Why had so many peoples come to worship different gods if humanity shared a common beginning? Gerardus Vossius (1577–1649) treated that question as a historical problem. In De theologia gentili (1641), his study of pagan religion, he collected explanations of how worship had departed from knowledge of the true God. One possibility gave the apparently bewildering variety a familiar human ancestry. Gods might be people whom later generations had honoured, misunderstood, and eventually worshipped.
Biblical history supplied candidates for those forgotten people. Vossius associated Saturn with Noah and Jupiter with Ham, reading stories about the divine family alongside the account of humanity after the Flood. Differences in names need not disprove the identifications if languages had changed as peoples separated. Differences in stories could likewise be attributed to altered memory.
This way of reading offered a coherent explanation for similarities that a catalogue of separate religions might leave unexplained. It also made a resemblance bear considerable weight. Before a story about a god could confirm the history of a patriarch, the proposed identity between them had to be established. Explaining disagreement as corruption made the comparisons easier to preserve, but harder to test.
Vossius left later scholars a large body of testimony with which to work. They could accept an identification, contest it, or use the same material to propose another. The inquiry also encouraged a move beyond comparing divine biographies. If names and beliefs had travelled with particular peoples, accounts of voyages and settlements might show how that movement had occurred. The descendants of Noah could then be followed across a map as well as through a succession of gods.