Christian Ravis (1613–77) was a German orientalist from Berlin who was patronized from 1639 by James Ussher, archbishop of Armagh, in order to enable him to make a journey to the east to collect manuscripts. Ussher’s funds were forwarded to Ravis by Samuel Hartlib. Ravis spent some time in Smyrna and Constantinople, assembling manuscripts on his own account, and returned to England in 1641 with his amanuensis, Nicolaus Petri. Ravis then lived in London for a time, depending on the charity of Ussher and of John Selden, but soon left to search for employment in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam in the mid-1640s, he met Hartlib’s friend and collaborator, John Pell, and provided him with an Arabic manuscript of Apollonius’s Conics, part of which Pell translated into Latin.
By the summer of 1647, Ravis had returned to England, where Hartlib was seeking to promote the teaching of oriental languages in London, as part of his plans to reform education in the capital and to provide its citizens with the proper means to interpret the Bible for themselves. Both Hartlib and Dury also canvassed the idea of employing Ravis as an intermediary to the Jews at this time, as well as using him as a source of information on eastern nations. In 1648, Ravis gave lectures on oriental languages which were sponsored by the London Presbyterian clergy of Sion College, and took place near St Paul’s. Despite this support and attempts to petition Parliament on his behalf, Ravis was unable to establish himself in London, and instead sought a position at Oxford. He was briefly lecturer in Hebrew at Magdalen College, before setting off to try his luck at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, where, however, he soon found himself short of money once again. Throughout his career, Ravis discovered that circumstances conspired against him, but he also proved that his most notable characteristics were untrustworthiness and vain self-promotion.
Despite his unpleasant character, Ravis had figured significantly in the hopes and plans of English orientalists in the 1640s. He played on their expectations by proposing schemes whereby the teaching of eastern languages might assist in the conversion of the Jews, or the printing of the Koran might lead to its more effective refutation and the success of a mission to the Turks. He also possessed a number of important Arabic manuscripts, and could argue that the application of his skill in Hebrew to the interpretation of difficult places in the Bible might lead to the production of a better English translation. Ravis set out his theory of the relationships between the various oriental languages in his Discourse. This stressed the unity of the Semitic languages, and was intended as a preface to the grammar which he composed for them. According to Ravis, Hebrew was the oldest tongue, which had been corrupted at Babel into many different pronunciations, from which the modern Semitic languages resulted. Like many of his contemporaries, Ravis stressed the primitive copiousness of biblical Hebrew, in which a relatively restricted number of roots could express the whole of language. He argued that a general knowledge of oriental languages would aid in the comprehension and correction of the English Bible, and that people could easily be taught to read the Hebrew and English scriptures side by side. Ravis’s Discourse thus justified his activities in London as a Hebrew lecturer, as well as advertising his skills to a broader public.
