In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

BIBLE COMMENTARIES AS A PLATFORM FOR POLEMICAL DEBATE Abraham Calovius versus Hugo Grotius Henk NELLEN Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, The Hague The seventeenth century was riddled with incessant theological controversies . Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, all these disputes seem like wasted energy. By strengthening disagreement, they could not but lead to more sharply demarcated confessional boundaries. Theologians challenged each other in public meetings and polemical writings, but these were certainly not the only combat zones. Since time immemorial, the Bible had stood in the centre of public debate as the most important and even — according to the Reformers — as a unique source of information for all matters pertaining to dogma, rites and Church organization. Commentaries on the Bible therefore played an important role in confessional dialogue. In this area, discussion was usually more thoughtful and balanced, but here, too, the defence and vindication of one’s own confession was the dominant impulse. Against the backdrop of this continuous struggle, it is easy to see why the exegesis of the Dutch humanist and jurist Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) still elicited a massive refutation more than two decades after his death. The instigator was a German, Abraham Calovius (1612-1686). Following in the footsteps of a famous predecessor , Martin Luther, he taught theology at the University of Wittenberg. In this paper, I will deal with the exegetical methods of Grotius and Calovius and then venture some remarks regarding the function of the biblical commentary in the seventeenth century. Grotius and his Humanistic Exegesis Humanist scholars who studied and published texts did not as a rule abstain from commenting on them. The urge to make a detailed 446 HENK NELLEN commentary was so ingrained in their mentality that they even explicated their own texts in this particular way. Often, editing simply meant adding comments, as if purely quantitative augmentation and qualitative improvement were the same things. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) fits this mold perfectly.1 He wrote commentaries on texts prepared for publications by himself or by fellow humanists, for example the works of Martianus Capella (1599), Lucan (1614), Stobaeus (1623), Tacitus (1640), and Seneca (1661-1662). He also annotated the Bible (16411650 ), the Corpus iuris civilis (1642), as well as the explanation of the Augsburg Confession by the conciliatory Roman Catholic theologian George Cassander (1641). Moreover, successive editions of his own works provided Grotius with an excellent opportunity to supplement his writings with new evidence and proofs, in which he also referred to yet other works of his. During the period when he annotated the New Testament , he published two famous bestsellers, De iure belli ac pacis (1625) and De veritate religionis Christianae (1627). Later, he supplemented these works with extensive commentaries. Both works, the first on the laws of war, the other containing an apology for the Christian faith, have strong links with his annotations on the Bible. This interconnectedness comes as no surprise, since constant reference is made to the Bible in De iure belli and De veritate.2 Although Grotius based his view of just war on autonomous natural rights, and although he went to great trouble to construe a rational basis for the truth of Christianity, he accorded a dominant position to the Bible as a unique source of faith and divine law. Grotius occupied himself with his annotations on the Bible over a long period of time. Initially, he intended to publish them as an appendix to a Polyglot, an edition of the Gospels in the original Greek supplemented with the Syrian, Arab and Ethiopian versions and a new Latin paraphrase. His friend Thomas Erpenius, the Leyden Orientalist, had embarked on this project, but he fell victim to the plague on November 13, 1624. By then, Grotius had reached the end of the evangelist Luke. Although he 1 See Henk Nellen, Hugo de Groot. Een leven in strijd om de vrede (Amsterdam: Balans, 2007), especially pp. 498-518, and Idem, ‘Chapter 32, Growing Tension between Church Doctrines and Critical Exegesis of the Old Testament’, in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, ed. Magne Sæbø, vol. II, From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 802-826. 2 For detailed surveys of Grotius’ works and their reception, see Jacob ter Meulen P .J.J. Diermanse, Bibliographie des écrits imprimés de Hugo Grotius (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), hereafter cited as BG; iidem, Bibliographie des écrits sur Hugo Grotius imprimés au XVIIe siècle (The...

Share