Cotton Mather’s Biblical Enlightenment: Critical Interrogations of the Canon and Revisions of the Common Translation in the Biblia Americana (1693–1728)

While there exists a robust scholarship on the cultural influences and public uses of the Bible in early American history, the historical development of biblical scholarship in America remains relatively understudied. The prevalent view suggests that biblical scholarship in America had its critical awakening with the importation of German Higher Criticism to northeastern divinity schools in the nineteenth century. This essay makes a corrective intervention by looking at Cotton Mather’s unpublished Biblia Americana (1693–1728), the first comprehensive Bible commentary to be authored in British North America. More specifically, the essay examines Mather’s response to critical interrogation of the canon and the Biblia’s numerous revisions of King James translation in light of recent philological scholarship. What connects these two issues is that they both concern the “givenness” of the Bible, which, in Mather’s day, was being fundamentally challenged. Behind the discussions about the canonicity of diverse books and over how to render the Hebrew and Greek texts into modern languages always lurked fundamental questions regarding the divine authority, integrity, and perspicuity of the Bible. Examining a broad range of examples from across the Biblia, the essay demonstrates how Mather’s work defies clear-cut categorization as either precritical or critical. In response to the intellectual currents of the early Enlightenment, Mather pioneered a new type of deeply learned, historically conscious but apologetically-oriented biblical criticism in America. The Biblia clearly reflects the challenges brought on by the deepening historicization of Scripture and the destabilization of texts and meanings through a new type of criticism. More widely read in current European scholarship and in many ways more curious and daring than any other early American exegete, Mather joined the infinitely complex and open-ended quest for better translations. Moreover, he was the first in New England to seriously address hard questions about the canon of the Bible and its historical development. But he always did so with the aim of providing constructive answers to these debates that would ultimately shore up the authority of Scripture, stabilize the scriptural foundation for what Mather regarded as the core of Reformed orthodox theological beliefs, and offer improved interpretations of the biblical texts, which would lend themselves even better to devotion and illuminate for Christians, with the help of the most up-to-date scholarship, the full riches of God’s Word.