This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
This website is dedicated to the slow accumulation and gradual interpretation of knowledge through the play of research.
The seventeenth century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza worked earlier than almost every other truly critical Biblical scholar, and is sometimes therefore wrongly called the father of Biblical criticism.
We humans have always exercised judgment (κρίνειν) in how we read and apply the scriptures, and in our field Spinoza represents only, I think, the first critic of scripture who directly challenged its then nearly universal temporal authority in the political world of late Christendom.
In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus(1670) he applies Cartesian doubt to Biblical narrative (before the Tractatus, in 1663, he wrote a book on Descartes).
His critical assessment of the Bible's historicity and his application of the philosopher's idea of God to the Biblical narratives involving miracles comes almost two centuries before David Friedrich Strauss caused such a great scandal with his "mythological" critique of the Gospels. Spinoza actually anticipates a host of problems that would later preoccupy critical Biblical studies for many decades.
Spinoza's Tractatus seems to have been translated into English for the first time only in 1862 (London: Trübner & Company). The anonymous editor for Trübner & Co. speaks of the "theological hate" and calumny which Spinoza and his name has suffered.
Just a survey of the book's contributions as summarized on Wikipedia should be enough to convince almost any Biblical scholar that Spinoza's insights are now broadly shared in the field.