Richard Bentley

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Richard Bentley was an English classical scholar and Anglican clergyman whose two most lasting achievements lie far apart: he gave the inaugural series of lectures founded to defend Christianity against unbelief, and he proved, by the methods of textual criticism, that a celebrated set of ancient letters was a fake. He is remembered today less as a churchman than as the most formidable philologist England produced before the nineteenth century.

Born in Yorkshire and educated at Cambridge, Bentley rose through learning and a sharp, combative intelligence to become Master of Trinity College in 1700, a post he held — through decades of litigation with his own fellows — until his death. In 1692 he delivered the first of the Boyle Lectures, endowed by the chemist Robert Boyle for the defence of religion against atheists and infidels. Bentley’s eight sermons, A Confutation of Atheism, argued that the order of nature pointed to a designing mind, and he did something new with the claim: he drew on Isaac Newton’s recently published mechanics, corresponding with Newton himself to be sure he had the physics right. The result was among the earliest attempts to enlist the new natural philosophy in the service of natural theology — the gravitational structure of the cosmos offered as evidence that it could not have arranged itself.

His fame in scholarship rests on a quarrel. Drawn into a literary dispute over the Epistles of Phalaris, letters attributed to a Sicilian tyrant of the sixth century BCE, Bentley published a Dissertation (1697, expanded 1699) showing from internal evidence — references to cities not yet founded, to coins not yet minted, to a literary form not yet invented — that the letters were the work of a much later forger. The argument was decisive, and the manner in which it was made mattered as much as the conclusion: it demonstrated that language, custom, and historical detail could date a text against its own claims. Scholars regard the Dissertation as a foundational document of modern historical and textual criticism.

The two enterprises are not as separate as they look. The same discipline that caught out a forger — the refusal to take a text on its own authority, the insistence on testing it against what could be independently known — was the discipline a later age would turn on scripture itself. Bentley applied it freely to the classics; his proposals for editing the Greek New Testament, never completed, hinted at where such method led. His own apologetics belonged to a confident moment when reason and revelation were thought to reinforce one another; the critical tools he sharpened would, in other hands, complicate that confidence considerably.

Bentley was disliked in his lifetime for arrogance and endless quarrels, and his emendations of poetry — he once rewrote lines of Milton he judged corrupt — drew ridicule. The judgment that survives him is narrower and firmer: that he saw, earlier and more clearly than his contemporaries, how much a text will confess under disciplined questioning.

→ In the library: Background: an ancient design argument from the order of the cosmos — Plato, Timaeus (Jowett, 1892)

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