ABSTRACT
What portion have we in David? neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse: to your tents, O Israel. [1 Kings 12:16]
A Committee sat upon examination of one who calls himself Theareau John, formerly a Goldsmith without Temple Bar, a much distempered Brain sick man, who by fits useth to live in Tents, which within these two years he hath erected sometimes in the fields about Lambeth and sometimes at Greenwich, saying He is to gather the dispersed Jews, and carry them to the Holy Land. [The Perfect Diurnall No. 265, 1-8 January 1655 p. 4061]
To your tents, O Israel
On Monday, 16 February 1652 TheaurauJohn Tany and Captain Robert Norwood were brought from Newgate before William Steele, Recorder of London and a Justice of the Peace for the City. Having served their terms of six months imprisonment on the charge of blasphemy they were each released on 100l. bail, pending good behaviour for one year. Within a month Tany had published a pamphlet entitled THEAVRAUIOHN High Priest to the IEVVES, HIS Disputive challenge to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the whole Hirach. of Roms Clargical Priests (1652).1 In an echo of Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Tany addressed himself to his brethren ‘who are the first fruits in that holy lump’.2 Recalling God’s oath ‘unto our fore-fathers the Jewes’ that he would gather ‘their Branches (We their children) his dispersed ones’, Tany looked forward to the rebuilding of the ‘glorious, glorifying, and glorified Temple’ in Jerusalem.3 For he believed that as a sign of the ‘truth in that Oath’ and for the ‘performance thereof’, God had sent him forth as his ‘High-Priest’ and ‘Recorder to the thirteen Tribes of the Jewes’.4
