Unmasking AIT

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Bodhi, Yes, I missed that post. Thanks.

In the mean time, from the same Edwin Bryant's book...


<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Biblical Origins </b>

Scholars and thinkers of the late eighteenth century, enthusiastically pushing forward the scientific and intellectual frontiers that had become accessible in post-Enlightenment Europe, found themselves grappling with the historicity of Old Testament chronology. The discovery, through expanding European colonies, of other cultures claiming pedigrees of vast antiquity; developments in linguistics; and the proliferation of “hard” archaeological evidence provoked a drastic reevaluation of biblical narrative in matters of human origins. Features such as the monogenic descent from Adam, the evolution of all human language from the monolingual descendants of Noah, and the brief period that seemed to be allotted to the dispersion of the human race after the Flood became the subjects of intense debates. As the first pioneering British scholars in India began to discover Sanskrit texts, the promise of hitherto unknown historical information becoming revealed to Europeans became the cause of both great anticipation and epistemological anxiety.

<b>Sir William Jones, the first Indologist to attempt a serious synchronization of biblical and Puranic chronology,</b> exemplifies the tensions of his time. His predecessors, British scholars John Holwell, Nathaniel Halhed, and Alexander Dow—all associated in various capacities with the British East India Trading Company—had relayed back to an eager Europe gleanings from Puranic sources that described an immense antiquity for the human race. 1 <b>These provided the ranks of disaffected Christians, such as the vociferous Voltaire, with valuable materials with which to attempt to shake off the constraints of Judeo-Christian chronology and to refute Jewish or Christian claims to exclusive mediation between man and Providence</b>. Holwell, for one, <b>believed that the Hindu texts contained a higher revelation than the Christian ones, that they predated the Flood, and that “the mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Brahmins” </b>(Marshall 1970, 46). Halhed, too, seemed to take the vast periods of time assigned to the four yugas quite seriously, since “human reason … can no more reconcile to itself the idea of Patriarchal … longevity” of a few thousand years for the entire span of the human race (Marshall, 1931, 159). Dow was instrumental in presenting Europe with a deistic image of India whose primitive truths owed nothing to either Jews or Christians. <b>Such challenges stirred up considerable controversy in Europe, fueled by intellectuals such as Voltaire adopting such material in endeavors to undermine biblical historicity. </b>

Naturally, such drastic innovations were bitterly opposed by other segments of the intelligentsia. For well over a millennium, much of Europe had accepted the Old Testament as an infallible testament documenting the history of the human race. <b>Thomas Maurice, for example, complained bitterly in 1812 about “the daring assumptions of certain skeptical French philosophers with respect to the Age of the World … arguments principally founded on the high assumptions of the Brahmins … [which] have a direct tendency to overturn the Mosaic system, and, with it, Christianity.” </b>Such scholars were greatly relieved by “the fortunate arrival of … the various dissertations, on the subject, of Sir William Jones” (22–23). Jones was just as concerned about the fact that “some intelligent and virtuous persons are inclined to doubt the authenticity of the accounts delivered by Moses.” In his estimation, too, “either the first eleven chapters of Genesis … are true, or the whole fabrick of our national religion is false, a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn” (Jones 1788, 225).

Eager to settle the matter, <b>Jones undertook the responsibility of unraveling Indian chronology for the benefit and appeasement of his disconcerted colleagues</b>: “I propose to lay before you a concise history of Indian chronology extracted from Sanskrit books, attached to no system, and as much disposed to reject Mosaick history, if it be proved erroneous, as to believe it, if it be confirmed by sound reason from indubitable evidence” (Jones 1790a, 111). Despite such assurances, Jones's own predispositions on this matter were revealed in several earlier written statements: “I … am obliged of course to believe the sanctity of the venerable books [of Genesis]” (1788, 225); Jones (1790) <b>concluded his researches by claiming to have “traced the foundation of the Indian empire above three thousand eight hundred years from now” (145), that is to say, safely within the confines of Bishop Usher's creation date of 4004 B.C.E. and, more important, within the parameters of the Great Flood,</b> which Jones considered to have occurred in 2350 B.C.E. Such undertakings afford us a glimpse of some of the tensions that many European scholars were facing in their encounter with India at the end of the eighteenth century; the influence of the times clearly weighed heavily. However, Jones's compromise with the biblical narrative did make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans: “Jones in effect showed that Sanskrit literature was not an enemy but an ally of the Bible, supplying independent corroboration of the Bible's version of history” (Trautmann, 1997, 74). Jones's chronological researches did manage to calm the waters somewhat and “effectively guaranteed that the new admiration for Hinduism would reinforce Christianity and would not work for its overthrow” (74). <b>Trautmann notes that, for the most part, up until the early part of the nineteenth century, British Indomania was excited about the discovery of Hinduism for several reasons: it provided independent confirmation of the Bible; its religion contained the primitive truth of natural religion still in practice, a unitary truth from which the forms of paganism of Rome and Greece were perverted offshoots</b>; and its arts and cultures were connected to Egypt's (64).
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