Abstract
On the ioth of June 1672 one John Baptista Damascene, ‘an impious and profane and irreligious person’ of the extra-mural London parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, was arraigned for proclaiming ‘impious, blasphemous and heretical words’. Some six months later Damascene was acquitted ‘Not Guilty’ of the charged utterance. He had been accused of proclaiming that ‘Jesus Christ, Moyses and Mahomet were three greate rogues’.1 The central theme of the supposed impiety, that Moses, Christ, and Mahomet were devious impostors, was to form the basis of one of the most radical eighteenth-century attacks upon organized religion and the priesthood, the French work Le Traité des trois imposteurs, published in 1719 but in circulation on the Continent in the 1690s and 1700s. What then was John Baptista Damascene doing voicing such opinions in the suburbs of London in the early 1670s?
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References
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See J. A. I. Champion and R. H. Popkin, ‘Richard Smith’s ‘Observations’ and the English origins of the treatises on imposture’ (Forthcoming).
See S. Berti, ‘Jan Vroesen, autore del “Traité des trois imposteurs”‘in Rivista storica italiana, cm (1991), esp. nn. 4–6, for a complete bibliography of the more recent studies.
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For ease of reference I have used A. Nasier, The three impostors translated (1904) which contains English translations of both the French and the Latin treatises. All references are to this edition unless otherwise stated. TTI is the abbreviation for the Traité des trois imposteurs and DTI for the De tribus impostoribus. A comparison has been made of these texts with the two English manuscript translations, the first British Library Stowe 47 ‘The famous book intitled De tribus impostoribus’, and the second at Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Bamberger #669 ‘De tribus impostoribus, or a Treatise of the three most famous national impostors’. Cross reference has also been made to the edition of the Latin text (in Latin and French) by G. Brunet (Paris, 1867 ) and a 17th-c. manuscript in the British Library, Harliean 6494 ‘De impostoris religionum breve compendium’. For the Latin treatise and its diffusion, see W. Gericke, ‘Die handschriftliche Uberliefering des Buches von den drei Betrügern (De tribus impostoribus)’ (Leipzig, 1986 ).
TTI 65–7, 72, 77, 9o, 91–2. Machiavelli gives his fullest account of political legislators in the Discourses (Penguin, 1981), Bk 1, chs. 11—i5; see also Machiavelli, The Prince (Penguin, 1975) 5o-52, where he discusses Moses in the same breath as other legislators like Cyrus and Romulus. Interestingly, the figure of Jethro of Midian was used to justify the politic divinity of the Hebraic commonwealth by James Harrington in his Oceana (1656): see Oceana, ed. S. J. Liljegren, Skrifter Vetenskaps—Societen 4 (Lund, 1924), 28, 35; see also Harrington, The art of lawgiving, in The political works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), 619, 652. Jethro and his son Hobab also appear in Toland’s Hodegus (1720), 51–2. One of the only published accounts of the idea of civil religion in Harrington’s writings is M. A. Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington’, in A. Pagden (ed.), The languages of political theory in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987). For the background to the republican use of the Old Testament, see A. Pacchi, ‘Leviathan and Spinoza’s Tractatus on Revelation: Some elements for a comparison’, History of European ideas, x (1989). ‘3 BL, Stowe 47, fo. 68.
This is the general thesis of my The pillars of priestcraft shaken: the Church of England and its enemies, 166o-1720 (Cambridge, 1992);
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Ibid., 6o. Interestingly, Stubbe cites Ahmed ben Edris on the accusation that ‘Paul instructed three Princes in religion, and taught each of them a different Christianity: assuring each of them singly that he was in the truth, and afterwards when Paul was dead, each of them pretended his religion to be the true religion derived from Paul, whence arose great feuds amongst them’. Ahmed ben Edris seems to be an important source for Stubbe’s interpretation of Islam, but there are very few accounts of his thought. D’Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale (1698), and Maracci, Alcorani textus universus (Passau, 1698), make reference to Ben Edris. Humphrey Prideaux in the bibliography appended to the True nature of imposture (1697),,66, describes him simply as ‘An author that writes in defence of the Mahometan religion against the Christian and the Jews’. See Stubbe, ‘Account’, 168–7o, 173–4; cf. DTI 133.
C. Blount, Oracles of reason, 123–4, 125–7. Charles Blount is a much understudied figure, casually dismissed by many historians as a mere plagiarist (see for example H. R. Hutcheson (ed.), Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s ‘De religione laici’ (Yale, 1944) 48, 71–4), but it seems that his work is central to early English free-thought. He was the first translator of passages from Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico politicus, but more importantly his understudied translation and polemical edition of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (1680) combines many of the subversive texts that were compiled in the Traité de trois imposteurs (for example: Spinoza, 99; Vanini, 29, 69, 82, 112, 113; Hobbes, 13, 28, 29, 32, 33, 151; Averroës, 29, 73; Postel, 72). A much more detailed study of Blount and his use of libertin sources needs to be undertaken: for an introductory survey see Champion, The pillars of priestcraft shaken.
H. Prideaux, The true nature of imposture (1697) compare with Stubbe’s ‘Account’, 373–4. Note that both authors use Edward Pococke’s Specimen historiae arabum (Oxford, 3650), 385, as a source.
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BL, Add. MS 4295, fo. 6, 58, 63, and 64. Toland replied rather ironically ‘The reason for this odd compliment I am yet to learn, unless it be that I can’t drink wine enough to pass for orthodoxy with some doctors: for I am by no means for propagating religion by force, in which respect the doctor is a very good Mahometan, how ill a Christian so ever he may be’. The best published account of Toland’s thought is R. Sullivan, John Toland and the Deist controversy (Harvard, 1982 ).
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T. Brett, Tradition necessary to explain and interpret the Holy Scripture (1718), p. iv.
J. Toland, Nazarenus (1718), iii. Some brief notes on Toland’s education in Leiden can be found in the holdings of the Dousa Room at Leiden University: the Volumen inscriptiorum sive catalogus studiosorum academicae leydensis has Toland’s matriculation details for his study under Spanheim. Entry 254 for 1692 reads, ‘i Nov Joh. Tholandus; Hybernus 1. Theol. Stud. annor 22’. Toland appears to have been resident in the house of Susanna Dolphin in the Langebrugge just off the Rappenburg, convenient for the university library.
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for a useful case-study see R. H. Popkin, ‘Spinoza and Samuel Fisher’ Philosophia, xv (1985).
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Champion, J.A.I. (1996). Legislators, impostors, and the politic origins of religion: English theories of ‘imposture’ from Stubbe to Toland. In: Berti, S., Charles-Daubert, F., Popkin, R.H. (eds) Heterodoxy, Spinozism, and Free Thought in Early-Eighteenth-Century Europe. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 148. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8735-8_11
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