Ruth Smith
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 May
Ruth Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
If it was actually human work, why believe it?
What status did it have?
So it was very easy to find grounds for skepticism there.
Religion was the main subject of publishing.
Most people went to church.
The sermon was the main public address system.
So balancing these views was quite difficult for people.
And there was great concern.
I mean, if you look at what's actually published at the time, religious doubt is as worrying to the writers as, say, climate change or terrorism now.
And it got at least as many column inches.
Well, no, actually, just to modify that a bit, yes, of course, Messiah is unique in all sorts of ways, but it did have a predecessor in Handel's output.
When Jennings is writing about sending Handel the libretto of Messiah and Handel decides he won't do it for the time being because he wants something of a gayer turn, Jennings describes it as another scripture collection.
Yes.
But Messiah includes New Testament text.
And I think that made a great difference in 18th century England.
New Testament text was more sacred than Old Testament text.
And I think that's the wonderful quotation that Larry just read us about, you know, desecrating God's word.
Jennings was very careful to minimize actual words of Christ and actual naming of Christ.
But it is in there.
And of course, people would have recognized it.
Showing 121–140 of 216 · page 7 of 11
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