The Bible and Religion in the Century of Genius

In these essays, the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century provides the proper historical context for understanding the emergence of both the study of the Bible and the study of religion as critical, historical and comparative enterprises. Since Benedict Spinoza and his circle are the central focus in this account, the first essay explores relevant aspects of context: Holland in its so-called ‘Golden Age’, and religious alienation and marginality, both Jewish and Christian. The approach taken here attempts to get behind the threadbare and distorted image of ‘warfare’ between abstractions such as science (or ‘scepticism’, or ‘rationalism’) and religion by examining the actual intellectual relations between Spinoza and his contemporaries.