News of unfamiliar religions did not stop at the shores of New England. Cotton Mather (1663–1728) read European scholarship and missionary reports while following the attacks that writers such as John Toland (1670–1722) made on revelation. The challenge called for more than repeating that the Bible was true. Mather wanted to explain how the histories of other peoples could belong within the world it described.
His Biblia Americana grew into an enormous commentary, assembled around the biblical text. Ancient gods, distant customs, and competing chronologies all required attention. Mather could reject a forged authority while continuing to believe that the nations preserved altered memories of a common religious beginning. His defence depended on deciding which testimony deserved trust, not on accepting every apparently useful witness.
China posed a revealing problem. Missionary accounts gave European readers traditions of rulers and learning of formidable antiquity. Mather identified the legendary founding figure Fuxi, also rendered Fohi, with Noah, interpreting details of the Chinese story as distorted memories of the biblical past. The comparison made an unfamiliar history intelligible within Genesis, but its force depended on the identity he had assigned to the Chinese figure.
The commentary remained unpublished in Mather’s lifetime, so the size of his undertaking should not be confused with the size of its contemporary readership. Its surviving pages nevertheless show how much of the wider world entered a Puritan minister’s study. The same reports could produce different histories elsewhere. In China itself, a Jesuit was reading Fuxi through another biblical identification and telling European correspondents that a Chinese classic preserved revelation from before Moses.