3 - Scripture Atomized

Summary

This chapter argues that Thomas Hobbes’s imagining of the original events of biblical authorship and transmission in Leviathan play a pivotal role in his radical arguments about sovereignty and its relationship to religion. It contends that Hobbes’s emphasis on the Bible as the product of multiple layers of history is not in itself secularizing. Instead, this chapter focuses on the materialist metaphysical foundations of Hobbes’s account of the Bible’s production, transmission, and reception. The radical ways Hobbes represents the Bible’s origins and the events of its textual history buttress his argument for the sovereign’s total authority over all religious matters pertaining to the public. This is because they have the effect of eradicating any means, other than the sovereign’s wholly secular decision, by which a communal biblical meaning and authority might be actualized, including any means by which “the Bible” can be collectively recognized as such. Hobbes’s subjection of Scripture to the sovereign is thus predicated on metaphysical assumptions inimical to human participation in revelation, assumptions undergirding the untraditional scenes of biblical origin he imagines.