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77
Brian Walton
The Considerator Considered
London, 1659
8º: A4 B–T8 V4
122×74mm
8º K 20 Th.


The reply which Walton composed to Owen’s criticism of the Polyglot Bible was both scholarly and polemical. At the level of scholarship, Walton asserted that he was not following Catholic or Jewish teaching, but seeking to discover the true meaning of scripture, which he valued as highly as Owen. He suggested that the best way to establish the Bible’s authority was to gain access to the original text, and that this could only be done through comparative work such as the London Polyglot.
Engraved portrait of Brian Walton, from the first volume of the London Polyglot Bible. Walton is shown at work, with the sources of the Polyglot and several other major works of continental scholarship behind him. Catalogue no. 73, frontispiece
Unlike Owen, Walton praised the Authorized Version, pointing out that all translations contained acts of interpretation. He was scathing about the effect which religious independents like Owen had had on the ecclesiastical order of England during the Civil Wars and Interregnum of the 1640s and 1650s. He argued that his scholarly work was written in Latin, but that, by replying to it in English, Owen was allowing his own doubts to reach the common people. He asserted that teaching like Owen’s was responsible for a blind faith in the right of individuals to interpret the literal meaning of the Bible for themselves which had, in turn, helped to undermine the authority of the established Church and promote the growth of heretical sects in England.

This polemic was intended to marginalize Owen in the debate, by associating his fears with the excesses of the unlearned. Nevertheless, Walton’s response also underlined his own belief in the authority of scripture to determine the teaching of the Church, and his conviction that the literal sense was the best way of understanding the text of the Bible, once that had been established correctly. For scholars like Walton and Owen, there was ultimately no alternative to a literal exegesis of scripture, even if they were willing to quarrel over the identity of the biblical text itself.

This copy of Walton’s reply to Owen belonged to Thomas Hyde, a young orientalist who had assisted Walton with the Persian and Syriac sections of the Polyglot, and who eventually became Bodley’s librarian.




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