Treatise of the Three Impostors
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The Treatise of the Three Impostors or of L ‘esprit dr Spinosa (The Spirit of Spinoza) is an anonymously published pamphlet of the Enlightenment which helped to advance the critique of religious dominance. Its Latin original De tribus impostoribus is a possible literary mystification, but has been attributed to Kaiser Friedrich II., Abu Tahir Al-Djannabi (907-944), Simon de Tournai (c.1130-1201), Pietro della Vigna, Guillaume Postel, Jan Nachtegal, Averroes, Petrus Pomponatius, Pietro Aretino, Michael Servet, Gerolamo Cardano, Niccolò Machiavelli, François Rabelais, Erasmus, John Milton, Matthias Knutzen, Angelus Merula, Giordano Bruno, Tommaso Campanella, Giovanni Boccaccio, Baron d'Holbach, Sa'd ibn Mansur ibn Kammuna, Uriel da Costa and Baruch Spinoza.
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Printing history
Its first printing was accredited to the printer Marc-Michel Rey, but may have existed in manuscript form for some time before it was published. It is unlikely to have been around since the time of Frederick II which was part of the mythology of the manuscript. The first trace we have of it as a manuscript comes from a letter to Prosper Marchand from his old friend, Fritsch. He reminds Marchand about how another friend, Charles Levier, got the manuscript of the treatise from the library of Benjamin Furly in 1711. It is almost certainly from the early eighteenth century and may be traceable to Marchand's circle that included Rousset de Missy.
Content
It was nominally a text handed down from generation to generation detailing how the three major figures of Biblical religion: Muhammad, Jesus, and Moses were in fact misrepresenting what had happened to them. At the time, this novel approach was used to allow thinkers to conceptualize a world where explanation ruled over mere "mystery", a term used for the miraculous intervention on earth by God. It was useful to both Deists and Atheists in legitimizing their world view and being a common source of intellectual reference. The work was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1783.
In 1846, Emil Weller published "De Tribus Impostoribus," and also a later edition in 1876, at Heilbronn, from a Latin copy of one of the only four known to be in existence and printed in 1598. The copy from which it was taken, consisting of title and forty-six leaves, quarto, is at the Royal Library at Dresden, and was purchased for one hundred gulden.[1]
The other three, according to Ebert in his "Bibliographical Lexicon," are as follows: one in the Royal Library at Paris, one in the Crevanna Library and the other in the library of Renouard.[2]
An edition was published at Rackau, in Germany, in 1598, and Thomas Campanella (1636), in his "Atheismus Trumphatus," gives the year of its first publication as 1538.[3]
See also
- Épître à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs a letter by Voltaire
- Impostor
- Baruch Spinoza
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