Wednesday, August 5, 2026

It is the 5th of August 2026. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org; I’m Dan van Voorhis.

 

This week has brought us a few curious early modern characters- and while today brings us no comedies or scandalous washrooms- we do have an eccentric professor, the first of his kind- a philologist obsessed with calendars whose curious wardrobe made him the target of Jesuits.

 

He was Joseph Justus Scaliger, born in the south of France on this, the 5th of August in 1540. He was the son of Julius Caesar Scaliger and his wife Andiette. As the son of a “Julius Caesar,” you might expect the young man to direct his attention to antiquity… which he did, at least informally. His father would insist that the family was of ancient Veronese royalty- a dubious claim nonetheless believed by young Joseph. He attended school in Bordeaux for a few years but returned home during the outbreak of the plague. His father taught him Latin- one story has him requiring his son to write 80 lines of Latin poetry per day. His father died in 1558, but the lessons in how to learn independently apparently stuck. He went to the University of Paris but was apparently terribly bored in lectures and unable to learn. He determined to teach himself, instead. There he met Guillaume Postel- the orientalist, kabbalist, and polyglot- Postel encouraged Scaliger to learn as many foreign languages as he could… the number would get up to 13, including Hebrew, Ethiopic, and Syriac.

 

Unsure what to do with his encyclopedic knowledge of foreign and ancient languages, he was made the tutor to a traveling nobleman. For three decades he traveled Europe, met with scholars, and collected ancient manuscripts. Two important things happened during these years- he became a Protestant; this would make living back home in Catholic France difficult, especially as the French Wars of Religion were raging.

 

Secondly, he began work on the ancient Roman poet-astrologer Manilius. While philology and Latin poetry had interested him, it was the content of Manilius- his astronomical observations that struck Scaliger.

 

From the late 1570s, he would turn his attention to what he believed was an understudied aspect of history: how we count time. He knew that the Jews had their own calendars, as did the Egyptians and Persians. Scaliger wondered how these calendars might match up and inform one another.

 

This led to his magnum opus- De Emendatione Temporum, or “On the Correction of Time”. This was followed by his Thesaurus Temporum, an attempt to reconstruct the church historian Eusebius’ lost Chronicle.

 

The practical implications of these works were that the time- and, most importantly, biblical “time” from the passover to exile and the life and crucifixion of Jesus could be examined. Many of Scaliger's own conclusions have since been refuted- but he is still considered the father of this kind of historical study.

 

He was invited to teach at the University of Leiden- he balked at first, having always hated lectures- either attending or giving them. He was offered a position as a kind of research professor- the first of its kind in Europe. His work in textual criticism and chronology was important- but if you were around the University of Leiden in the late 1500s and early 1600s, you would probably better know the eccentric Joseph Scaliger as the curious man dressed in purple robes- in the fashion of Medieval Veronese princes… of which he claimed to be a descendant.

 

As a convinced Protestant, he drew criticism from Catholic scholars- many of whom found his textual criticism and chronology to be hurting the Catholic apologetic- and many of whom just thought he was a strange fellow. In 1607, the Catholic Jesuit Gaspar Scoppius wrote a book called Scaliger Hypobolimaeus- we could translate that as “Scaliger, the Counterfeit Kid”- an attack on his father's supposed biography and claims to Veronese royalty. Scaliger would write a rebuttal- but it was deemed ineffective. Scaliger would die soon after- Scoppius would brag that his takedown of the professor led to his death… ouch.

 

Scaliger’s work, his occasional sayings at the table, and his vast correspondence were published posthumously- and it wasn’t until this last century that a two-volume work, in English by Anthony Grafton, has finally illuminated this curious man at the confluence of Renaissance philology and criticism and the Reformation.

 

Joseph Justus Scaliger died in January of 1609- his massive library bequeathed to the University of Leiden, where it remains today. There is no word on what happened to the curious purple robes. Born on this day in 1540, he was 68 years old.

 

 

The Last word for today comes from the daily lectionary and Matthew 15:

32 Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I have compassion for these people; they have already been with me three days and have nothing to eat. I do not want to send them away hungry, or they may collapse on the way.”

33 His disciples answered, “Where could we get enough bread in this remote place to feed such a crowd?”

34 “How many loaves do you have?” Jesus asked.

“Seven,” they replied, “and a few small fish.”

35 He told the crowd to sit down on the ground. 36 Then he took the seven loaves and the fish, and when he had given thanks, he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and they in turn to the people. 37 They all ate and were satisfied. Afterward the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. 38 The number of those who ate was four thousand men, besides women and children. 39 After Jesus had sent the crowd away, he got into the boat and went to the vicinity of Magadan.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 5th of August 2026 brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

The show is produced by a man whose own purple robes have nothing to do with Veronese royalty. He just claims they breathe nicely in the summer… he is Christopher Gillespie.

The show is written and read by a man who loves robes… great after a shower, after work… nice pockets… sometimes a hood… I’m Dan van Voorhis.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.