Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768): Classicist, Hebraist, Enlightenment Radical in Disguise

Description

Over the course of thirty years, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) secretly drafted what would become the most thorough attack on revelation to date, ushering the quest for the historical Jesus and foreshadowing the religious criticism of the new atheism of the twentieth century. Peeling away the layers of Reimarus's radical work by looking at hitherto unpublished manuscript evidence, Ulrich Groetsch shows that the Radical Enlightenment was more than just an international philosophical movement. By demonstrating the importance philology, antiquarianism, and Semitic languages played in Reimarus's upbringing, scholarship, and teaching, this new study provides a vivid portrayal of an Enlightenment radical at the cusp of the secular age, whose debt to earlier traditions of scholarship remains undisputed. Acknowledgments ix List of Illustrations xiii Note to the Reader and List of Abbreviations xiv Introduction 1 1. From Protégé to Peer. Reimarus at the Hamburg School of Polyhistors 20 2. Among Pagans and Hebrews. Teaching Jewish Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century Hamburg 62 3. Jean Le Clerc’s Faithful Pupil. Reimarus Encounters the Profane 116 4. Reimarus, the Cardinal, and the Remaking of Cassius Dio’s 'Roman History' 177 5. How Reimarus Read His Bible 224 6. The Miraculous Crossing of the Red Sea What Lessing and His Opponents during the Fragmentenstreit Did Not See 285 Afterthoughts 310 Bibliography 317 Manuscripts 317 Printed Primary Sources 319 Secondary Literature 334 General Index 362 Scriptural Index 375