Part Two of Two
Part One of this series, Inherited Doubt, examined several Enlightenment conclusions about Scripture and tradition that subsequent archaeology and scholarship have substantially revised. This article takes the other side of the ledger.
The Enlightenment's challenge to religious tradition was necessary, and it was right about more than its critics have typically conceded. An honest engagement with that tradition demands saying so precisely, because the case for the traditions is stronger when it begins from an accurate account of the challenge they faced.
The Demand for Argument
Before the seventeenth century, large categories of assertion, theological, political, philosophical, circulated on the authority of institution, lineage, and long repetition. A claim did not need to be argued; it needed to be endorsed by the right voice, housed in the right building, repeated across enough generations to acquire the texture of the obvious. Descartes's method of systematic doubt broke that pattern by refusing to count inherited confidence as evidence, forcing a single question onto the table: can you demonstrate this, or are you simply accustomed to it? Religious institutions had largely managed to avoid that question, and the avoidance had cost them.
The cost was specific. When ecclesiastical authority substituted itself for argument, it produced theology that was institutionally robust and intellectually brittle: positions that depended on power for their survival rather than persuasion. The Index of Forbidden Books, the trial of Galileo, and the use of excommunication as an epistemological tool were the predictable consequence of a tradition that had learned to treat institutional confidence as a sufficient answer to inconvenient questions. Skepticism identified that substitution as a pathology, and the identification was correct.
The broader point holds even where the specific abuses were absent. A tradition that cannot be questioned has replaced faith with coercion, and the difference matters, morally and intellectually. The demand for argument, whatever its origins in Cartesian philosophy or Humean empiricism, was a demand the traditions needed to hear, and those that heard it clearly came out of the encounter with sharper, more defensible positions than the ones that simply waited for the challenge to pass.
The Text and Its Interpreters
Among skepticism's most durable contributions is the distinction between what a text says and what a tradition has made of it. Centuries of theological interpretation had accreted around Scripture to the point where the accretion and the text had become nearly indistinguishable, and challenging an inherited reading felt equivalent to challenging the source itself. The Reformation had already begun pulling these apart, insisting that the text be allowed to speak against its own interpretive tradition where necessary. The Enlightenment pressed further, asking not only which readings were faithful but whether the apparatus of institutional interpretation had been, in places, systematically self-serving.
The answer, in places, was yes. The geocentric universe is the clearest case. Ecclesiastes 1:5, Joshua 10:13, and Psalm 93:1 were read for over a millennium as cosmological claims, evidence that the sun moved while the earth stood fixed. When Galileo's observations contradicted that reading, the institutional response treated the contradiction as an attack on Scripture itself. The actual conflict was between the observations and one interpretive tradition's understanding of a handful of poetic and narrative verses. The text had not changed; the confidence with which one reading of it could be defended had. Identifying that gap, between the text and what generations of institutional authority had made of it, is an act of honesty toward Scripture. A tradition confident enough in its sources to examine what has been done with them is stronger for having done so.
The Jewish textual tradition had been practicing this discipline for centuries through entirely different means. The Masoretes, the scribal tradition responsible for the vocalized Hebrew text, built the gap between text and reading into the physical manuscript itself. The Tetragrammaton is the most familiar instance: written as the four-letter divine name, read aloud as Adonai, the gap between the two preserved in the vocalization itself rather than collapsed into a single choice. Where the transmitted consonantal text (ketiv, "what is written") diverged from the received oral tradition (qere, "what is read") more broadly, the Masoretes noted both in the margin rather than resolving the tension by editorial decision. The disagreement was preserved, annotated, and handed on as information worth keeping. The Talmudic structure institutionalizes the same instinct at the level of legal reasoning, tracing rulings through their sources, testing them against objections, and preserving dissenting opinions even when they could not be reconciled with the majority position. The dictum that "these and these are the words of the living God," pronounced in Eruvin 13b over two schools whose rulings directly contradict each other, is a principled acknowledgment that the text exceeds any single reading of it. Skepticism named this gap between text and interpretation as a methodological discovery; the rabbinic tradition had already formalized it as a literary genre.
The Feedback Loop
The critical methods developed to challenge Scripture became the tools that read, excavated, and recovered it. Enlightenment philology, historiography, and archaeology, the same apparatus skeptics deployed against the traditions, gave scholars the means to decipher ancient languages, date manuscripts with precision, reconstruct historical context, and place biblical texts within the civilizations that produced them. Without that methodological development, the Hittites remain a biblical curiosity with no independent verification, the Dead Sea Scrolls are unreadable, and the Masoretic text goes unanalyzed at the level Emanuel Tov's work represents. The tools were a gift to the traditions even when they were wielded against them.
The nineteenth-century German historical-critical school makes the point with particular clarity. Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis was explicitly skeptical in its orientation, reading the Pentateuch as a composite of later sources rather than a unified Mosaic text, and drawing conclusions that troubled conservative readers across confessional lines. Yet the methods Wellhausen employed became the standard toolkit for biblical scholarship regardless of where a given scholar stood on his conclusions. Jewish and Christian scholars who contested the Documentary Hypothesis adopted its philological and source-critical apparatus to construct their counterarguments. The tradition absorbed the instrument even while disputing the verdict.
