Machiavel's tafsir

Wiker-Hahn rated Nicky Machiavelli worthy of a chapter on secular biblical exegesis. They're right. Although they don't like him.

Machiavelli proposed to treat the Bible as a pagan work dedicated to a pagan god, just a jealous one. De Principatibus figured Moses as the same as Cyrus, and the Torah like Xenophon's Cyropaedia. To that end, Machiavelli conducted an eisegesis - reading his view of power-politics into the Torah's account of Moses' career. Wiker and Hahn end this chapter castigating Machiavelli for that.

Machiavelli didn't even publish De Principatibus, as such; he distributed secret copies in samizdata form to fellow Italian elites. Some final version did get published - after his death. Rather like an Islamic Imam, cf. Malik with his Muwatta.

Debunking the Bible wasn't precisely Machiavelli's own intent. Although he approved William of Ockham, nobody since William had (yet) built the tools for a true exegesis, and our man didn't care. Machiavelli's assumption was wholly philosophical. He took for granted that Christianity was inferior to Latin paganism, arguing that point in his Livy discourses. Hence, for the JudaeoChristian text, his resort to eisegesis.

For De Principatibus, Machiavelli proposed instead that the Prince use the ambient religious canon to mollify his subjects' prejudices and to borrow as a "political language", as Bernard Lewis would put it. Machiavelli would assuredly approve someone else we know.

There is a direct line from Machiavelli to Western atheist disputation, and thence to Robert Spencer's The Truth about Muhammad. More direct perhaps from Machiavelli to Irving and Carlyle. The line to true exegesis - to Did Muhammad Exist? - is indirect at best.