Richard Bentley

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A scholar reads a sentence and the sentence betrays its date. Among the letters ascribed to Phalaris — tyrant of Akragas in Sicily in the sixth century before the common era — one mentions a city that did not exist in his lifetime; another trades in a coinage not yet struck; the whole collection is composed in a polished Attic prose the rough archaic Greek of his age had not yet learned to write. The man who lined those anachronisms up, one after another, until the forgery had nowhere left to stand, was Richard Bentley, and the method he used to date a fake against its own claims is the method by which the modern world learned to question any text, scripture not excepted.

Richard Bentley (1662–1742), classical scholar and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge — portrait by Sir James Thornhill, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Bentley was an English classical scholar and Anglican clergyman whose two most lasting achievements lie far apart and yet share a single root. He gave the inaugural series of lectures founded to defend Christianity against unbelief, enlisting the newest natural philosophy in the cause; and he proved, by the patient comparison of word against fact, that a celebrated set of ancient letters was a counterfeit. He is remembered today less as a churchman than as the most formidable philologist England produced before the nineteenth century — the founder, by common scholarly reckoning, of higher textual and historical criticism.

From Yorkshire to the Royal Library

Bentley was born on 27 January 1662 at Oulton, near Wakefield in Yorkshire, and schooled at Wakefield grammar school before going up to St John’s College, Cambridge, admitted in 1676 at the age of fourteen. He took his degree and then, for want of a fellowship, entered the household of Edward Stillingfleet — soon Bishop of Worcester — as tutor to his son. The post was a scholar’s apprenticeship as much as a livelihood: Stillingfleet’s library was among the finest in England, and Bentley read through it with the omnivorous, retentive appetite that would mark all his work. By the time he was thirty he had a continental reputation in manuscript and inscription, and in 1694 he was appointed Keeper of the Royal Library, a curator of the nation’s books before he had published a book of his own.

His learning was vast and his temper sharp, the two not always separable. He was combative by instinct, sure of his own eye, and contemptuous of slower minds — a disposition that won him enemies as steadily as his scholarship won him standing. The same confidence that let him overturn a received attribution let him, elsewhere, ride roughshod over colleagues and texts that had given him no real cause. Both halves of the man are needed to understand his career, which alternated between demonstrations of genius and quarrels that outlasted the questions that started them.

The Boyle Lectures and the new natural philosophy

In 1692 Bentley delivered the first of the Boyle Lectures, endowed by the will of the chemist Robert Boyle for the defense of religion against atheists and infidels. The brief was apologetic — eight sermons a year, to confute unbelief and establish the being and attributes of God — and Bentley met it with a series published as A Confutation of Atheism. He argued, as natural theologians had argued before him, that the order and contrivance of the world point to a designing mind. But he did something new with the old claim. He drew on Isaac Newton’s Principia, published only five years earlier, treating the gravitational architecture of the heavens as the freshest and strongest evidence yet that the cosmos could not have arranged itself.

Title page of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), the work Bentley enlisted for his Boyle Lectures — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Anxious to get the physics exactly right, Bentley wrote to Newton, who answered in a sequence of four letters across the winter of 1692–93 — among the most quoted documents in the history of science and religion alike, now edited in full by the Newton Project. Newton told him, in substance, that gravity is not innate to matter, that he held the notion of an inherent attractive power so plainly absurd that no competent thinker could entertain it; that the cause of gravity is an agent acting constantly by certain laws, whether material or immaterial Newton declined to say; and — the point Bentley most wanted — that gravity alone could never have thrown the planets into the nearly circular, nearly coplanar orbits they keep, so that the frame of the solar system must be ascribed to an intelligent and powerful agent. Newton’s caution is as striking as his conclusion: he gave Bentley the design inference and withheld the mechanism.

Isaac Newton in 1689, painted by Godfrey Kneller; Newton’s four letters to Bentley of 1692–93 supplied the physics for A Confutation of Atheism — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Bentley took what he was given. A Confutation of Atheism stands among the earliest attempts to harness the new mechanics for natural theology, and it set the template the lecture series would follow for a generation, through Samuel Clarke and others who likewise made Newtonian order an argument for God.

This was a confident moment, and the confidence shaped what the argument could be. Reason and revelation were taken to reinforce rather than rival one another: the book of nature and the book of scripture had one author, and a closer reading of the first could only confirm the second. The design argument Bentley pressed — that cosmic order testifies to a mind behind it — has a long ancestry, reaching back through the ordered cosmos of Plato’s Timaeus to the beginnings of philosophical theology; Bentley’s contribution was to refit that ancient intuition with the latest mathematics of the heavens.

The Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris

His fame in scholarship rests on a quarrel he did not start. Sir William Temple, in an essay on the relative merits of ancient and modern writers, had praised the Epistles of Phalaris as a sterling specimen of antiquity, more lifelike and noble than anything the moderns could manage. A young Christ Church scholar, Charles Boyle, brought out an edition of the letters in 1695; and when William Wotton answered Temple on behalf of the moderns, Bentley contributed an appendix arguing that the Epistles — and Aesop’s fables along with them — were nothing of the kind. He expanded the appendix into a full Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris in 1697, and after the Christ Church wits replied, into the far longer and more crushing edition of 1699.

