Spinoza, religious heterodoxy, and the rise of historical criticism of the Bible (Benedictus de Spinoza)

Studies tracing the rise of historical criticism of the Bible often consider Benedict de Spinoza (1632--1677) the progenitor of this approach, presenting him as a quintessentially modern, rationalist thinker who developed a philological-historical method to interpret biblical texts. According to this line of thought, the father of the historical method cleared a path for the Enlightenment, supplying munition for attacks against religious belief, the Christian church, and the Bible. Left unqualified, however, this view appears too monogenetic, for it regards modern historical criticism as the brainchild of one irreligious, left-Cartesian rationalist philosopher who had been expelled from his religious community for unorthodoxy.; I reassess Spinoza's relationship to higher criticism by drawing attention to the emergence of historical-critical investigations of the Bible from among heterodox Protestants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Examining the "theological-political" context of the Netherlands during this period reveals the extent to which the seventeenth century was still mired in the hermeneutical uncertainties of the preceding century when investigations into what are now understood to be distinct areas of inquiry were not so easily separated (e.g., theology, philosophy, astronomy, natural science, and political science). The religious motivations behind early rational attacks against biblical authority are usually neglected in current discussion. This oversight is particularly true in contemporary religious studies.; Often the remark is made that Spinoza influenced liberal Protestant thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rarely is recognition given to the ideas of liberal Protestants from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who may have influenced the Dutch rationalist. I demonstrate that radical, innovative, rational critiques of Scripture circulated in many heterodox Christian writings decades before Spinoza incorporated these ideas into the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TT-P).; I argue that the TT-P, like other seventeenth-century rational critiques of Scripture, was in part a response to Calvinism and to Protestant debates over biblical hermeneutics. I also propose that several rational arguments commonly accepted today by historical critics emerged from within---rather than from outside---the confines of Christianity, i.e., from within the context of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Protestant reformations, rather than as part of the Enlightenment.