Spinoza And The Rise Of Historical Criticism Of The Bible

Frampton reassesses 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.

Two prominent biblical scholars place the traditional historical-critical method of biblical study in perspective by examining the work of its principal proponents and critics. They review the impact--often detrimental--that this approach has had on the spiritual life of the church and suggest ways to revise and supplement the method.

Biblical scholars by and large remain unaware of the history of their own discipline. This present volume seeks to remedy that situation by exploring the early history of modern biblical criticism in the seventeenth century prior to the time of the Enlightenment when the birth of modern biblical criticism is usually dated. After surveying the earlier medieval origins of modern biblical criticism, the essays in this book focus on the more skeptical works of Isaac La Peyrere, Thomas Hobbes, and Baruch Spinoza, whose biblical interpretation laid the foundation for what would emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as modern biblical criticism.

If, therefore, someone is a prophet, he no doubt prophesies, but if someone prophesies he is not necessarily a prophet.—Origen Origen, writing sometime in the mid-third century on the Gospel of John, has charted a course for the subsequent history of interpretation of true and false prophecy. Although Tarrer’s study is concerned primarily with various readings of Jeremiah’s construal of the problem, the ambiguity inherent in Origen’s statement is glaring nonetheless. This monograph is a study of the history of interpretation. It therefore does not fit neatly into the category of Wirkungsgeschichte. Moving through successive periods of the Christian church’s history, Tarrer selects representative interpretations of Jeremiah and Ezekiel in later theological works dealing explicitly with the question of true and false prophecy in an effort to present a sampling of material from the span of the church’s existence. As evidenced by the list of “false prophets” uncovered at Qumran, along with the indelible interpretive debt owed by Christian interpreters such as Jerome and Calvin to Jewish exegetical methods, Jewish interpretation’s vast legacy quickly exceeds the scope of this project. From the sixteenth century onward, the focus on the Protestant church is, again, due to economy. In the end, Tarrer concludes that the early church and pre-modern tradition evidenced a recurring appeal to some form of association between Jeremiah 28 and the deuteronomic prophetic warnings in Deuteronomy 13 and 18.

Mark Gignilliat discusses critical theologians and their theories of Old Testament interpretation in this concise overview, providing a working knowledge of the historical foundation of contemporary discussions on Old Testament interpretation. Old Testament interpretation developed as theologians and scholars proposed critical theories over time. These figures contributed to a large, developing complex of ideas and trends that serves as the foundation of contemporary discussions on interpretation. Mark Gignilliat brings these figures and their theories together in A Brief History of Old Testament Criticism. His discussion is driven by influential thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza and the critical tradition, Johann Semler and historical criticism, Hermann Gunkel and romanticism, Gerhard von Rad and the tradition-historical approach, Brevard Childs and the canonical approach, and more. This concise overview is ideal for classroom use as it provides a working knowledge of the major critical interpreters of the Old Testament, their approach to the subject matter, and the philosophical background of their approaches. Further reading lists direct readers to additional resources on specific theologians and theories. This book will serve as a companion to the forthcoming textbook Believing Criticism by Richard Schultz.

Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660-1710 investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focuses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, language, and the historical context in which it originated. Jetze Touber expertly charts contested issues of biblical philology in mainstream Dutch Calvinism to determine if Spinoza's work on the Bible had bearing on the Reformed understanding of the way society should handle Scripture. Spinoza has received considerable attention both in and outside academia. His unconventional interpretation of the Old Testament passages has been examined repeatedly during the past decades. So has that of fellow 'radicals' (rationalists, radicals, deists, libertines, and enthusiasts), against the backdrop of a society that is assumed to have been hostile, overwhelmed, static, and uniform. Touber counteracts this perspective and considers how the Dutch Republic used biblical philology and biblical criticism, including that of Spinoza. In doing so, Touber takes into account the highly neglected area of the Dutch Reformed ministry and theology of the Dutch Golden Age. The study concludes that Spinoza—rather than simply pushing biblical scholarship in the direction of modernity—acted in an indirect way upon ongoing debates, shifting trends in those debates, but not always in the same direction, and not always equally profoundly at all times, on all levels.

Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age explores the hypothesis that in the long seventeenth century humanist-inspired biblical criticism contributed significantly to the decline of ecclesiastical truth claims. Historiography pictures this era as one in which the dominant position of religion and church began to show signs of erosion under the influence of vehement debates on the sacrosanct status of the Bible. Until quite recently, this gradual but decisive shift has been attributed to the rise of the sciences, in particular astronomy and physics. This authoritative volume looks at biblical criticism as an innovative force and as the outcome of developments in philology that had started much earlier than scientific experimentalism or the New Philosophy. Scholars began to situate the Bible in its historical context. The contributors show that even in the hands of pious, orthodox scholars philological research not only failed to solve all the textual problems that had surfaced, but even brought to light countless new incongruities. This supplied those who sought to play down the authority of the Bible with ammunition. The conviction that God's Word had been preserved as a pure and sacred source gave way to an awareness of a complicated transmission in a plurality of divergent, ambiguous, historically determined, and heavily corrupted texts. This shift took place primarily in the Dutch Protestant world of the seventeenth century.