Early American Literature

"I will also ask you one thing, which if ye tell me, I in like wise will tell you;—The Bodies of the Raised, shall they be furnished with Teeth, or no?"—Cotton Mather poses this rhetorical question at almost the very end of his massive Biblia Americana manuscript, in a "Coronis" or coda to the last of thirteen thematic essays appended to its complete Bible commentary (963). Although the dentition of resurrected saints was exactly the kind of technical eschatological detail that absorbed Mather, his inquiry here reflects his exasperation at those who maintained that the apocalyptic scriptures were mired in "Obscurity and Ambiguity" (963). He conceded [End Page 231] that there were still many mysteries about the eschaton that were yet to be resolved. But after laboring on the Biblia for over half his life, he was convinced that it contained more than enough proof of the reality and imminence of Christ's millennial kingdom on earth.

The volume under review is the sixth to be published in the Biblia Americana series, under the direction of Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann (also the editor of this volume). Although it also contains his commentaries on Hebrews, James, 1–2 Peter, 1–3 John, and Jude, Mather's commentary on Revelation is its centerpiece, running to 354 pages, including a "Postscript" and its own "Coronis." As Stievermann's impeccable introduction demonstrates, Mather's literalist interpretation of some of Revelation's key prophecies was the cornerstone of the entire Biblia project because it defined his understanding of the history of exegesis. Early Christians, Mather insisted, shared his belief that the "First Resurrection" mentioned in Revelation 20:5–6 described the return to corporeal life of all the elect dead at the beginning of the millennium, ahead of their rule over the sanctified New Earth (718–19). Catholicism then "condemned [the doctrine] for Hæresy"—an indication that the Roman church was the Antichrist (718). Following the Reformation, the "Truth began to Revive" (765). However, there were still those Protestants (including his own grandfather John Cotton) who, "with a wonderful Absurdity," read the First Resurrection metaphorically, as "a Work of Sanctification upon the Soul" (717), or else (with Hugo Grotius and Richard Baxter) held that the millennial prophecies had been fulfilled spiritually in the earlier years of the church. Mather's (unfulfilled) hope was that the Biblia's summation of the best patristic and Protestant commentaries on the millennium would convince his contemporaries that the resurrected saints would indeed return to govern the world in person.

Stievermann's edition of Mather's commentaries on Isaiah and Jeremiah (in volume 5 of this series) and his monograph Prophecy, Piety, and the Problem of Historicity (Mohr Siebeck, 2016) have shown how Mather sought to reconcile his intensely chiliastic understanding of the Old Testament prophecies with the rise of historical-contextual biblical criticism. Here again, readers will find Mather balancing his supernaturalist eschatology and soteriology against new Enlightenment thinking. His discussion of 2 Peter 3, for instance, draws on then-recent developments in geology to explain how the epistle's prediction that the earth would be destroyed by fire at Christ's Second Coming would be realized. In essays on Zoroastrianism, the Sibylline Oracles, and Noah's religious precepts he [End Page 232] engages with Enlightenment theories of the history of religion. Together with some Deist authors, Mather acknowledged that there were similarities between Christianity, Judaism, and "pagan" creeds. But where they assumed that these confluences undermined Christianity as a revealed faith, he maintained that many apparently pagan beliefs were corruptions of a proto-Christian monotheism that had been practiced by Noah and Adam.

Stievermann's deeply learned exposition of the sources of Mather's millenarianism serves as an excellent introduction to the major controversies in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century eschatology. This alone should commend it to students of American Puritanism. But his meticulous introduction and notes also provide a fully rounded picture of Mather as an intellectual living on the cusp of...