"The Christian Study of Hebrew, Judaism, and the Ancient Near East in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," with  Kirsten Macfarlane, University of Chicago 

"The Christian Study of Hebrew, Judaism, and the Ancient Near East in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia," with  Kirsten Macfarlane, University of Chicago 

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European Protestants poured vast amounts of time into the study of Hebrew, Judaism, and Rabbinics. They did so first and foremost for theological reasons: they believed that Jewish texts and traditions would not only prove the truth of Christianity generally, but of Reformed Protestantism specifically. When the earliest puritans arrived on American shores, they took these assumptions about the importance of Hebrew studies to Protestantism with them, and they laboured to ensure that ‘Christian Hebraism’ could thrive in the New World as it had in the Old. By the early eighteenth century, however, this intellectual framework was beginning to unravel, at least in Europe. New discoveries, new manuscripts, and the growth of research in languages like Arabic and Persian transformed how European Christians understood the ancient world, which no longer appeared to map neatly onto the story told by the Old Testament. Yet this shift did not cross the Atlantic so easily. Using the Quaker James Logan (1674-1751) and Philadelphia as a case study, this lecture reconstructs the factors that structured the development of eighteenth-century American biblical studies. It argues that these factors enabled the perpetuation of an idiosyncratic vision of sacred history and the ancient Near East in North America even as this same vision was dying out in Europe. Furthermore, it argues that the persistence of this increasingly anachronistic vision would have significant, long-term ramifications for the nature of American Protestantism.

Kirsten Macfarlane is Associate Professor of Early Modern Religious and Intellectual History. Her prize-winning research spans Western Europe and North America, focusing on the history of biblical scholarship and transatlantic puritanism. She has published two books on these themes with Oxford University Press (2021, 2024) and is writing her third book (under contract with Harvard University Press) on the Protestant study of Hebrew in eighteenth-century America. Her research has been recognised with the 2025 Roland Bainton Prize, the 2025 Selma V. Forkosch Prize and the 2026 Andrew W. Mellon SoFCB Best Essay Award, as well as supported by multiple grants and fellowships from institutions across Britain, continental Europe, and the US. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and serves as one of the co-General Editors for the Oxford University Press Book Series The Bible and the Humanities. From 2027-2028 she will hold a fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

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