BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Apostles and prophets
preach to everyone without exception and to convert all men to religion.
Therefore wherever they might go, they were following the command of
Christ. Moreover, they did not need to have what they were to preach
revealed to them before they went, for they were disciples of Christ to
whom he had said, ‘and when they deliver you up, do not be anxious
how or what you will say; for what you will say will be given you in that
hour,’ etc. (see Matthew 10.19^20).
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[6] Hence, we conclude that the Apostles received by special revelation
only what they preached with their own voices and, at the same time,
con¢rmed by wonders (see what we demonstrated at the beginning of
chapter 2). What they merely taught, either in writing or orally, without
using signs as testimony, they spoke or wrote on the basis of knowledge
(i.e. natural knowledge); on this see 1 Corinthians 14.6.
It is no objection to this that all the Epistles begin with a con¢rmation
that they are Apostles. For as I shall show presently, the Apostles received
not just the power of prophecy but also authority to teach. It is in this
sense that we allow that they wrote their Epistles as Apostles, and that
this is the reason each of them starts his preface with a con¢rmation of
his Apostleship. Or perhaps, to win their readers’ con¢dence more readily
and seize their attention, they wanted above all to stress that they had
won a reputation among all the faithful for their preaching and had also
shown by plain testimony that they taught true religion and the way of
salvation. For I ¢nd that whatever I see in these Epistles about the calling
of the Apostles and their sacred and divine spirit, is ascribed to the
preaching they had done, with the single exception of passages in which
‘the spirit of God’ and ‘holy spirit’ are intended to mean a healthy and
happy mind, a mind dedicated to God, etc. (as we explained in chapter 1).
For example, in 1 Corinthians 7.40 Paul says,‘in my view, she is blessed if
she remains as she is, and I think that the spirit of God is in me’. Here by
‘spirit of God’ he means his own mind, as the context of the sentence
indicates. What Paul is saying is: ‘I judge (‘‘in my view’’) that the widow
who does not wish to marry a second time is blessed; for I am celibate
myself by choice and consider myself to be blessed’. There are other passages
like this that I do not think I need to cite here.
Since we must conclude that the Apostles’ Epistles were composed
using the natural light of reason alone, we should now ask how they could
teach by means of natural knowledge alone things that are not within its
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