Richard Simon, text critic from the past

Philip Schaff identifies Catholic priest Richard Simon as the first theologian to “confine inerrancy to these non-existing original autographs,” which idea A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield would later popularize among American conservatives. Simon often is dubbed the “father of Biblical criticism.”

In the footnote, second paragraph, p. 393, Schaff writes:

“The distinction between ‘inerrant autographs’ and errant copies seems to have been first made by Richard Simon (1638-1712), the father of biblical isagogic, to prove the necessity of textual criticism and to silence the attacks of Protestant and Roman Catholic champions for the inerrancy of the existing text of the Bible.[i] He also intended to show ‘que les protestants n’avait aucun principe assurè de leur religion, en rejetant la tradition de L’Eglise’ (Preface to his L’histoire critique du V.T.)” This French sentence translates roughly “that Protestants had no assured principle of their religion, in rejecting the tradition of the [Roman Catholic] Church.”[ii]

Simon rejected the principle of sola scriptura, and rejected the authority of the apographa.

“Fourthly, The great alterations which have happened, as we have shewn in the first Book of this Work, to the Copies of the Bible since the first Originals have been lost, utterly destroy the Protestants and Socinians Principle, who consult onely these same Copies of the Bible as we at present have them.”[iii]

“When we have not the Originals, upon which one may ground the truth of the Copies which are taken from them, we have still reason to doubt.”[iv]

Some Catholics thought Simon did not sufficiently support the authority of the Church Fathers. Protestant theologians opposed the work of Simon, especially since he attacked Sola Scriptura. He held other views in common with modern liberals, such as teaching that Moses did not write much of the work in the Pentateuch commonly attributed to him. Like Simon before them, many modern-day Protestants and Evangelicals are adrift on a textual sea whose wind bloweth them where it listeth.

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[i] biblical isagogic – introductory study; study of the literary and external history of the Bible prior to exegesis; that is, prior to trying to interpret the Bible itself. Schaff uses (Biblical) Isagogic as a noun meaning the historico-critical Introduction to the Bible – “a literary history of the Bible from its origin to the present time. Theological Propædeutic; a General Introduction to the Study of Theology, Exegetical, Historical, Systematic, and Practical, including Encyclopædia, Methodology, and Bibliography; a Manual for Students, Second Edition, Philip Schaff and Samuel Macauley Jackson, New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894, p. 149.
[ii] Ibid., Schaff and Jackson, p. 393.
[iii] A Critical History of the Old Testament, Richard Simon (1638-1712), London: Walter Davis, 1682 (Preface).
[iv] Ibid., Simon, Book II, Chapter IV, p. 32.