Rusticus ad Academicos: The Rustic's Alarm to the Rabbis (Selections)
Samuel Fisher (1605–1665) — the Oxford-educated vicar who laid down one of the richest livings in Kent for conscience's sake and became the scholar of the first Quaker generation — answers the academic divines in the wittiest, most learned polemic of the age. Selections from Rusticus ad Academicos in modern English, with linked scripture and historical references.
- Selections from the massive 1660 folio — the movement's one Oxford-trained scholar answers John Owen, Danson, Tombes & Baxter
- The celebrated pioneering biblical criticism: the canon, the vowel points, the various readings — a decade before Spinoza
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Free Original EEBO-TCP (Text Creation Partnership)About This Edition
Samuel Fisher was the anomaly of early Quakerism: an Oxford Master of Arts in a movement of shepherds and shoemakers. Vicar of Lydd in Kent, holder of a benefice worth some two hundred pounds a year, he stunned his parishioners by resigning it all — convinced that a ministry maintained by compulsory tithes could not be the ministry of Christ. He grazed sheep for his bread, preached among the Baptists, and in 1655 was convinced by the Quaker message that the light of Christ is given to every man. When the ablest divines in England — John Owen, late Dean of Christ Church, Thomas Danson, John Tombes, and Richard Baxter — published against the Friends, Fisher answered them all at once, in the enormous, riotous folio of 1660: Rusticus ad Academicos, “The Rustic’s Alarm to the Rabbis; or, The Country Correcting the University and Clergy.”
At the heart of the book stands the argument that made it famous, and that has led modern scholars to call Fisher a pioneer of biblical criticism a full decade before Spinoza. Against Owen’s claim that the Scripture text had been preserved “entire to a tittle,” Fisher — who knew the manuscripts and the scholarship — showed that the Hebrew vowel points were a late invention of the Masoretes; that the copies vary in thousands of readings; that the originals are lost; that the canon was bounded by fallible human councils; and that no translation the common reader touches can rise above the texts beneath it. His conclusion was not to cast Scripture away, but to ground faith where the Scriptures themselves ground it: in the Spirit that gave them forth, the light of Christ within.
This Friends Illuminated edition presents curated selections — about one-seventh of the 554,000-word folio — carrying the complete arc of the work: the great opening address to the reader, the confrontation with Owen and Danson, the celebrated text-critical chapters, the defense of the universal light, the catalogue of his opponents’ self-contradictions, and the radiant closing manifesto, Christ’s Light Springing. Fisher’s deliriously punning prose — no one else in the seventeenth century sounds like him — is preserved in lightly modernized English, with scripture and historical references linked throughout.