Archaeology sharpens the point further. The discipline that vindicated the Hittites, confirmed the Assyrian campaigns, and placed the Babylonian exile in precise historical context was built on Enlightenment empiricism and applied with the rigor the skeptical tradition demanded. K. A. Kitchen's work, among the most sustained conservative responses to the skeptical scholarly consensus, deploys the same comparative methods, the same attention to ancient Near Eastern texts and material culture, the same evidentiary standards. Skepticism gave the tradition better tools with which to defend itself, and the resulting scholarship on both sides of the argument is richer for the exchange.
Institutional Fallibility
Skepticism's recognition that institutions protect themselves, suppress inconvenient inquiry, and mistake longevity for authority found real material in the religious record. The use of theological power to silence rather than answer, to excommunicate rather than refute, was a genuine failure, and the intellectual consequence was predictable: positions that survived by suppression rather than persuasion were eventually exposed as weaker than their defenders had claimed. Traditions that absorbed that pressure honestly came out of it with more defensible positions than those that resisted.
The same standard applied to secular scholarly institutions produces a less comfortable picture. For much of the twentieth century, the mainstream scholarly position held that King David was a literary creation with no historical basis, a position defended with the same institutional weight that ecclesiastical authority once brought to bear on its own claims. The 1993 discovery of the Tel Dan Stele, a ninth-century BCE inscription referring to the "House of David," did not gently update that consensus. It forced a reversal that the textual evidence, available for centuries, had not been sufficient to produce on its own. Mainstream positions in secular scholarship have proven just as capable as their religious counterparts of holding firm against argument until physical evidence makes the position untenable. That story is told in detail in Part One. The point here is narrower: fallibility is institutional, and a skepticism that applies the recognition selectively has stopped being a method and started being a prejudice.
The Canon's Own Skepticism
Skepticism charged that religious tradition suppressed dissent, protected its institutions from scrutiny, and elevated its own authority above the truth it claimed to serve. The biblical canon answers that charge by demonstrating, at length and with considerable candor, that the tradition had already internalized the same discipline.
Amos was a shepherd from Tekoa who addressed the prosperous religious establishment of the northern kingdom and told them their festivals were an offense, their prosperity was built on exploitation, and the God they invoked at the sanctuaries was not interested in their worship. "I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies" (Amos 5:21). The community that preserved and transmitted this text across generations was doing precisely what skepticism demands: holding its own institutions to account, refusing to let authority substitute for integrity, keeping the critique alive. Jeremiah stood in the Temple precincts and announced that the Temple offered no theological guarantee. The slogan "The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, The temple of the Lord, are these" (Jeremiah 7:4) was superstition, and the triple repetition was a deliberate parody of the institution's own self-understanding.
Job ends with God vindicating the man who argued against received theodicy and rebuking the friends who defended it: "ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" (Job 42:7). The tradition held that suffering was punishment and restoration was reward. The text dismantles that account and lets it stand dismantled. Ecclesiastes meditates on the limits of wisdom itself, sitting in unresolved tension with the confidence of Proverbs, and the canon preserved both without resolving the argument. Paul's letter to the Galatians records a public confrontation with Peter, the acknowledged leader of the Jerusalem community, over a question of practice with significant theological stakes: "I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed" (Galatians 2:11). The letter was preserved and circulated as authoritative. These are the decisions of a tradition that had concluded the argument mattered more than the institution's reputation.
Reading Without Prior Commitment
The methodological discipline skepticism brought to ancient texts, approaching them without a predetermined conclusion to confirm, applies equally to the biblical corpus and illuminates something a purely hostile reading does not expect to find.
No other literary corpus from the ancient world treats its own central figures with the degree of candor the Hebrew Bible sustains across its full length. Egyptian royal inscriptions present a pharaoh of unbroken victory. Homeric epic elevates its protagonists toward the divine. The Hebrew Bible gives its greatest king an adulterous affair and a calculated murder and does not look away. It gives its lawgiver a death outside the land he spent his life working toward, and its founding patriarch moments of cowardice alongside his faith. Coming to this material without prior commitment, the candor is the first thing that registers, and it bears the marks of a tradition with no investment in its own flattery. A tradition constructing these texts to serve institutional power would have constructed different texts.
That observation does not settle the theological questions. It is offered as a datum rather than a proof, one that the skeptical method, applied honestly, surfaces rather than suppresses, and that a purely hostile reading is obliged to account for.
The Exchange
Three centuries of sustained critical pressure on religious tradition produced something neither side fully anticipated: a feedback loop in which the traditions and their critics sharpened each other. Skepticism gave the traditions a vocabulary for distinguishing institutional authority from textual authority, tools for reading their own sources with greater precision, and a standard of argument that forced positions either to be defended on their merits or quietly abandoned. The traditions, for their part, demonstrated that honest dissent, preserved uncertainty, and argument across generations without demanding resolution, disciplines skepticism claimed as its own contributions, had been operating within them long before the Enlightenment named them.
The discipline of doubt, applied without exception, meets that inheritance rather than dissolving it. The traditions that engaged the challenge honestly are the stronger for having done so, and the intellectual tools they gained in the encounter remain indispensable to anyone who wants to read these texts well.
Sources
Primary Texts
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (KJV).
Talmud Bavli, Eruvin 13b (Sefaria).
Secondary Literature
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641).
K. A. Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003).
Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress Press, 2012).
Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1878).
