In some real sense, the Bible we read today is not at all the same Bible that Blaise Pascal used to document his apology. The mental universe of the cultivated French person between 1650 and 1700, Philippe Sellier reminds us, is replete with what for us are amazing lacunae. The reader must play ethnologist in order to engage in dialogue with writers or thinkers who date the creation from the year 4004 BC or think they know the exact date of the Flood. Indeed, it is truly impossible to understand fully a Pascal or a Bossuet without knowing their vision of the world and history, a vision in which the Bible not only stands at the centre, but also limits the scope of the inquiry.

Sellier estimates that of the approximately 800 fragments we read as the Pensées, about 80 per cent belong to Pascal's unfinished notes for his Apology for the Christian Religion. Of those fragments, at least 200 relate directly or indirectly to Pascal's project of scriptural exegesis. Why, then, has this considerable body of material suffered such neglect at the hands of readers and scholars alike?