Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“I can’t speak enthusiastically enough for Minois’s excellent book.
The Atheists’s Bible is more scholarly than Stephen Greenblatt’s
The Swerve and less playful than the philological detective work that Robert K. Merton displayed in
On the Shoulders of Giants, but it offers comparable intellectual pleasure. Lys Ann Weiss’s translation, moreover, reads beautifully.” -- Michael Dirda * Bookforum *
“Just as in Umberto Eco’s novel
The Prague Cemetery, if you create false evidence in order to discredit your enemies—be they Jews or Jesuits, Carbonari or Bolsheviks, Masons or the Vatican—you will soon find people eager not only to believe you but also to serve the cause you have been trying to undermine. The text that is the object of Georges Minois’ study, the
Treatise of the Three Impostors, provides a perfect illustration of this peculiar dynamics of deceit, credulity and paranoia." * Times Higher Education *
“Georges Minois’s timely and elegant study The Atheist’s Bible is a landmark addition to both the history of ideas and the history of the book. The Treatise of the Three Impostors set a record for advance publicity—before it was finally published, intellectuals accused one another of writing it for nearly half a millennium. Its real author was not any single thinker but the cumulative, nervous imagination of the entire European intelligentsia. Like a Freudian id, it exposed the repressed, traumatic thought that all religion was a hoax: centuries before avowed atheism became possible, accusations that someone else had written the Treatise of the Three Impostors explored the particulars and possibilities of irreligion. Readers who are intrigued or scandalized by the diatribes of Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens will discover in The Atheist’s Bible that, as that other Bible says, there is nothing new under the sun.”
-- Walter Stephens, author of Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Beli
“The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist’s sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe’s courageous freethinkers. In the face of today’s social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.”—Joscelyn Godwin, author of The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance
-- Joscelyn Godwin, author of The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance
Table of ContentsTranslator’s Note
Preface to the English-Language Edition (2011)
Preface (2009)
1. The Origin of a Mythical Theme: The Prehistory of the
Three Impostors (Up to the Thirteenth Century)
The First to Be Accused: Frederick II and Pierre des Vignes (1239)
The Precursors of Imposture: Zalmoxis and Numa Pompilius
Celsus: Moses the Impostor
Celsus and the Talmud: Jesus the Impostor
Mahomet the Impostor in Christian Literature (Ninth to Twelfth Century)
Politico-Religious Imposture in the Middle Ages
The Arabic Origins of the Theme of the Three Impostors (Tenth Century)
The First Mention in Christianity (Twelfth Century)
2. The Hunt for the Author of a Mythical Treatise (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century)
A Culture of Imposture
The Rumors of the Late Middle Ages
The Renaissance: A Receptive Context for the Idea of Imposture
Moses the Machiavellian
Appeals to the Holy Union of Religions
Italy and the Specter of the Three Impostors
The Obsession Spreads
Geneva, Birthplace of the Three Impostors?
Three Impostors or Three Prophets? (Guillaume Postel)
Who Actually Saw the Treatise?
3. The European Elites and Religious Imposture (Seventeenth Century)
On the Trail of
De tribus around the Baltic Sea
Holland and England: Heterodox Contexts
The French Trail: Learned Libertines and Religious Imposture
4. Debates on the Origin of Religions (Second Half of the Seventeenth Century)
Hobbes and Spinoza
Holland and the Birth of the Radical Enlightenment
Rumors of the De tribus in England
5. From the
De tribus to the
Trois imposteurs: Discovery or Invention of the Treatise? (1680–1721)
Sources of the De tribus: Kiel, 1688
The Intervention of Leibniz and of Baron von Hohendorf
The
De tribus: A German Affair
Preliminary Polemic: Does the
Trois imposteurs Exist? (1715–1716)
The Reference Edition: The Hague, 1719
The Birth of
L’Esprit de Spinoza and of the
Trois imposteurs (1700–1721)
A Franco-Dutch Commercial Imposture?
Erroneous Attributions: Henri de Boulainvillier (1658–1722) and John Toland (1670–1722)
6. The
Treatise of the Three Impostors: The Contents of a Blasphemy
The
De tribus: A Slapdash Work?
The Atheism of the
Traité
The End of Religions
The Soul and Demons: Subtle Chimeras
Moses the Impostor: Magic and Persecution
Jesus the Impostor: A Merchant of Absurd Dreams
Mahomet the Impostor: The Senses and the Sword
Epilogue: The
Three Impostors in the Antireligious Literature of the Eighteenth
CenturyAppendixes
Notes
Glossary
Index of Names
