Pico's most consequential act was not the nine hundred theses but the claim buried among them: that no science gives greater certainty of the divinity of Christ than magic and kabbalah. To make it he needed texts, and he bought them. The convert Flavius Mithridates translated for him an enormous corpus of kabbalistic works into Latin, thousands of folio pages prepared at speed in the 1480s, and Pico read them as he read everything, as fragments of a single ancient theology whose centre was Christian truth. Out of that reading came the founding move of Christian Kabbalah: the techniques of the Jewish tradition, the sefirot, the permutations of letters, the names of God, redeployed as proofs and instruments within a Christian frame.
Reuchlin took the project further, and for two centuries Christian Hebraists followed the trail Pico opened. The oration he set at the front of the theses, on the dignity of man, with its God telling Adam that he may fashion himself into whatever form he chooses, became the most quoted page of the Renaissance long after the debate it was written to open was banned. His last completed campaign reversed field: the Disputations against divinatory astrology, published after his early death in 1494, attacked the astrologers' claim to read particulars from the heavens, and it did more damage to learned astrology than any work before Kepler. Both projects came from one conviction: that human dignity is incompatible with fated stars.