If an Egyptian sage had described truths of Christianity before Moses, his testimony would be extraordinary. If the same words had been written during the Roman Empire, they would require a different explanation. Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) brought that distinction to the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, which Renaissance readers had treated as evidence of a theology older than the Greek philosophers. Their place in religious history depended on a date that close reading could test.
In a work published in 1614, Casaubon examined their Greek and the religious and philosophical ideas they contained. He found signs of a world far later than the one their admirers assigned to them. The texts could not serve without challenge as the testimony of an Egyptian contemporary of the biblical patriarchs. Similarities that readers had understood as ancient prophecy now belonged within the history of later thought.
Casaubon made the argument as part of a controversy over Christian history, rather than as an attempt to dismiss religion. Establishing that a witness was late could protect a historical claim from evidence that did not belong to it. His correction also left much to be studied. The writings remained important expressions of religious thought, but their importance had to be explained in relation to the people and circumstances that had produced them.
Readers responded at different speeds and for different reasons. Some contested the criticism; others retained a belief in early Egyptian wisdom while looking elsewhere for its surviving traces. A scholar who had found spiritual instruction in Hermes did not necessarily surrender it when the proposed date changed. Casaubon had exposed a serious fault in one influential history of revelation. The search continued among other texts, and increasingly among monuments and religious practices whose age seemed less vulnerable to a philologist’s objection.