The case, which placed Bentley in the front rank of the discipline’s founders (Gallery of Philologists, UMass), was built entirely from internal evidence. The letters, supposedly written by a sixth-century Sicilian tyrant, refer to cities not yet founded in his day, to coins not yet minted, to events that postdate him, and — most tellingly — they are cast in a literary form, the prose familiar letter as a vehicle for character, that had not yet been invented when Phalaris is meant to have lived. Their Greek is the Attic of a much later age, not the Doric a Sicilian of the period would have used. Marshaled together, the anachronisms were decisive: the collection was the work of a later sophist, by modern reckoning a writer of roughly the second century of the common era, ventriloquizing a famous name. What carried beyond the particular verdict was the manner of it. Bentley had demonstrated that language, custom, geography, numismatics, and the history of literary genre could be turned into instruments precise enough to date a document against its own testimony — to make a text confess when it was really written, however loudly it claimed otherwise. Scholars regard the Dissertation as a foundational document of modern historical and textual criticism, the place where the discipline found its characteristic move.

The quarrel also made him a figure of satire. The dispute over the Epistles fed directly into the larger contest of ancients against moderns, which Jonathan Swift caricatured in The Battle of the Books (written 1697, published 1704), where Bentley appears as an ill-favored modern slain in mock-epic combat. The demonstration outlived the lampoon. The lampoon is read now mostly because the demonstration made its target famous.

Master of Trinity and the long war

In 1700 Bentley was made Master of Trinity College, Cambridge — the summit of his profession and the scene of the longest fight of his life. He governed the college as he edited a text, by his own certain judgment and against all resistance: overhauling the buildings, the chapel, and the Master’s Lodge at the fellows’ expense, asserting prerogatives the statutes did not clearly grant him, and meeting opposition with litigation rather than concession. The fellows, their incomes pinched by his building and their authority overridden, carried their grievances to the college Visitor, the Bishop of Ely, charging Bentley with dozens of breaches of the statutes. The case ground on for decades. He was sentenced to deprivation more than once — most seriously in the early 1730s — yet was never actually removed: at one crisis the vice-master, Richard Walker, a friend, simply refused to execute the sentence, and when the senior fellow John Colbatch obtained a writ of mandamus from the court of King’s Bench in 1735 to compel him, the affair tangled in jurisdiction and was overtaken by the death of the presiding bishop. The feud ran on the order of thirty years. Bentley held the Mastership through all of it, and died in office, in the Lodge, on 14 July 1742.

Through the litigation he never stopped editing. His Horace (1711) applied the full force of conjectural emendation to a beloved poet, restoring readings by what he called sagacity and happy conjecture where the manuscripts seemed to him corrupt; editions of Terence and, late in life, of Manilius (1739) followed. The gift and the vice were one faculty. The same readiness to correct a text on the strength of his own judgment that uncovered real corruption could also manufacture it. The notorious case is his 1732 edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Bentley supposed the blind poet’s text to have been mangled by a meddling editor and a careless printer, invented an imaginary editor to bear the blame, and proceeded to rewrite lines he judged unworthy of Milton — substituting his own taste for the poet’s. The verdict was swift and merciless; a contemporary squib was titled Milton Restor’d, and Bentley Depos’d. It remains the standing illustration of emendation unmoored from evidence, the shadow side of the method that had caught out Phalaris.

The discipline turned toward scripture

The two enterprises — the apologetics and the criticism — are not as separate as they look. The discipline that exposed a forgery was the refusal to take a text on its own authority, the insistence on testing every claim against what could be independently established; and that discipline did not stop at the edge of the sacred page. Bentley turned it, late, on scripture itself. In a letter of 1716 to William Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury, and then publicly in his Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Greek Testament (1720), he announced an edition of the Greek New Testament more ambitious than anything yet attempted: he would set aside the printed text descended from the sixteenth century and reconstruct, from the very oldest Greek manuscripts checked against the oldest copies of Jerome’s Latin version, the text as it had stood in the church at the time of the Council of Nicaea. To show the method, he printed a specimen of the last chapter of Revelation carrying dozens of changes from the received reading, many of which later critical editions would independently confirm.

The edition was never completed; the materials sit to this day in the library at Trinity, where the surviving collations and prolegomena have been reconstructed by modern scholarship (Novum Testamentum, 2020). But the Proposals mark a threshold. The tools sharpened on the classics had reached the most authoritative text in the culture, and the principle was the same: that the words come down to us through fallible hands, and only criticism can recover what was first written. Bentley believed reason and revelation were allies, and meant his criticism to serve the faith — to restore, not to corrode. In other hands, and turned on the composition rather than the wording of scripture, the same refusal to take a text on its own word would unsettle the very confidence that had licensed it. The French physician Jean Astruc, a generation later, would apply an analogous internal analysis to the seams within Genesis; and the controversies over the Trinity that engulfed Bentley’s Newtonian contemporaries — Samuel Clarke censured, William Whiston expelled from Cambridge for open Arianism — showed how quickly the appeal to the documentary record could turn from the defense of orthodoxy to the questioning of it.

Bentley was disliked in his lifetime for arrogance and an inexhaustible appetite for quarrels, and his rewriting of Milton earned the ridicule it deserved. The judgment that has survived him is narrower and far firmer. He saw, earlier and more clearly than his contemporaries, that a text will tell you more than it means to — that its words, weighed against the world, will date themselves, name their true author, and disclose where copyists have intervened. He spent that insight prodigally on the classics and, at the last, on the Gospels; the specimen of Revelation he printed in 1720, restoring by collation a reading the modern editors would reach by the same road, is the whole of his method in miniature — proof of how much a text will confess under disciplined questioning, and how little its own authority can do to keep the secret.

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

→ Related: Jean Astruc · Isaac Newton · Christianity · New Testament · Reason · Revelation · Samuel Clarke · William Whiston