Biblia Americana: America's First Bible Commentary: A Synoptic Commentary on the Old and New Testaments: Volume 1, Genesis (review)

Cotton Mather was not a popular figure in his own day, and his reputation has not improved much since his death in 1728. To be sure he had his supporters during his lifetime, and there is no doubt that some in Boston and New England since then have admired him. There were—and are—grounds for admiration. They begin with his family. His grandfathers, Richard Mather and John Cotton, both ministers, were powerful men who led others in founding the Puritan regime in New England. His father, Increase Mather, preached in a Boston church, served as president of Harvard College, and rescued New England from Anglican domination by securing a charter that helped maintain traditional Puritan control in his society. Cotton Mather felt profoundly the importance of these beginnings—born into a dynasty, he relished his family's long dominance in the churches of New England. Besides this dynastic background, there is something in his character in his favor. A devout, hard-working man, he published some four hundred sermons, tracts, and books, all of which bore, in some fashion, on the religious life of his time. Only a man of deep faith and a sense of calling could have produced such evidence of his religious commitment, and no one in his time doubted his devotion to his religious heritage.

Such devotion may have been the underlying cause of criticism of him, indeed of his unpopularity. For in his self-assigned mission of doing good and his extraordinary conduct in its service, he sometimes acted in ways usually considered wildly excessive and bizarre. The conduct began when, as a boy, he attempted to do good to people who did not think that they needed his help but got it nonetheless. The first recipients of his godly conduct were his younger siblings who proved resistant to his efforts to catechize and instruct them. Then came his fellow students at Harvard—he entered the college when he was eleven, an age sure to arouse dislike among his fellows, who knocked him around for his efforts on their behalf. As an adult and an accomplished minister of a great Boston church, he was accepted with awe and appreciation, but also with disdain when his meddlesome personality wore on the nerves and sensibilities of others who could not summon up a religious spirit anywhere near his own. Perhaps the peak of the scorn came in Robert Calef 's denunciation of him for his role in the Salem witchcraft crisis. Samuel Eliot Morison said that Calef "tied a tin can to Cotton Mather which has rattled and banged through the pages of superficial and popular historians." Perry Miller responded by saying that "if by tin can is meant the charge that Mather worked up the Salem tragedy, it does not belong to him; but what Calef was actually to charge was that he prostituted a magnificent conception of New England's destiny to saving the face of a bigoted court . . . and [in that sense] the right can was tied to the proper tail, and through the pages of this volume it shall rattle and bang" (The New England Mind: From Colony to Province [1953], 204). In another context, Miller referred to Mather as a nauseous human being. The scorn has never really disappeared, though later scholars, most notably David Levin and Kenneth Silverman, wrote biographies that took him seriously and treated him with respect.

The editor of this volume under review, Reiner Smolinski, shares their regard for Mather and his undertaking the production of the Biblia Americana, his commentary on the Bible. The first volume is Genesis—with nine more to come. Moreover, he has presumably chosen the editors of the remaining nine and has undertaken two others himself. It is an enormous project of several thousand pages. If the volumes that follow...