Spend any amount of time around fundamentalist Christianity, and one thing will become evident — the sacredness of the Bible. Asking the question, “What does the Bible say?” is of first importance in all matters of life and faith, and “The Bible says…” is the gold standard for credibility. There’s even a term for this level of reverence: Sola Scriptura (literally ‘by Scripture alone’). Violating this sacredness — say, by meddling with the words of Scripture, or by ‘manipulating’ the ideas it contains — is seen as a supreme sin.
… Except when it’s not, of course.
I’ve written already about a handful of examples (such as the altering of 1 Peter, and the fact that the word ‘hell’ is a misrepresentation that really ought to be removed from the Bible). I could certainly mention the frequency that the New Testament promises ‘death’, ‘destruction’, and ‘perishing’ for the ungodly in the afterlife (including famous verses like Romans 6:23 and John 3:16) — an obvious conflict with the notion of hell as eternal, conscious suffering. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that fundamentalists’ perceptions of the Bible, rather than the Bible itself, is what is truly sacred.
My pedantry here is not merely self-indulgent; rather, my aim is to provide context for understanding the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza, one of the most influential figures of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Enlightenment had its fair share of colourful, irreverent, and ‘dangerous’ thinkers (such as Denis Diderot, Paul-Henri Theirry d’Holbach, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and John Locke). The venom of the Christian establishment, however, was arguably directed to none more so than Spinoza. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, his key work, was vilified as “a book forged in hell… by the devil himself”. What, then, did he say that was so utterly offensive?
Spinoza was dismissive of mainstream Christianity (as well as Judaism, since his own heritage was Jewish). Popular religion, he remarked, was full of theologians “endeavouring to hawk about their own commentaries as the word of God, and giving their best efforts, under the guise of religion, to compelling others to think as they do”. Furthermore, he argued, religion was under the control of superstition, which is opposed to “reason and nature”. “Every result of their diseased imagination,” Spinoza summarised, “they attribute to the Holy Ghost, and strive to defend with the utmost zeal and passion”.
Such caustic insults would naturally have won Spinoza no favours with the religious mainstream. Pithy put-downs, though, were not uncommon (a tendency that has carried forward to Richard Dawkins and other recent ‘New Atheists’). No, it was Spinoza’s approach to the Bible that made him such a threat.
Instead of inflexible dogma and superstition, Spinoza argued that an appropriate reading of scripture must come from understanding the rules of literature, language, and history. Using this method, Spinoza arrived at a series of groundbreaking and scandalous conclusions. Moses, he wrote, was not the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Jewish scriptures); instead, they were written by a later author. The books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings were likewise written and compiled by a later author. Spinoza speculated that the common author for all of these books was Ezra (a Jewish leader from the 4th century BC). The prophetic books of the Bible, meanwhile, were “compiled from other books, and are not always set down in the exact order in which they were spoken or written by the prophets, but are only such as were collected here and there, so that they are but fragmentary.” In some cases, Spinoza argued, such as numerical figures, genealogies, and prophecies, the Bible contains errors.
If this all sounds as if Spinoza was a crusading atheist, hell-bent on discrediting the Bible, you’d be mistaken. Far from “overthrowing the authority of Scripture”, Spinoza’s purpose was to “prevent the clear and uncorrupted passages being… corrupted by the faulty ones”. Just because certain errors and contradictions exist in the Bible, he argued, it doesn’t mean that the entire Bible itself is corrupted. “No book ever was completely free from faults, yet I would ask, who suspects all books to be everywhere faulty? Surely no one, especially when the phraseology is clear and the intention of the author plain.”
Spinoza’s work, though bitterly opposed, was brilliant and revolutionary, paving the way for modern biblical analysis. Any number of breakthroughs in 20th and 21st century scholarship and Christian theology — from the modest popularity of Universalism, to the egalitarian movement for female leadership within Christian churches, to the study of Hebrew poetry, storytelling, prophecy, and apocalypse, to the dating of various biblical texts, and so on — owe a debt of gratitude to the Theological-Political Treatise. As for my book… well, without the chain of dominoes that Spinoza set off, ‘Decoding Gehenna’ would have been an impossibility!
This is a modified excerpt from my as-yet-unreleased book, Decoding Gehenna: Hell and the Afterlife in the West. Subscribe or Follow Me for updates and more sneak-peek excerpts!
