Could the disagreement among ancient teachers be the result of reading them badly? Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) thought a sufficiently learned comparison would uncover agreements that narrower scholars had missed. In 1486 he published nine hundred theses that he proposed to defend in Rome. The undertaking drew on Greek philosophy and Christian theology, but it also gave an unusually prominent place to Jewish mystical learning.
For Pico, Kabbalah, Jewish teachings about God and Scripture, promised access to an ancient understanding of revelation. Its interpretations of Hebrew words and sacred names seemed to support Christian claims about Christ. This was an ambitious use of another tradition’s books. Jewish scholars had developed those interpretations for purposes of their own, and the Christian conclusions Pico drew were not simply waiting in the texts for anyone to read.
His proposed agreement therefore depended on the work of translators and on decisions about how unfamiliar teachings should be understood. A difference might be explained as a matter of vocabulary, or one authority read through another until their conclusions appeared compatible. Pico’s confidence came from the breadth of his learning, but that breadth also multiplied the places where a reader could object. His project asked Christian authorities to accept more than the harmless collection of ancient opinions.
The public debate never took place. Papal condemnation of some of the theses interrupted the attempt to demonstrate concord and made Pico’s own orthodoxy a matter of dispute. The episode exposed a difficulty that would recur throughout this history. A scholar could believe that truth was shared across traditions and still produce a conclusion that the custodians of those traditions rejected. The search for agreement enlarged the range of books Christians read without giving them a common rule for deciding what those books proved.