French Apocalyptic Messianism: Isaac La Peyrère and Political Biblical Criticism in the Seventeenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Isaac La Peyrère is one of the most important and yet little-known seventeenth-century intellectuals involved in developing modern biblical criticism. His work on the Bible resembles that of his later contemporaries Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and La Peyrère's friend Richard Simon, all of whom his writings may have influenced. Through his attempt to get behind the biblical texts and his use of comparative extra-biblical historical literature from across the globe, La Peyrère's methods attempted to mould biblical exegesis into historical criticism. His social and political context in seventeenth-century France during the reign of King Louis xiv provides an important glimpse into the historical background that shaped La Peyrère's thought and project. At its core, La Peyrère's work was not scholarship for its own sake, but was politically motivated. His exegesis entailed an elaborate theo-political messianic vision, which his historical method was an attempt to bolster. La Peyrère's biblical exegesis was in service of his French apocalyptic messianic vision, the heart of which supported the political designs of his employer, the Prince of Condé.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".