Jacob Bauthumley

Jacob Bauthumley or Bottomley [Also Jacob Bathumley, Bothumley ("Oxford Dictionary of National Biography"), Bauthaumley, Bauthumely.] (1613–1692) was a significant English radical religious writer, usually identified as a central figure among the Ranters. He is known principally for "The light and dark sides of God" (1650) [ [http://www.worldcatlibraries.org/oclc/11732526&referer=brief_results The light and dark sides of God or A plain and brief discourse of the light side (God, Heaven and angels.) The dark side (Devill, sin, and Hell.) As also of the Resurrection and Scripture. : All which are set forth in their severall natures and beings, according to the spirituality of the Scripture. [WorldCat.org ] ] [ [http://billheidrick.com/tlc2002/tlc0102.htm Extract] ] . This work was regarded as blasphemous. After the Blasphemy Act of August 1650, he was arrested, convicted, and bored or burned through the tongue [ [http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/glossary/ranters.htm The Ranters ] ] .

Bauthumley had served in the Parliamentarian Army [http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:LsIXgASBxOIJ:csb.princeton.edu/index.php%3Fapp%3Ddownload%26id%3D46+Bauthumley+blasphemy&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=uk Radical Uses of History in the Restoration] ] ; Norman Cohn ["The Pursuit of the Millennium", 1970 edition p. 303-6, with extracts.] states that he was in the Army while writing the pamphlet, and took part in Ranter and Quaker meetings in Leicestershire in the mid-1650s. Christopher Hill ["The World Turned Upside Down", p. 208 of Penguin edition.] says he left the Army in March 1650. His family had earlier suffered ostracism, for permitting sermons by Jeremiah Burroughes to be said in their house [Nigel Smith, "Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660" (1994), p. 143.] ; he was a shoemaker.

After the Restoration of 1660 he was a librarian in Leicester. He produced a book of extracts from John Foxe, published in 1676.d]

Views

He denied that the Bible was the Word of God [Hill, "The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution" (1993) p. 234.] , and that Christ was more divine than other men [Hill, "Milton and the English Revolution" (1977), p. 293.] . He considered that the real Devil lay in human nature [ [http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:uGtsb5V3s4MJ:www.isaac-newton.org/devil.doc+%22Jacob+Bauthumley%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=19&gl=uk 403 Forbidden ] ] , while God dwells in the flesh of man [Hill, Milton, p. 301.] .

E. P. Thompson calls his views 'quasi-pantheistic' in their re-definition of God and Christ, and quotes A. L. Morton to the effect that this is the central Ranter doctrine ["Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law" (1993), p. 26.] .

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