| Jean Astruc |
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| 1684 births | |
| astruc,jean | |
| 1766 deaths | |
| french non-fiction writers | |
| biblical scholars | |
| astruc, jean | |
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The son of a Protestant minister who had converted to Catholicism (although the House of Astruc was of medieval Jewish origin), Astruc was educated at Montpellier , one of the great schools of medicine in early modern Europe. His dissertation and first publication, submitted when he was only 19, is on decomposition, and contains many references to recent research on the lungs by Thomas Willis and Robert Boyle . After teaching medicine at Montpellier he became a member of the medical faculty at the University Of Paris . His numerous medical writings, or materials for the history of medical education at Montpellier, are now forgotten, but the work published by him anonymously in 1753 has secured for him a permanent reputation. This book, brought out anonymously in 1753, was entitled ''Conjectures sur les mémoires originauz dont il paroit que Moyse s'est servi pour composer le livre de la Génèse. Avec des remarques qui appuient ou qui éclaircissent ces conjectures'' ("Conjectures on the original documents that Moses appears to have used in composing the Book of Genesis. With remarks that support or throw light upon these conjectures"). The title cautiously gives the place of publication as Brussels , safely beyond the reach of French authorities. Not all the 18th century books that declare that they were printed at Amsterdam or Geneva , to cite two other familiar imprints, were actually printed outside France. It was a safeguard. Indeed a safeguard was required. The forcible "re-Catholicization" of Astruc's Languedoc homeland, when the Protestant " (another telling of the same incident, as for example the two accounts of the creation of man, and the two accounts of Sarah being taken by a foreign king). Astruc found four documents in Genesis, which he arranged in four columns, declaring that this was how Moses had originally written his book, in the image of the four Gospels of the New Testament, and that a later writer had combined them into a single work, creating the repetitions and inconsistencies which Hobbes, Spinoza and others had noted. (Gordon Wenham, "Exploring the Old Testament: Volume 1: The Pentateuch" (2003), p.62-63). Astruc's work was taken up by a succession of German scholars, the intellectual climate in Germany being more conducive to scholarly freedom, and in their hands formed the foundation of modern critical exegisis of the Old and New Testaments. REFERENCES
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