"This pantheism could be traced back past Spinoza to Bruno and beyond, to the Neo-Platonists and Egypt itself. The first articulate rejection of the challenge of the Radical Enlightenment—and the earliest popularization of the Newtonian ‘Whig’ scheme in science, politics and religion—was made in 1693 by Richard Bentley, Newton’s friend and a great sceptical Classicist. One way in which Bentley attacked his and Newton’s enemies was to use Casaubon’s tactics. He employed his critical scholarship to undermine Greek sources on the antiquity and wisdom of the Egyptians. Thus throughout the 18th and 19th centuries we find a de facto alliance of Hellenism and textual criticism with the defence of Christianity. The ructions caused by occasional Hellenist atheists like Shelley and Swinburne were trivial compared to the threat of Aegypto-Masonry."
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Historians from EnglandJews from the United KingdomUniversity of Cambridge alumniUniversity of Cambridge facultyCornell University faculty
Original Language: English
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Introduction (p. 27)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Bernal
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Martin Bernal
Martin Gardiner Bernal (10 March 1937 – 9 June 2013) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a well-known, controversial work which argues that the culture, language, and political structure of Ancient Greece contained substantial influences from Egypt and Syria-Palestine.
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