Richard Simon and the Roman Strategy of Textual Uncertainty

Revision note: Substantially revised July 20, 2026. The argument has been reordered according to the classical rhetorical movement, compressed where necessary, and given one consolidated Notes and Further Reading section.

“Making the word of God of none effect through your tradition.” — Mark 7:13

The preceding article examined John Owen’s refusal to let the learned apparatus become a court over Scripture. Nineteen years after Owen published that warning, Richard Simon supplied a remarkable demonstration of why it was necessary. Simon did not merely collect variants and leave their theological meaning undecided. He arranged textual alteration, disputed authorship, uncertainty in Hebrew grammar, disagreement among translations, and the loss of the physical autographs into an argument against the Protestant rule of faith. He then offered ecclesiastical tradition as the certainty Scripture allegedly could not supply.

The sequence matters. Textual uncertainty was not an unfortunate problem to which Roman authority happened to offer a pastoral answer. In Simon’s argument, the uncertainty performed an apologetic function. It weakened the sufficiency, perspicuity, preservation, and final authority of Scripture so that another rule could occupy the vacated place.

This does not mean that every fact Simon reported was false. It does not mean that Roman Catholic authorities acted with one mind concerning his work. Nor does it require us to portray him as an unbeliever secretly attempting to destroy Christianity. Simon opposed Spinoza, affirmed inspiration in his own form, and regarded himself as a defender of the Christian religion. His book was also suppressed at the urging of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet and condemned by authorities within Simon’s own communion.

The phrase Roman strategy must therefore be used precisely. It names the polemical logic Simon expressly deployed against sola Scriptura, not a coordinated conspiracy uniformly approved by Rome. That qualification does not weaken the charge. It makes the charge historically exact. Simon’s importance lies in showing what happens when textual criticism is permitted to establish the conditions under which providence, authority, and certainty may be affirmed. Once the extant Scripture is declared insufficient to identify and interpret the Word of God, the argument does not remain neutral. It demands another authority.

The Sequel to Walton and Owen

Richard Simon was a French Roman Catholic priest, Oratorian, Hebraist, orientalist, and controversialist. His Histoire critique du Vieux Testament appeared in 1678. Most of the original printing was seized and destroyed after Bossuet intervened; an English translation, A Critical History of the Old Testament, appeared in 1682, and Simon’s authorized Rotterdam edition followed in 1685.

The book’s three divisions treated the history and alleged alterations of the Hebrew text, the principal ancient and modern translations, and the work of biblical commentators. Simon also advanced a theory of public recorders or prophetic scribes who collected, revised, supplemented, and abridged Israel’s historical documents. This allowed him to deny that Moses personally wrote everything traditionally attributed to him while attempting to retain divine inspiration for the resulting collection.

Simon’s work belongs directly after Owen’s in this series because Simon repeatedly engaged the same learned world Owen had confronted. He discussed Brian Walton’s Polyglot and Prolegomena, the criticism of Louis Cappel, the work of Jean Morin, ancient versions, Hebrew manuscripts, the Masoretic tradition, and the relation between lost autographs and extant copies.

Owen feared that learned claims about universal textual corruption would furnish Romanists, Socinians, and atheists with weapons against Scripture. Simon did not belong to all three categories. He opposed the unbelieving conclusions of Spinoza and distinguished his position from Socinianism. Yet he openly employed textual instability against the Protestant doctrine of Scripture. The very consequence Owen had warned about became the announced purpose of Simon’s preface.

This historical connection is especially instructive because Simon did not need to invent every technical premise he used. He appropriated material from Protestant and Roman Catholic scholarship, including conclusions whose original authors did not always intend his ecclesiastical inference. Simon acknowledged, for example, that Cappel had not intended to prove the Roman conclusion others drew from his criticism.

Here the academy game appears in an early and unusually transparent form. Technical claims can migrate across confessional boundaries because a manuscript, a spelling, or a scribal error is a public object. But the theological significance assigned to those facts depends upon the interpreter’s doctrine of revelation, providence, church, and authority. Agreement about a variant is not agreement about the nature of Scripture.¹

A responsible criticism of Simon must first reject an easy caricature. Simon did not simply repeat Spinoza’s naturalistic treatment of the Bible. He accused Spinoza of drawing false and pernicious conclusions from additions and alterations in the Old Testament. Simon argued that later prophetic editors could possess divine authority to revise earlier public records. What Spinoza attributed to merely human compilation, Simon attempted to place under inspired prophetic office.

He also rejected the theory that biblical writers were inspired only when treating matters directly related to faith. He regarded that limitation as dangerous and contrary to the New Testament’s doctrine that all Scripture is inspired. His critical history was intended, at least in part, to answer objections against biblical authority.

