Renaissance scholars mined Hebrew Cabala to prove Christian truth

Evidence

Pico, one of the founders of this movement, took up the study of Hebrew in order to master cabalism and then use the Cabala to demonstrate the truths of the Christian version of the Bible. He studied the text of the Bible for the hidden meanings that he thought it contained. ‘There is no knowledge which makes us more certain of the divinity of Christ than magic and Cabala.’ He believed in the application of gematria (a cabalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures by interchanging words whose letters have the same numerical value when added) in order to tease out the hidden meaning of the biblical text. As the primal language, the one spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Hebrew language contained magical properties found in none of its successor languages. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 112

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines gematria, the cabalistic numeric-interchange method, and explains the Renaissance belief in Hebrew as a primal magical language.