A history that began with the biblical patriarchs left much of the world waiting to enter the account. Voltaire (1694–1778) objected to that arrangement. The antiquities of India and China offered reasons to question whether one people’s sacred record should determine the age and meaning of every civilization. Reports arriving from Asia could enlarge the past while diminishing the authority of the churchmen who claimed to explain it.
Voltaire did not need to believe every religious teaching in those reports to find them useful. He favoured the idea of an early, reasonable worship of a supreme being, later complicated by priestly interests and accumulated superstition. A text said to preserve simple religious truths from before Moses could therefore serve his argument even if its author or translator intended something quite different. The search for an original religion continued, with the biblical claim to priority now under attack.
John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–1798) supplied a particularly welcome account. His purported Indian scripture seemed to give the argument an ancient witness rather than a modern conjecture. Yet the credentials of that witness remained unresolved. Voltaire’s suspicion of Christian authorities did not always extend with equal force to sources that promised to displace them.
His choices reveal a scholar and polemicist responding to opportunities, rather than consistently applying one historical test. Asian learning was acquiring real importance in European thought, but the uses made of it depended on arguments already under way. A supposed revelation could be quoted against revelation, and a defence of religious antiquity turned against the religion it was intended to support. The disagreement increasingly concerned where the earliest civilization should be placed, and whose evidence entitled them to put it there.