These facts matter because the strongest criticism of Simon is not that he openly denied all revelation. It is that he attempted to defend revelation by relocating the church’s certainty away from the extant inspired text. He preserved a category of inspiration while denying that inspiration required a text kept pure by God’s singular care. He preserved Christianity by making the church’s doctrinal tradition epistemically prior to the copies of Scripture.

This distinction also exposes the inadequacy of judging a textual method solely by the personal profession of the practitioner. A critic may confess inspiration, oppose atheism, defend Christian doctrine, and still employ a method that subordinates Scripture to another authority. Sincerity does not settle epistemology. Simon’s argument must therefore be examined at the level of governing principles rather than reduced to an accusation about motives.

The Announced Target: The Protestant Rule of Faith

Simon’s preface removes any doubt about the polemical direction of his criticism. He argued that the great alterations suffered by biblical copies after the loss of the first autographs would “utterly destroy the Protestants and Socinians’ principle.” The principle he targeted was the appeal to Scripture as the only infallible rule of religion. According to Simon, Protestants had discarded church tradition and consequently were forced to assert that Scripture was sufficiently plain to establish the truth of faith. Disagreement among Protestants and Socinians supposedly showed that this principle could not produce certainty.

Simon then stated his alternative. Unless “we join not Tradition with the Scripture,” he maintained, we can scarcely affirm anything certain in religion. The argument is not hidden:

1. The original manuscripts are physically lost.
2. Extant copies contain alterations introduced by time and copyists.
3. Hebrew grammar, vocalization, and translation involve uncertainty.
4. Scripture by itself therefore cannot provide an adequately certain rule.
5. The church’s received tradition must supply the doctrinal certainty the text lacks.

This is not textual criticism operating in a neutral space. It is textual criticism functioning as Roman apologetics. Simon’s reasoning also demonstrates why the doctrine of preservation cannot be postponed until after textual criticism has completed its work. If criticism first determines that the inspired text is no longer available with certainty, preservation can later mean only the survival of some religious content through another institution. The Protestant may continue using the word preservation, but Simon has already selected its permitted definition.

From Real Variants to Global Uncertainty

Simon’s argument derived much of its force from genuine phenomena. Copyists make mistakes. Manuscripts differ. Ancient translations do not always agree with the medieval Hebrew copies or with one another. The physical autographs no longer exist. Some passages present difficult historical and grammatical questions. The Reformed answer does not require the denial of any established instance. Owen himself conceded lost autographs, fallible scribes, and diverse readings. The question is whether these facts prove Simon’s larger conclusion.

They do not.

A mistake in one copy does not demonstrate corruption in every copy. Variation among witnesses does not prove that the authentic reading has disappeared from the entire textual inheritance. Difficulty in a passage does not establish that no determinate meaning is present. A translation problem does not prove that the original-language text is unavailable. The loss of the autographic artifact does not entail the loss of its words.

Simon repeatedly moved from particular disorder to general insecurity. His case depended not merely upon showing that alterations occurred but upon portraying the extant textual state as inadequate to serve as the church’s final rule. Yet that conclusion requires more than examples of scribal fallibility. It requires proof that God did not preserve his Word through the totality of extant witnesses and the church’s ministerial use of them.²

At precisely this point Simon excluded the Reformed doctrine of providence. When discussing Walton’s claim that divine providence had prevented anything destructive of faith from happening to Scripture, Simon answered that such an appeal was insufficient. Reviewers and critics were not inspired; they lacked the autographs; and the copies might now be less accurate in some places than formerly. Simon therefore recast preservation as the church’s retention of true doctrine rather than God’s preservation of the textual rule.

The facts did not dictate that recasting. Simon’s ecclesiology did.

When Scripture Shares the Fate of Profane Books

Simon expressly treated changes in Scripture as analogous to changes in profane authors. Roman Catholics, he argued, need not be scandalized by this because their religion rests upon both Scripture and church tradition. Protestants, whose religion supposedly depends upon the extant biblical text alone, face the crisis.

The apologetic advantage is evident. If the Bible has undergone the ordinary textual fate of ancient literature, the Protestant possesses only fallible copies reconstructed by fallible critics. The Roman Catholic, according to Simon’s model, still possesses the church’s continuous doctrinal tradition. Textual uncertainty is therefore asymmetrical: it harms the Protestant principle more than the Roman one.

