Treatise_of_the_Three_Impostors

<i>Treatise of the Three Impostors</i>

Treatise of the Three Impostors

Book denying all three Abrahamic religions

Not to be confused with The Three Impostors.

The Treatise of the Three Impostors (Latin: De Tribus Impostoribus) was a long-rumored book denying all three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, with the "impostors" of the title being Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad. Hearsay concerning such a book surfaces by the 13th century and circulates through the 17th century. Authorship of the hoax book was variously ascribed to Jewish, Muslim, and Christian writers.[1] Fabrications of the text eventually begin clandestine circulation, with a notable French underground edition Traité sur les trois imposteurs first appearing in 1719.

Treatise of the Three Impostors

Timeline of the myth

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Traité sur les trois imposteurs, from 1719

The work that came to be known by this name was published in the early eighteenth century. There were eight published editions, from 1719 to 1793. There was also clandestine circulation. The Traité sur les trois imposteurs has been reckoned the most important example of the underground literature in French of the period.[20]

The work purported to be a text handed down from generation to generation. It can be traced to the circle around Prosper Marchand, who included Jean Aymon and Jean Rousset de Missy. It detailed how the three major figures of Biblical religion in fact misrepresented what had happened to them.

According to Silvia Berti, the book was originally published as La Vie et L'Esprit de Spinosa (The Life and Spirit of Spinoza), containing both a biography of Benedict Spinoza and the anti-religious essay, and was later republished under the title Traité sur les trois imposteurs.[21] The creators of the book have been identified by documentary evidence as Jean Rousset de Missy and the bookseller Charles Levier.[22] The author of the book may have been a young Dutch diplomat called Jan Vroesen or Vroese.[21][22] Another candidate, to whom Levier attributed the work, is Jean-Maximilien Lucas.[23] Israel places its composition in the 1680s.[24]

The content of the Traité has been traced primarily to Spinoza, but with subsequent additions drawn from the ideas of Pierre Charron, Thomas Hobbes, François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Gabriel Naudé and Lucilio Vanini. The reconstruction of the group of authors, given the original text, goes as far as Levier and others such as Aymon and Rousset de Missy. An account based on the testimony of the brother of the publisher Caspar Fritsch, an associate of Marchand, has Levier in 1711 borrowing the original text from Benjamin Furly.[24]

Events from 1719

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As trope

It has been suggested that the "three impostors" as trope can be seen as the negative form of the "ring parable", as used in Lessing's Nathan the Wise.[26]

References

  1. [1]
    Kohler, Kaufmann; Loewenthal, A. (1806). "Averroes, or Abul Walid Muhammed Ibn Ahmad Ibn Roshd". Jewish Encyclopedia.
  2. [2]
    Pines, S.; Yovel, Y. (2012). Maimonides and Philosophy. Springer Science & Business Media. pp. 239–240. ISBN 978-94-009-4486-2.
  3. [3]
    Minois, Georges (2012). The Atheist's Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed. University of Chicago Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-226-53029-1.
  4. [4]
    Cleve, Thomas Curtis Van (1972). The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, immutator mundi. Clarendon Press. pp. 432–433.
  5. [5]
    Shagrir, Iris (2019). The Parable of the Three Rings and the Idea of Religious Toleration in European Culture. Springer Nature. p. 52. ISBN 978-3-030-29695-7.
  6. [6]
    Deanesly, Margaret (2004). A History of the Medieval Church: 590-1500. Routledge. p. 205. ISBN 978-1-134-95533-6.
  7. [7]
    Schwarz, Hans (1991). Method and Context as Problems for Contemporary Theology: Doing Theology in an Alien World. Edwin Mellen Press. p. 105. ISBN 978-0-7734-9677-4.
  8. [8]
    Minois, Georges (2012). The Atheist's Bible: The Most Dangerous Book That Never Existed. University of Chicago Press. p. 52. ISBN 978-0-226-53029-1.
  9. [9]
    Force, J. E.; Popkin, R. H. (2012). Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 35. ISBN 978-94-009-1944-0.
  10. [10]
    Popkin, Richard Henry (1992). The Third Force in Seventeenth Century Thought. Brill. p. 363. ISBN 978-90-04-09324-9.
  11. [11]
    Keynes, Geoffrey (1934). John Evelyn a Study in Bibliophily. CUP Archive. p. 196.
  12. [12]
    Matar, Professor Nabil; Matar, Nabil (1998). Islam in Britain, 1558-1685. Cambridge University Press. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-521-62233-2.
  13. [13]
    De tribus impostoribus: Anno MDIIC;2. mit einem neuen Vorwort versehene (in German). Henninger. 1876. p. vi.
  14. [14]
    Bloch, Olivier (1999). L'identification du texte clandestin aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Actes de la journée de Créteil du 15 mai 1998 (in French). Presses Paris Sorbonne. p. 28. ISBN 978-2-84050-130-5.
  15. [15]
    Tournoy, Gilbert (1999). Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies. Leuven University Press. p. 432. ISBN 978-90-6186-972-6.
  16. [16]
    Laursen, John Christian (1994). New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge. Brill. p. 92. ISBN 978-90-04-24714-7.
  17. [17]
    Champion, Justin (2003). Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722. Manchester University Press. p. 172. ISBN 978-0-7190-5714-4.
  18. [18]
    Israel, Jonathan I. (2002). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. OUP Oxford. p. 699. ISBN 9780191622878.
  19. [19]
    Laursen, John Christian (1995). New Essays on the Political Thought of the Huguenots of the Refuge. Brill. p. 92. ISBN 978-90-04-09986-9.
  20. [20]
    Artigas-Menant, Geneviève; McKenna, Antony (2000). Anonymat et clandestinité aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: actes de la journée de Créteil du 11 juin 1999 (in French). Presses Paris Sorbonne. p. 259. ISBN 978-2-84050-163-3.
  21. [21]
    Berti's essay in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment edited by Michael Hunter and David Wootton. Clarendon, 1992. ISBN 0-19-822736-1
  22. [22]
    Jacob, Margaret C. (2001). The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 94. ISBN 978-0-312-23701-1.
  23. [23]
    Israel, Jonathan I. (2002). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. OUP Oxford. pp. 696–7. ISBN 9780191622878.
  24. [24]
    Israel, Jonathan I. (2002). Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750. OUP Oxford. p. 695. ISBN 9780191622878.
  25. [25]
    Mosheim, Johann Lorenz (1878). Mosheim's Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern: A New and Literal Translation from the Original Latin, with Copious Additional Notes, Original and Selected. W. Tegg and Company. p. 437 note 3.
  26. [26]
    Forst, Rainer (2013). Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-521-88577-5.

Further reading

  • Anderson, Abraham (1997). The Treatise of the Three Imposters and the Problem of the Enlightenment. A New Translation of the Traité des Trois Imposteurs (1777 ed.). Lenham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-8476-8430-X.
  • Presser, Jacob (1926). Das Buch "De Tribus Impostoribus" (Von den drei Betrügern). Amsterdam, the Netherlands: H. J. Paris (Doctoral dissertation, University of Amsterdam, with the highest distinction, written and published in German); 169 p.
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