Valores Interpersonales

Considering that Spinoza is writing for a largely Christian audience and is primarily addressing the views of Christian theologians, it may seem curious that he has said so little about the teachings of the New Testament. Although he has distinguished the imaginative form of revelation experienced by the Old Testament prophets from the intuitive form experienced by Christ, he has remained virtually silent about the doctrines taught by the Apostles. ‘No one who has read the New Testament’, he now asserts, ‘can doubt that [the Apostles] were prophets’, whose imaginative gifts enabled them to elaborate and communicate the doctrine that they had themselves learned from Christ.

But just as it was important in the case of the Old Testament to distinguish the prophets’ revelations from their ordinary utterances, so we now need to try to do the same with the teachings of the Apostles.

This is a crucial step in the argument of the Treatise. One of the primary aims of Spinoza’s initial discussion of prophecy was to discount the prophets’

speculative opinions about nature and God on the basis of biblical evidence.

Nothing suggests that Moses or Joshua, for example, were philosophically sophisticated people whose speculative views are worthy of respect. Further-more, their project was not to understand God, nature, or the good in a philosophical fashion, but to persuade their audiences to adopt a particular way of life. The question now is whether the speculative opinions of the Apostles also lack authority; but the problem has taken on a new dimension.

Whereas the prophets taught particular nations, the Apostles taught the uni-versal form of the divine law that they had learned from Christ. Although they did, of course, address distinct groups of people in their various Epistles, their doctrine was applicable to everyone, including the philosophically educated.

This suggests that their speculative claims may be harder to dismiss. It is possible that these claims were transmitted to the Apostles by Christ (who in turn had them from God), and that they are part of divine doctrine. With this in mind, we need to work out when the Apostles are communicating truths revealed to them by God, and when are they simply offering views of their own.

On the whole Spinoza would prefer to avoid this topic, and it is easy to see why. An excommunicated Jew with a reputation for atheism might have well hesitated to challenge Calvinist biblical scholars in what they regarded as the sanctuary of their religious faith. Excusing himself from investigating the New Testament fully, he remarks that the task has already been undertaken‘by men who are learned in the sciences, and especially in languages’; that he does not know enough Greek (although this does not prevent him from commenting on the correct interpretation of certain Greek passages);⁸⁵ and that Hebrew versions of the texts are not available.^{86, 87}Nevertheless, there is an issue that he needs to address. His analysis of accommodation has enabled him to open up a large space for free philosophical enquiry by showing that there are many topics on which the prophets’ utterances are not intended to be philosophically compelling. But this space will be snatched away from him unless he can establish that the same applies to the Apostles’ speculative claims. If they have to be taken au pied de la lettre and treated as part of biblical doctrine, the fence between theology and philosophy that Spinoza has been constructing will collapse. Furthermore, since the speculative claims of one Apostle sometimes contradict those of another, the discrepancies between them will make the interpretation of Scripture contentious. Philosophical issues will inevitably become tangled up with endless theological disputes, schisms, and superstitions, so that the question of what one can affirm about philosophy will be theologi-cally tainted.⁸⁸If Spinoza is to sustain his view that philosophical enquiry can proceed independently of Scripture, it is therefore vital to show that the Apostles’ speculations are not part of their core doctrine.

How can this conclusion be sustained? Returning to his initial classification of types of accommodation, Spinoza reminds his readers that the capacity to prophesy is only intermittent. Because it is a function of imaginative powers that vary with time and place, it can only occur when conditions are right, and at other times the forms of imagining and reasoning on which prophets rely are

85 Ibid. ch. 10, p. 151fn.

86 Ibid. ch. 10, p. 150.

87 In suggesting that there might be‘copies of the books [of the New Testament] which were written in the Hebrew language’, Spinoza seems to be supposing that the original language of the New Testament texts was Hebrew. Though this is doubtful, there is a modern theory of

‘Aramaic primacy’, which holds that the original language of the New Testament texts was a Semitic one rather than Koine Greek. For some discussion of this theory, see Joseph Augustine Fitzmeyer, The Semitic Background of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans 1997);

Frank Zimmermann, The Aramaic Origin of the Four Gospels (New York: Ktav, 1979).

88 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ch. 11, p. 157.

not exceptional. Their lives are shaped by the experience of revelation; but only some of the things they say and do are revealed to them by God.

Interpreters therefore need to pick and choose, basing their readings of revela-tion on a critical examinarevela-tion of the biblical record, and subjecting it to the interpretative techniques that Spinoza has outlined.