But Simon purchased that advantage by altering the biblical doctrine of preservation. Scripture does not present itself merely as a valuable ancient record from which the church extracts a durable doctrinal core. God gave his words to govern his covenant people. He commands that nothing be added to or removed from them. Christ declares that Scripture cannot be broken and that his words will not pass away. The apostolic writings function as the abiding standard by which teachers, traditions, and even angelic messages are tested.

Materially, manuscripts are artifacts. They can fade, tear, be miscopied, or be lost. Providentially and covenantally, however, Scripture is not merely another ancient book. Its history includes the purpose, promise, and government of its divine author. Treating those realities as methodologically irrelevant does not establish neutrality. It assumes the very point disputed between Simon and the Reformed churches.

The Decisive Transfer of Authority

Simon’s clearest statements appear in his criticism of Walton. He argued that when Paul called the church the pillar and ground of truth in 1 Timothy 3:15, the apostle did not mean that biblical grammarians and critics preserve religious truth by correcting copies. Simon took Paul to mean that truth must be sought in the church, which possesses Scripture because it possesses Scripture’s true sense.

He pushed the point to its logical conclusion. Religion, he said, would remain even if no biblical copies existed, because the church would continue. Faith did not require God to preserve the original text entire, since true doctrine had been left with the church. Most revealingly, Simon argued that a scriptural text could function authentically when it agreed with the church’s doctrine, whether or not the text had suffered corruption. The church’s prior rule of faith regulates the textual and interpretive problem.

Here the direction of authority has been reversed.

In the Reformed order, Scripture creates and governs the church. The church hears the Shepherd’s voice in the Word, receives the canonical books, preserves and proclaims them, translates them, adjudicates controversies ministerially, and submits every doctrine to their judgment. The church’s testimony is real and important, but it is not the formal ground of Scripture’s authority.

In Simon’s order, the church possesses a doctrinal deposit sufficiently independent of the extant text to decide when Scripture speaks authentically. The supposedly uncertain text is tested by the church’s allegedly certain doctrine. This does not solve the authority problem. It relocates it. How is the true church identified? Which stream of tradition is infallible? How is apostolic tradition distinguished from later accretion? By what rule are disagreements among fathers, bishops, councils, and communions adjudicated? If Scripture is too uncertain to judge the tradition, the tradition cannot appeal to Scripture to establish its own divine commission without arguing in a circle.³

Simon objected that Protestant disagreements disprove the sufficiency and perspicuity of Scripture. Yet institutional disagreement and conflicting traditions do not disappear inside Roman Catholic history. Disagreement among interpreters proves human fallibility, not the insufficiency of God’s Word. Moving the interpreter into an ecclesiastical office does not make him divine.

The Protestant Principle Simon Needed to Simplify

Simon’s polemic depended upon representing Protestantism as a choice between an isolated individual with a self-interpreting book and a historic church with living tradition. The Reformed confessions reject that construction. The Westminster Confession does not teach that every passage is equally plain, that learning is unnecessary, that the church has no authority, or that tradition has no value. It acknowledges ordinary means, teachers, translations, the testimony of the church, the communion of saints, and synodical judgment. It distinguishes the objective clarity of necessary saving truth from the varying comprehension of particular readers.

What it denies is that any human authority is infallible or coordinate with Scripture. Scripture’s authority depends wholly upon God its author. The Spirit bears witness by and with the Word. Nothing may be added through human traditions. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures were “kept pure in all ages.” Scripture interprets Scripture, and the supreme judge is the “Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture.”

This is sola Scriptura, not solo Scriptura.

The church is a minister of the Word, not its creator. Confessions summarize the Word and remain corrigible by it. Teachers expound the Word and may be judged by it. Textual critics compare the witnesses to the Word and may not manufacture a different rule. Tradition transmits valuable testimony but cannot exempt itself from scriptural examination.

Simon’s use of 1 Timothy 3:15 confuses support with source. A pillar holds forth and defends something other than itself. The church is the pillar of truth because it confesses, guards, and proclaims the truth given by God—not because truth remains complete in the church independently of the writings through which God chose to preserve and propagate it.

That is why Westminster begins by saying Scripture is “most necessary.” God committed revelation wholly to writing for preservation, propagation, certainty, and the church’s defense against corruption, Satan, and the world. Simon’s hypothetical church remaining doctrinally secure without any biblical copies contradicts the divinely appointed necessity of the written Word.

Doctrinal Preservation without Textual Preservation

Simon’s reduced doctrine of preservation deserves special attention because it survives in modern evangelical speech. According to his model, providence preserved Scripture in the church by preserving doctrinal purity, not by preventing the textual inheritance from becoming irrecoverably corrupt. The inspired words might be altered, readings might be inaccessible, and the originals might be unrestorable; nevertheless, faith survives in the church’s doctrinal deposit.

