Simon, RICHARD, the father of biblical criticism, was born at Dieppe, May 13, 1638. He entered the Congregation of the Oratory in 1659, but soon after withdrew, to return in the later part of 1662. He was sent first to lecture on philosophy in the college of Juilly, but was afterwards appointed to catalogue the oriental MSS. in the library of the Order at Paris. His criticisms upon Arnauld's Defence of the Perpetuity of the Faith in the Blessed Eucharist caused great displeasure among the Port-Royalists, and his imprudent meddling with another controversy brought upon his head the wrath of the Benedictines. The scandal occasioned by the appearance of his Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (1678) led to his again withdrawing from the Oratory and retiring to Belleville as curé. In 1682 he resigned his parish, and lived in literary retirement at Dieppe, Paris, and again at Dieppe, where he died April 11, 1712. Few writers of his age played so prominent a part in the world of letters, and especially in its polemics. There is hardly a critical or theological scholar among his contemporaries with whom he did not break a lance—Weil, Spanheim, Le Clere, Isaac Voss, Du Pin, Jurieu, and Jurieu's great antagonist, Bossuet. His Histoire Critique (suppressed through Bossuet's influence, and only printed entire at Rotterdam in 1685) anticipates the most important conclusions of all the later rationalistic scholars of Germany, and also their method of investigation, and, indeed, is the first work which treated the Bible from the point of view of a literary product. For example, he disproves the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, assigning its composition to the scribes of the time of Ezra. Other writings of Simon's are Histoire Critique du Texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterd. 1689); and L'Histoire Critique des Principaux Commentateurs du Nouveau Testament (Rotterd. 1693), in which he assails the theology of the Fathers, and particularly that of Augustine, as a departure from the simple and less rigid doctrines of the primitive church. Among the Fathers his most esteemed authority was Chrysostom. Bossuet replied to this last work by his Defense de la Tradition et des Saints Pères. Simon frequently published under assumed names—as his Dissertation Critique on Dupin's Library of Ecclesiastical Writers, under the name of Jean Reuchlin; a work, Histoire Critique sur la Créance et des Coutumes des Nations du Levant, under the anagram of Monis; and a Histoire de l'Origine et du Progrès des Revenus Ecclésiastiques, under the name of Jerome Acosta.
See the Life by K. H. Graf in Strassburger theolog. Beiträge (1847); A. Bernus, Richard Simon et son Histoire Crit. du V. T. (Laus. 1869), and the same scholar's Notice Bibliographique (Basel, 1882).