[1] How much the investigation we have made into who really wrote these books improves our understanding of them is readily seen merely from the passages cited above confirming our view of that question. Without it, anyone would certainly find them highly obscure. But apart from the question of authorship, there are other aspects of the books themselves which remain to be remarked on which popular superstition does not permit ordinary people to come to grips with. The foremost of these is that Ezra (whom I will continue to regard as their author until someone demonstrates a more certain candidate) made no final version of the narratives contained in them, but merely collected narratives from different writers, sometimes just copying them out as they were, and passed them on to posterity without examining them properly and setting them in due order. I cannot conjecture the reasons (except perhaps an early death) that prevented him from completing this task in every respect. But the fact itself is abundantly attested even though we lack the [works of] the ancient Hebrew historians, by the very few fragments of their works that remain to us.

[2] The history of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18.17 ff.) is related as it was found written in the ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Judah’. For we find the whole of this history in the book of Isaiah, and the book of Isaiah itself was contained in the ‘Chronicles of the Kings of Judah’ (see 2 Chronicles 32.32).

[1] All men are ready to say that Holy Scripture is the word of God that teaches us true happiness or the way of salvation, but their actions betray a quite different opinion. For the common people, the last thing that they appear to want is to live by the teaching of Scripture. We see them advancing false notions of their own as the word of God and seeking to use the influence of religion to compel other people to agree with them. As for theologians, we see that for the most part they have sought to extract their own thoughts and opinions from the Bible and thereby endow them with divine authority. There is nothing that they interpret with less hesitation and greater boldness than the Scriptures, that is the mind of the Holy Spirit. If they hesitate at all, it is not because they are afraid of ascribing error to the Holy Spirit or straying from the path of salvation, but rather of being convicted of error by others and seeing themselves despised and their authority trodden underfoot.

If people truly believed in their hearts what they say with their lips about Scripture, they would follow a completely different way of life. There would be fewer differences of opinion occupying their minds, fewer bitter controversies between them, and less blind and reckless ambition to distort our interpretation of the Bible and devise novelties in religion.

Spinoza's aims

The Theological-Political Treatise (1670) of Spinoza is not a work of philosophy in the usual sense of the term. Rather it is a rare and interesting example of what we might call applied or ‘practical’ philosophy. That is, it is a work based throughout on a philosophical system which, however, mostly avoids employing philosophical arguments and which has a practical social and political more than strictly philosophical purpose, though it was also intended in part as a device for subtly defending and promoting Spinoza's own theories. Relatively neglected in recent times, and banned and actively suppressed in its own time, it is also one of the most profoundly influential philosophical texts in the history of western thought, having exerted an immense impact on thinkers and writers from the late seventeenth century throughout the age of the Enlightenment down to the late nineteenth century.

Spinoza's most immediate aim in writing this text was to strengthen individual freedom and widen liberty of thought in Dutch society, in particular by weakening ecclesiastical authority and lowering the status of theology. In his opinion, it was these forces which were chiefly responsible for fomenting religious tensions and hatred, inciting political sedition among the common people, and enforcing damaging intellectual censorship on unconventional thinkers like himself. He tried to lessen ecclesiastical power and the prestige of theology as he himself encountered these in the Dutch Republic – or, as it was then more commonly known, the United Provinces – partly as a way of opening a path for himself and those who sympathized with his ideas, or thought in similar ways, to propagate their views among contemporaries freely both verbally and in writing.

[1] The conceptualization offered in the previous chapter of the right of sovereign powers to all things and the transfer of each person's natural right to them, agrees quite well with practice, and practice can be brought very close to it, yet in many respects it will always remain merely theoretical. No one will ever be able to transfer his power and (consequently) his right to another person in such a way that he ceases to be a human being; and there will never be a sovereign power that can dispose of everything just as it pleases. In vain would a sovereign command a subject to hate someone who had made himself agreeable by an act of kindness or to love someone who had injured him, or forbid him to take offence at insults or free himself from fear, or many other such things that follow necessarily from the laws of human nature. Experience itself also teaches this very clearly, I think. People have never given up their right and transferred their power to another in such a way that they did not fear the very persons who received their right and power, and put the government at greater risk from its own citizens (although bereft of their right) than from its enemies. If people could be so thoroughly stripped of their natural right that they could undertake nothing in the future without the consent of the holders of sovereign power, then certainly sovereigns could dominate their subjects in the most violent manner.

