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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2010
What is now called Christian religion, has existed among the ancients, and was not absent from the beginning of the human race, until Christ came in the flesh: from which time true religion, which existed already, began to be called Christian.
Augustine, Retractions, 1.13It would be a mistake to think that with the growth of biblical criticism came a whole new field of ‘secular’ history. What in fact took place was the development of a number of hybrid histories in which biblical material was supplemented with historical information drawn from other sources. Augustine himself had made the admission that ‘it is difficult to discover from Scripture, whether, after the deluge, traces of the holy city are continuous, or are … interrupted’. Augustine, in other words, could insist on the historical accuracy of the Bible without pressing the further claim that it gave full information about the history of true piety; and if the ‘City of God’ did not have a continuous history written out in the pages of Scripture, still less could it be claimed that the Bible gave a full historical account of manifold forms of religious error. In view of this, it is not surprising that the Catholic biblical scholar Richard Simon hardly aroused a ripple when in 1680 he declared that the Bible, by itself, is an insufficient basis for a universal history.
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