The Life of Adam and Eve is an early Jewish or Christian writing about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. It is also known under the title Apocalypse of Moses . Taking its lead from the story in Genesis 3, it recounts the well‐known events, enriched abundantly with apocryphal details. The writings is extant in numerous versions and manuscripts, showing that it has been one of the most widespread writings in the Christian world. Almost all of these offer a different form of the story, showing in addition that the transmitters' interest in it was not antiquarian, but lively, and continually nurtured by oral tradition.

The Assumption of Moses is a Jewish writing from the first century CE , presumably composed in Judaea. Some scholars also refer to it as the Testament of Moses . It is preserved only in a fragmentary Latin palimpsest from the fifth or sixth century, as well as in a small number of quotations in early Christian literature (including the New Testament letter of Jude); these quotations guarantee the identification of the writing as the Assumption of Moses ‐in the manuscript itself, the title is lost.

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In 1617, Hugo Grotius had his treatise On satisfaction published. Explicitly directed against Faustus Socinus’s 1594 book On Jesus Christ as our Saviour, it purports to contribute to the confutation of the Italian scholar’s teachings, which in the Netherlands were widely regarded as utterly heretical. The way in which he perceived Socinus, however, was mainly determined by the image of Socinianism as disseminated by its detractors, foremost Sibrandus Lubbertus of Franeker. Grotius did read Socinus’s work, but not with much care, and at least unaccommodatingly. The reason for Grotius to intervene in this theological debate is often assumed to have been to vindicate his and his ecclesiastical party’s views on religion as orthodox, or at least far removed from Socinianism and other heresies. In contrast, it is proposed here to take the explicit motivation in the preface at face value, and assume that Grotius wrote it to refute Socinus on the basis of his juridical, philological, and historical errors, simply because he could, and genuinely abhorred Socinianism as he had learned to understand it.

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