[1] Those who consider the Bible in its current state a letter from God, sent from heaven to men, will undoubtedly protest that I have sinned ‘against the Holy Ghost’ by claiming the word of God is erroneous, mutilated, corrupt and inconsistent, that we have only fragments of it, and that the original text of the covenant which God made with the Jews has perished. However, if they reflect upon the facts, I have no doubt that they will soon cease to protest. For both reason and the beliefs of the prophets and Apostles evidently proclaim that God's eternal word and covenant and true religion are divinely inscribed upon the hearts of men, that is, upon the human mind. This is God's true original text, which he himself has sealed with his own seal, that is, with the idea of himself as the image of his divinity.

[2] To the early Jews, religion was handed down in writing as law, evidently because in those times they were looked on as if they were infants. Later, however, Moses (Deuteronomy 30.6) and Jeremiah (31.33) proclaimed to them that a time would come when God would inscribe his law in their hearts. It was therefore appropriate for the Jews alone, and especially for the Sadducees, in their time, to fight for the law written upon tablets, but it is not at all appropriate for those who have the law inscribed on their minds.

[1] It follows from the previous chapter, as we have pointed out, that the prophets were not endowed with more perfect minds than others but only a more vivid power of imagination, as the scriptural narratives also abundantly show. It is clear from the case of Solomon, for instance, that he excelled others in wisdom but not in the gift of prophecy. Heman, Darda and Calcol were also very discerning men but they were not prophets. On the other hand, rustic fellows without any education, and insignificant women like Hagar, the serving girl of Abraham, were endowed with the prophetic gift. This also accords with experience and reason. Those who are most powerful in imagination are less good at merely understanding things; those who have trained and powerful intellects have a more modest power of imagination and have it under better control, reining it in, so to speak, and not confusing it with understanding. Consequently those who look in the books of the prophets for wisdom and a knowledge of natural and spiritual things are completely on the wrong track. I propose to explain this here at some length, since the times in which we live, philosophy, and the subject itself require me to do so without worrying about the outcry from credulous people who detest none more than those who cultivate real knowledge and true life.

[1] Were it as easy to control people's minds as to restrain their tongues, every sovereign would rule securely and there would be no oppressive governments. For all men would live according to the minds of those who govern them and would judge what is true or false, or good or bad, in accordance with their decree alone. But as we noted at the beginning of chapter 17, it is impossible for one person's mind to be absolutely under another's control. For no one can transfer to another person his natural right, or ability, to think freely and make his own judgments about any matter whatsoever, and cannot be compelled to do so. This is why a government which seeks to control people's minds is considered oppressive, and any sovereign power appears to harm its subjects and usurp their rights when it tries to tell them what they must accept as true and reject as false and what beliefs should inspire their devotion to God. For these things are within each person's own right, which he cannot give up even were he to wish to do so.

[2] A person's judgment, admittedly, may be subjected to another's in many different and sometimes almost unbelievable ways to such an extent that, even though he may not be directly under the other person's command, he may be so dependent on him that he may properly be said to be under his authority to that extent.

[1] True joy and happiness lie in the simple enjoyment of what is good and not in the kind of false pride that enjoys happiness because others are excluded from it. Anyone who thinks that he is happy because his situation is better than other people's or because he is happier and more fortunate than they, knows nothing of true happiness and joy, and the pleasure he derives from his attitude is either plain silly or spiteful and malicious. For example, a person's true joy and felicity lie solely in his wisdom and knowledge of truth, not in being wiser than others or in others' being without knowledge of truth, since this does not increase his own wisdom which is his true felicity. Anyone therefore who takes pleasure in that way is enjoying another's misfortune, and to that extent is envious and malign, and does not know true wisdom or the peace of the true life.

When therefore Scripture states that God chose the Hebrews for himself above other nations (see Deuteronomy 10.15) so as to encourage them to obey the law, and is near to them and not to others (Deuteronomy 4.4–7), and has laid down good laws solely for them and not for others (Deuteronomy 4.2), and has made himself known to them alone, in preference to others (see Deuteronomy 4.32), and so on, Scripture is merely speaking according to their understanding.

In the years after the publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza gradually added a number of supplementary notes in the margins of his own personal copy which we know he wished to see added to the published version. “I should like you”, he wrote to Henry Oldenburg, in September 1675,“to point out to me the passages in the Tractatus Theologio-Politicus which have proved a stumbling-block to learned men. For I want to clarify this treatise with some additional notes and, if possible remove the prejudices which have been conceived against it.” The copy furnished with these Adnotationes was sent from The Hague to his publisher, Jan Rieuwertsz, in Amsterdam, after Spinoza's death, in 1677, along with the rest of his manuscripts and papers. Although this original version subsequently disappeared without trace, most of the notes appeared in the French version of the Tractatus, in 1678, while the remainder, and nearly all those previously known only in the French version, were rediscovered in modern times. They were found, in their Latin versions, as hand-written explanatory notes on various manuscripts and printed copies of the book.