Concept

John Spencer (théologien)

Résumé
John Spencer (1630–1693) was an English clergyman and scholar, and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. An erudite theologian and Hebraist, he is best remembered as the author of De Legibus Hebraeorum, a pioneer work of comparative religion, in which he advanced the thesis that Judaism was not the earliest of mankind's religions. He was a native of Bocton, near Blean, Kent, where he was baptised on 31 October 1630. He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury, became king's scholar there, and was admitted to a scholarship of Archbishop Parker's foundation in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on 25 March 1645. He graduated B.A. in 1648, M.A. in 1652, B.D. in 1659, and D.D. in 1665. He was chosen a fellow of his college about 1655. After taking holy orders he became a university preacher, served the cures first of St Giles and then of St Benedict, Cambridge, and on 23 July 1667 was instituted to the rectory of Landbeach, Cambridgeshire, which he resigned in 1683 in favour of his nephew and curate, William Spencer. On 3 August 1667, he was unanimously elected master of Corpus Christi College, a post he held for 26 years. He was admitted, on the presentation of the king, to the archdeaconry of Sudbury in the church of Norwich on 5 September 1667; and was instituted to the deanery of Ely on 9 September 1677. He died on 27 May 1693, and was buried in the college chapel, where a monument with a Latin inscription was erected to his memory. In 1669 he published a Dissertatio de Urin. et Thummin (Cambridge, 8vo), in which he referred these mystic emblems to an Egyptian origin. (See Urim and Thummim.) The tract was republished in the following year, and afterwards, in 1744, by Blasius Ugolinus in Thesaurus Antiquitatum. In 1685 appeared Spencer's major work, his De Legibus Hebraeorum, Ritualibus et earum Rationibus libri tres (Cambridge, 1685; The Hague, 1686). Spencer here conducts a "full-fledged historical investigation" of Mosaic law. According to Jan Assmann, "Spencer's project was to demonstrate the Egyptian origin of the ritual laws of the Hebrews.
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