BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Theological-Political Treatise
[8] From this we readily see how God is to be understood as the
author of the Bible. It is owing to the true religion that it teaches and not
because he wanted to present human beings with a certain number of
books. We may also see why the Bible is divided into the books of the
Old and the New Testament. It is because before Christ’s coming the
prophets were accustomed to proclaim religion as the law of the country
based upon the covenant entered into at the time of Moses; whereas
after Christ’s coming the Apostles preached religion to all people
everywhere, as the universal law, based solely upon Christ’s passion. It
is not because the books of the Testaments di¡er in doctrine, nor
because they were written as covenantal texts, nor, ¢nally, because the
universal religion, which is supremely natural, was anything new,
except to those people who did not know it: ‘he was in the world’, says
John the Evangelist 1.10,‘and the world did not know him’. Therefore,
even if we had fewer books, whether of the Old or of the New Testament,
we would still not be deprived of the word of God (by which is
properly meant, as we have just said, true religion), just as we do not
now regard ourselves as deprived of it, even though we do now lack
many other excellent writings, like the Book of the Law which was
zealously preserved in the Temple as the text of the covenant, and the
Books of the Wars, the Books of the Chronicles, and many, many others,
from which the books of the Old Testament which we now possess
were selected and assembled.
[9] All this is con¢rmed by many other arguments:
(1) In neither Testament were the books written at one and the
same time, for all centuries, by express command but rather from time to
time by speci¢c individuals in the way their times and individual temperaments
dictated. This is made clear by the callings of the prophets (who were
called to admonish the impious men of their time) and by the Epistles of the
Apostles.
(2) It is one thing to understand Scripture and the minds of the prophets
and quite another to understand the mind of God which is the very truth of a
thing as follows from what we showed about the prophets in chapter 2.This
distinction applies no less to histories and to miracles, as we showed in chapter
6. But this same [vast di¡erence] can not be said to be present in those
passages which speak of true religion and true virtue.
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