This book deals almost exclusively with the Old Testament, almost without touching on Revelation and the New Testament. When I first started thinking about the topic, it was not my intention, but the way was indicated by the material itself. The Old Testament describes a journey to the promised land. Oliver Cromwell, I believe, is the last English politician to be hailed as Moses. This happened immediately after he dispersed the "rump" of the Long Parliament. George Fox was perhaps the last religious leader to be likened to Moses. But old England did not turn into Israel; New England was not a country where milk and honey flowed, but a useful market for manufactured goods and the slave trade. Edwards, enumerating the mistakes of the sectarians, named among them the fact that the Old Testament "does not interest and does not oblige Christians who live according to the New Testament to anything." The memory of Babylon and the fear of the Antichrist faded into the background when the Navigation Act and the new imperial policy gave the English a different wealth and greater self-confidence. The favorite texts of the "people of freedom" were taken almost exclusively from the New Testament[1981].

The great Protestant doctrine of predestination attempted to adapt the message contained in the Old Testament to the world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers begins with the Old Testament concept of the priesthood, which is not always easy to find in the New Testament. The ideas of the right of primogeniture and the right of inheritance go back to the patriarchal society of the Old Testament. Monarchy was a problem for the children of Israel, as it was for the people of the 16th and 17th centuries, and it was not a problem for those who lived according to the New Testament, having been hopelessly subjugated by the Roman Empire. The Old Testament virtues were not subtle, they were the "heroic" military virtues that Samuel Butler rejected when Gudibras tried to prove the orthodoxy of his doctrine by apostolic blows and knocks—but they were certainly not apostolic, but rather prophetic. Milton denied "chivalrous" military prowess; he drew his strength of spirit mainly from the Old Testament, but perhaps this virtue is more characteristic of the New Testament. But Milton is the last great creator of the biblical epic; the age of Augustus lost interest in the tribal society of ancient Israel. At the end of the seventeenth century, the cultural self-confidence of England and English literature had already been established. Defoe, whose ideas mark the highest rise of anti-papism, helped to create a new bourgeois novel in which England led the world.

In the end, I think that the Bible in English has done much more good than harm; We should be thankful that critics have worked on her, undermining her supernatural authority and dethroned her at the end of her period of absolute authority. Someone has said that "the world that the Bible created has thrown the Bible off its pedestal." The radical righteous' desire to understand the Bible led them to a critical activity that eventually toppled it from its pedestal. Let us pay tribute to the learned works of Tyndell, Thomas James, William Crashaw, Perkins, Preston, and Chillingworth, as well as to lesser luminaries such as Greenhill and Barrows; the great Milton and Owen, the radicals Walvin, Winstanley, Reiter and Fisher. They overturned their present into the Bible, as Hobbes overturned it into its natural state. They found guidance in the Bible as they diligently sought to understand the relationship of the barbaric stories in the books of Judges, Kings, and Chronicles to their own more complex society. The actual achievements of their vast interpretive volumes may seem inconsistent with the effort put into them; But the influence of their scholarship on the authority of their sermons and books should not be underestimated. To a certain extent, the fact that England eventually became a democratic country owes much to the discussions unleashed by these scholars, discussions which, ironically, eventually led people to rely more on their own reason than on quotations from the sacred text. They cut down the very branch on which they were sitting, giving access to the light, and this benefited those who followed them.

Notes

1

In the Russian translation, all biblical quotations are given according to the Synodal edition. — Ed. transl.

Подобные примеры лицемерного использования Библии в изобилии встречаются в пьесах Марло.

Negley Harte, ‘In Memory of F J. Fisher’, in Fisher, London and the English Economy, 1500-1700 (ed. PJ. Corfield and N. B. Harte, 1990), p.28.