BENEDICT DE SPINOZA: Theological-Political Treatise

Divine law and the word of God
(3) The books of the Old Testament were selected from among many 164
others, and collected and approved by a council of Pharisees, as we showed in
chapter 10. The books of the NewTestament were also brought into the canon
by the decrees of certain councils, whose decrees discarded as spurious
numerous other texts which were widely held to be sacred. Now the membership
of these councils (both Pharisaic and Christian) did not consist of prophets
but solely of teachers and learned men. Nevertheless we must
necessarily admit that in thus making this selection they took the word of
God as their criterion, and hence before approving any books, must necessarily
have had a conception of God’s word.
(4) The Apostles wrote not as prophets but as teachers (as we said in the
previous chapter) choosing the manner of teaching that they thought would
be easiest for the disciples whom they wanted to teach at the time. From this
it follows that there are many things in their writings (as we concluded at the
end of that chapter) which, from the point of view of religion, we are now able
to dispense with.
(5) Finally, there are the four evangelists of the New Testament. But who
will believe that God wanted to recount Christ’s history and communicate it
to men in writing four times Admittedly, there are some things in one
which are not found in another, and some passages help elucidate others. But
it does not follow from this that it was necessary for us to know everything the
four narrate or that God chose them to write so that the history of Christ
would be better grasped. For each preached his own gospel in a di¡erent
place, and each recorded what he had preached, doing so in a straightforward
fashion so as to tell Christ’s history clearly. None wrote so as to explain [the
versions of] the others. If they are now sometimes more readily, and better,
understood by comparison with each other, that is accidental and occurs only
in a few passages; and were these passages unknown, the story would still be
just as evident and men no less happy.
[10] These considerations prove that Scripture is properly termed
the word of God only with respect to religion, i.e., the universal divine
law. 4 It remains now to show that, in so far as it is properly so called, it is
not defective or distorted or truncated. Here, I call a text defective,
4 It is typical of Spinoza to rede¢ne the meaning of the term ‘religion’ in this way. In his philosophy
‘true religion’ means following the universal and absolute rules of morality, which can only be
demonstrated according to him, philosophically, and hence understood only by a few, but which
revealed religions do, or at least should, teach all men to‘obey’.
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