Among the many features of Scripture that interpreters need to take into account is the style of its speeches and narratives. By attending to style, Spinoza now claims, we can distinguish prophetic from non-prophetic utterances.

When prophets are inspired, they speak in a particular fashion. Phrases such as ‘thus says God’ make it clear that they are issuing divine instructions; and because they are conveying the divine word, they simply issue judgements without giving any reasons for them. (God does not give reasons, nor has the prophet reasoned his way to the view he expresses.) Conversely, the more that prophets argue, ‘the more the knowledge they have of the matter revealed approaches natural knowledge’.⁸⁹ Guided by these stylistic differences, and applying them to the text of the New Testament, Spinoza concludes that the Apostles rarely prophesy, and in their letters merely offer their own opinions.

‘The way the Apostles both spoke and discussed things in their Epistles indicates most clearly that they were not written in accordance with revelation and a divine command, but only in accordance with their natural judgment, and contain nothing but brotherly advice, mixed with a politeness far removed from prophetic authority’.⁹⁰

It may seem troubling, Spinoza allows, that on the basis of their natural reason the Apostles were able to teach things that are beyond reason’s grasp.

But the puzzle is easily solved. We have seen how, with the help of a proper interpretative method, we can use our ordinary powers of reasoning to create a history of Scripture, which tells us what the Bible says about events such as revelations and miracles whose causes we do not understand. Interpretation enables us to recover the meaning of a text which deals with events that we cannot rationally account for. However, whereas we bring the interpretative method to bear on the Bible, the Apostles applied it to the things they had seen and heard, and created a history of the life of Christ. They brought their interpretative skills to bear, not on a text, but on their immediate experience of Jesus, including the revelations and miracles that he, and to a lesser extent they themselves, performed. Using the same historical method, they assembled information from which they first extracted and then transmitted Christ’s

89 Ibid. ch. 11, p. 153. ⁹⁰ Ibid.

teaching. Parts of this do indeed exceed the power of natural understanding.

But since much of it consists of moral lessons that are accessible to everyone, their teaching is in general easy to understand.

The techniques of textual interpretation that Spinoza has defended therefore indicate that the Apostles were predominantly preachers rather than prophets, and that their teachings were not based on divine revelation. But what, then, is the status of the advice they offer, and are we bound to attend to it? Approach-ing this question in his usual exegetical manner, Spinozafirst points out that the Apostles themselves testify that they have been given authority to teach as well as prophesy. For instance, Timothy describes himself as an‘appointed preacher and Apostle . . . a teacher of the nations with faith and truth’.⁹¹However, even if we accept that this is the case, we still do not know what they had authority to teach, and whether an Apostle could authoritatively teach in any way he wished. A further trawl through the biblical evidence divulges the answer.

While all the Apostles taught the same religious precepts, each of them built these on a different foundation adapted to the mentality of his particular audience. Like other teachers, many of whom ‘prefer to teach people who are completely uneducated’ so that they can put their own stamp on them, each Apostle had their own pedagogical method, and defended religion on a different basis.⁹²This basis was in turn accommodated to distinct audiences.

For example, the Apostles mainly preached to Jews who, according to Spinoza, disdained philosophy. They consequently‘accommodated themselves to their audience and taught a religion devoid of philosophic speculations’.⁹³Paul, by contrast, preached to all the nations and based his teaching on‘the foundations that were best known and accepted at that time’. As a result, he philosophized more than the rest.

As Spinoza implies, this has had disastrous effects. Generations of theologians who have failed to recognize the reason for the divergences in the Apostles’ doctrines have read them as authoritative. This in turn has‘given rise to disputes and schisms which have tormented the Church incessantly from the time of the Apostles until the present day, and will surely torment it until religion is separated from philosophical speculations and reduced to the very few and very simple tenets taught by Christ and his followers’.⁹⁴ Moreover, since the resulting religious debates are a source of superstitious anxiety, they feed the opposition to natural reason against which Spinoza is pitting himself. ‘How

91 Ibid. ch. 11, p. 156. 1 Timothy 2:7. ⁹² Ibid. ch. 11, p. 157.

93 Ibid. ch. 11, p. 158. ⁹⁴ Ibid. ch. 11, pp. 157–8.

happy our age would be’, he concludes, ‘if we saw religion again free of all superstition’.

By applying his account of accommodation to the Apostles, Spinoza is thus able to argue that their diverse philosophical opinions are not authoritative.

As the interpretative method confirms, our philosophical convictions about nature, God, interpretation, or the foundations of morality may be as good as, or better than, theirs, and we are free to work out for ourselves what sort of foundation Christ’s moral teaching requires.