This separates what God joined. Christian doctrine is not an oral substance floating above the words of Scripture. We know the doctrines because God expressed them in the prophetic and apostolic Word. If the textual rule is uncertain wherever the ecclesiastical doctrine must correct it, the doctrine has become an independent revelation.

The modern claim that no essential doctrine is affected can perform the same reduction when used as a complete doctrine of preservation. It may offer a limited reassurance about a particular variant. It cannot prove that God preserved the inspired text. A doctrinal minimum selected after textual loss is not identical with the words God gave.⁴

Nor can the church preserve doctrine purely while losing the rule that corrects doctrinal corruption. Church history displays controversy, compromise, and apostasy. The written Word is necessary precisely because ministers, councils, and communions can err. To protect the doctrine by placing it in an institution beyond the text is to remove the divinely appointed instrument by which institutional doctrine is tested.

The Modern Protestant Version of Simon’s Move

Most contemporary evangelical textual critics do not appeal to the Council of Trent, claim that apostolic tradition is equal to Scripture, or consciously adopt Simon’s Roman ecclesiology. It would be unjust to attribute his intentions or full system to them. The structural resemblance nevertheless demands attention.

Simon argued that the extant copies could not provide the requisite certainty, so the church and its tradition must identify and preserve true doctrine. Modern restorationist criticism argues that the extant ecclesiastically received text cannot be presumed authentic, so the scholarly guild and its evolving methods must reconstruct the earliest attainable text. Rome’s tradition is replaced by expert judgment; the magisterium becomes methodological rather than episcopal.

In both forms, the present Scripture cannot be received as the self-attesting, providentially preserved rule until another authority has determined what portion of the available material should count as Scripture. The external tribunal differs, but the epistemological displacement is similar. This does not make philology Roman Catholic. Collation, palaeography, grammar, stemmatic analysis, versional study, and historical inquiry are not owned by a communion. The issue is whether these tools minister to a text God preserved or constitute a text the church did not previously possess.

Simon teaches the modern Protestant what may happen after the confessional doctrine of preservation is surrendered. Textual uncertainty does not remain empty. Someone must govern it.

A Confessional Answer to Simon

The confessional answer need not fear any verified fact in Simon’s work. It may acknowledge that autographic artifacts are lost, later copies contain errors, manuscripts vary, translations differ, scribes sometimes harmonized or omitted material, and difficult readings require learned comparison. None of those concessions grants universal corruption or an external infallible tribunal.

The answer instead restores the proper order:

1. God’s Word establishes its own divine authority.
2. Scripture teaches that God gave the written Word as the abiding rule of his church.
3. God’s special providence secures the fulfillment of that purpose through ordinary means.
4. The church receives, copies, reads, preaches, translates, and compares the preserved textual inheritance.
5. Textual judgments remain fallible and ministerial, subject to Scripture’s total testimony rather than constitutive of Scripture’s identity.

This order neither canonizes every manuscript nor claims that every printed edition is flawless. It does not forbid correction of a particular copy by the broader witness. It does not turn the King James Version into an inspired authority over Hebrew and Greek. It locates certainty in God’s faithfulness rather than in the critic’s immunity from error. The relevant question is not whether the critic has discovered variation. It is whether his interpretation of variation is allowed to contradict the prior testimony of God concerning his Word.

Conclusion

Richard Simon deserves to be remembered as a learned critic, a complicated Roman Catholic controversialist, and a defender of Christianity against conclusions he considered atheistic. He should also be read as an unusually candid witness to the theological use of textual uncertainty. He did not hide his target. Alleged alterations in the extant copies undermined the Protestant rule of faith. Scripture without tradition could not yield religious certainty. The church’s preserved doctrine therefore became the rule by which the uncertain text was authenticated and interpreted.

That is the Roman strategy examined here: not the discovery of variants, but their conversion into an argument for a second infallible authority. The strategy remains instructive because modern Protestants may reproduce its first half while rejecting its Roman conclusion. They may grant that Scripture suffered the ordinary fate of ancient books, that its authentic wording is not found in any providentially received form, and that the church must await critical reconstruction—then insist that sola Scriptura remains untouched.

Simon understood the instability of that position better than many evangelicals do. If the extant Scripture cannot serve as the final rule, another rule will govern it. Simon named church tradition. The modern academy names critical expertise. Neither may occupy the throne belonging to the Holy Ghost speaking in Scripture. Owen saw the danger approaching. Simon displayed its logic. The church must learn from both.

Notes and Further Reading