An eighteenth-century theologian argued Christianity would survive scripture’s divine inspiration being denied.

Evidence

If the question is whether the Christian religion is divinely inspired,” noted the eighteenth-century theologian Johann David Michaelis, “authenticity, or lack of authenticity, of Scripture turns out to be more important than one might assume at first glance… . Assuming that God did not inspire any of the books of the New Testament but simply left Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Paul the freedom to write what they knew, provided only that their writings are old, authentic and reliable, the Christian religion would still be the true one” (cited in Peter Bietenholz, Historia and Fabula: Myths and Legends in Historical Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age, Leiden: Brill, , p. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 197

Categorization

• CANDY: A punchy theological counterintuition: an orthodox believer willing to give up inspiration if the texts remain old, authentic, reliable.
• QUESTION: Michaelis’s position prefigures modern critical-historical approaches to the Bible that bracket supernatural authorship yet preserve religious authority — worth tracing this line.