VOSS, GERHARD JOHANNES (VOSSIUS). — Calvinist theologian and philologist, born in Heidelberg to a Dutch family in 1577, died in Amsterdam on March 17, 1649. He studied in Leiden and served as a professor in Dordrecht, Leiden, and Amsterdam.
As a philologist, he wrote: *Grammatica latina* (1626), *Grammatica graeca* (1627), *Ars rhetoricae* (1620), *De historicis graecis* (1623), and *De historicis latinis* (1627). As a theologian, he authored *De theologia gentili et physiologia christiana, sive de origine et progressu idololatriae* (Amsterdam, 1641), which may be considered the first systematic treatise on the history of religions, albeit adhering to the theory of plagiarism, according to which any truth found in extra-biblical religions is either a remnant of primitive religion or a plagiarism of the Bible. The work, divided into nine books, examines what pagans attribute to theology—namely, the deification of natural forces or elements—which, for Christians, instead belong to physiology or natural science. The worship rendered to various deities is either proper: God, genii (Bk. I); celestial bodies (Bk. II); terrestrial bodies, humans, animals, plants, minerals (Bks. III-VI); the universe or cosmos as a whole (Bk. VII); or symbolic: abstract human qualities (Bk. VIII), symbols or simulacra of various forms or materials (Bk. IX). The documentation spans from the ancient East to the peoples of northern Europe, from Britain to Russia.