The interpretative approach that Spinoza has outlined is designed to capture what he describes as the foundations and principles of our knowledge of the Scriptures.1As long as exegetes stick conscientiously to his historical method, they will be able to understand the teaching of the Bible as well as it can be understood. Rather than distorting its meaning and enhancing superstition, their efforts will enable them to decode the prophets’ metaphors and affirm its central message. That, at least, is the claim. But while the Treatise goes to great lengths to defend this hermeneutic stance against a string of potential criticisms, it remains to show what it can do. What exegetical errors can a history of Scripture put right and what superstitious practices can it unmask? Unless the answers are compelling, readers may be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss has been about.2
Spinoza, is more than willing to rise to the challenge, and sets out to show that his method can overcome‘the common prejudices of theology’.3Despite the fact that parts of the history of Scripture have fallen into oblivion4and that
1 Benedictus de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ed. Carl Gebhardt, vol. III, Opera (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1924), ch. 8, p. 117.
2 On Spinoza’s analysis of the Bible, see Michael Heyd, Between Orthodoxy and the Enlighten-ment: Jean-Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982); Jacqueline Lagre´e and Pierre-Franc¸ois Moreau, ‘La lecture de la Bible dans le cercle de Spinoza’, in Le grand sie`cle et la Bible, ed. Jean-Robert Armogathe (Paris:
Beauchesne, 1989); Steven B. Smith, Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), ch. 3; Sylvain Zac, Essais spinozistes (Paris: Vrin, 1985); Sylvain Zac, Philosophie, the´ologie, politique dans l’œuvre de Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1979);
Sylvain Zac, Spinoza et l’interpre´tation de l’e´criture (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965).
3 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 8, p. 118.
4 Ibid. ch. 8, p. 117.
commentators have‘concocted new things out of their own brains’,5it is still just about possible to circumvent their errors and identify the true teachings of Scripture. In a sequence of chapters he takes on four theological prejudices (the first three closely interlocking), each of which bears in different ways on the development of his argument; and by showing where these prejudices go wrong he puts himself in a stronger position to dismiss them. The conclusions of this section of the Treatise are therefore partly negative, although as we shall see they have a number of radical implications. By far the most important of these, from Spinoza’s point of view, is that Spinoza’s analysis puts him in a position to take up the main thread of his discussion and explain what a religious way of life consists in. By discrediting his Calvinist opponents, he clears the way for his own account of the substance of Scripture’s doctrine.
Thefirst stage in this process focuses on the authorship of the various books of the Bible. Continuing his critique of the Reformed Church, Spinozafirst employs his method to demolish the view that the Old Testament as a whole is the word of God. In fact, he argues, it is a compilation, written by several hands and only assembled in its present form during the era of the Maccabees.6The aim of this lengthy exercise (which begins with an examination of the Penta-teuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Kings, and then moves on to consider the books of the prophets), is partly to vindicate a piecemeal approach to the books of Scripture.‘Proving the divinity of one book’, Spinoza urges, ‘is not enough to establish the divinity of all’7; rather, the authority of each individual book must be considered on its own merits. Next in line to be dismissed is the belief that ‘by a certain special providence, God has kept the whole Bible uncor-rupted’. Rather than simply assuming that the moral doctrine of the text remains decipherable, we have to use the historical method tofind out whether this is so, and whether the meaning of Scripture,‘the only thing in a statement that gives us a reason for calling it divine, has reached us without corruption, even though we may suppose that the words by which it wasfirst signified have very frequently been changed’.8Here Spinoza will reach a positive conclusion;
but in the course of doing so he will set aside what he regards as a third error, this time concerning the marginal notes in the Masoretic version of the Old Testament. The Masoretic text, he argues, was created during the latter part of the first millennium CE by scholars who inserted vowel points in the earlier Hebrew manuscripts. As they did so, they also added marginal annotations known as the ‘Masorah’, which subsequently became the subject of fierce
5 Ibid. ch. 8, p. 118. 6 Ibid. ch. 10, p. 150. 7 Ibid.
8 Ibid. ch. 9, p. 135.
scholarly controversy.9 According to certain commentators, some of these annotations indicate divine mysteries concealed in the main body of the text,10and this is one of the views that Spinoza will contest.11
In all these cases, Spinoza is determined to show that problems for which commentators have sought supernatural solutions can be resolved by appeal to the natural reasoning on which his method relies. To be sure, he concedes, he is not likely to persuade everyone.‘Those who consider the Bible, as it is, as a letter God has sent men from Heaven will doubtless cry out that I have committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, because I have maintained that the word of God is faulty . . . that we have only fragments of it, and finally that the original text of the covenant God made with the Jews has been lost’.12But Spinoza, on his side, is engaged in a campaign against these opponents, who,‘in their excessive zeal to be holy, may turn religion into superstition, and indeed, may begin to worship likenesses and images, i.e. paper and ink, in place of the word of God’.13
Before leaving the theme of interpretation, Spinoza turns his attention to a fourth prejudice specifically about the status of the New Testament. Looking forward to the positive account of religion he will go on to offer, he pauses to show how his historical approach to Scripture can deal with a difficulty that threatens to stand in his way. As with the Old Testament, we need to resist the view that the New Testament as a whole is the word of God by distinguishing its core doctrines from other elements in the text. By sticking to the historical method and paying careful attention to the style of the Apostle’s utterances we can separate prophecy from teaching. Thus released from the need to accept everything the Apostles say as authoritative, Spinoza is ready to give an account of the teaching expressed in one form by Moses and in another by Christ.
Diverse as they are, each of these discussions plays a part in building an overall case for a conception of the Bible as a text compiled and transmitted over many generations, in which numerous ordinary human actions and attitudes are recorded. The interpretative method that Spinoza has set out now begins to produce what is from a Calvinist point of view poisonous fruit, as he progres-sively undercuts all attempt to associate the Scriptures with the supernatural.
Failing to treat the biblical books as human artefacts written by human authors is, so Spinoza repeatedly insists, a form of superstition. Even if it does not
9 Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), pp. 398–9.
10 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 9, pp. 135–6.
11 Ibid. ch. 9, p. 136. 12 Ibid. ch. 12, p. 158.
13 Ibid. ch. 12, p. 159.
directly arouse hopes and fears that stifle the capacity for independent thought, it is integral to practices that do so.