tales, without the merit of being entertaining.
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