Page:Short Treatise on God, Man and His Wellbeing.djvu/39

Ibn Ezra states that he "will show no partiality in the exposition of the Law," and although the promise seems bolder than the fulfilment, yet now and again one meets with "a word to the wise" which is just sufficient to direct attention to some inconsistency in Scripture, to the post-Mosaic authorship of certain passages in the so-called Five Books of Moses, or to the different authorship of the first and of the second parts of Isaiah. These hints, obscure as they may seem, justify Ibn Ezra's claim to be called "the father of the Higher Criticism of the Bible," and they certainly led to Spinoza's subsequent important contributions to this kind of Biblical criticism. In the Guide of the Perplexed of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) his attention was drawn to certain crudities and inconsistencies in Biblical theology, which Maimonides, indeed, tried to explain away, or to reconcile with the requirements of reason, though apparently, in the judgment of Spinoza, with little success. And Maimonides' treatment of the institution of sacrifices as merely a temporary concession or device to wean Israel from idolatry could not but suggest to Spinoza that other religious customs, too, were only temporary in character and validity. In the writings of Gersonides (1288-1344) he saw rationalism encroaching on miracles and on prophecy, so as to explain away their supposed supernatural character. Maimonides had already boldly asserted that any passage in the Bible which appeared to conflict with reason must be so reinterpreted as to be in harmony with it. This method of "interpreting" Scripture into conformity with reason still seemed to save the priority of the Bible over human reason—though only in appearance. Gersonides went further than that. Frankly admitting the possibility of a real conflict between Reason and Revelation, he openly declared that the Bible "cannot prevent us from holding that to be true which our reason prompts us to believe." Moreover, the tendency towards free thought was very much in the air