A revelation could be immediate to the person who received it. Everyone else heard an account of what had happened. Thomas Paine (1737–1809) made that distinction central to The Age of Reason, bringing an argument about religious authority within the reach of readers who had never studied ancient languages. Before deciding whether a message was divine, they could ask how the claim had reached them and why they should trust its witnesses.
Paine applied the same independence of judgment to the Bible. Contradictions, questions of authorship, and the conduct attributed to biblical figures could be examined without granting the text’s divine origin in advance. Church approval did not settle those questions. The familiar religious book had to face objections that readers were accustomed to making about other accounts of human affairs.
His criticism did not amount to a rejection of God. He affirmed a creator and treated the natural world as evidence available to humanity without the exclusive custody of a church. That belief gave his argument a religious alternative to revelation. People did not need to establish the authenticity of a lost manuscript or accept another person’s vision in order to acknowledge the world they inhabited.
Defenders of Christianity answered him in large numbers, but their agreement that he was wrong concealed substantial differences among them. Some were themselves critics of doctrines their churches treated as essential. Paine’s challenge consequently sharpened disputes within Christianity as well as between Christians and their opponents. Among those answering him was a preacher who believed revelation promised the eventual restoration of every soul, a conclusion many of Paine’s other Christian opponents would have rejected.