"This hypothesis becomes quite plausible in view of the fact that Jones strove to defend the Bible's position as the true source of humanity’s most ancient history. Knowledge about India had already been used by British and French deists, who had argued that the ancient Indian tradition could compete well with the Bible in terms of the notion of god, philosophical reflection, and reli­ ability of chronology.52 The best-known deist to promote this idea was Voltaire, whose ambition in religious politics was to reduce the Catholic Church's grip on society and to spread a "natural" and "rational" belief in god. Part of this project involved writing a world history that did not exaggerate the contribu­tions of the Jews and Christians to civilization but that instead pointed to the existence of an ethical monotheism outside the Judeo-Christian sphere. The scant knowledge about India that Voltaire had acquired served him well in this connection: by idealizing India and emphasizing its holy sources, the biblical traditions status was lowered. What Voltaire wanted to show was that a belief in god has always existed and that it thrives without the church and priesthood, even without Christianity and Mosaic legends. 33-5"