Muggleton, Lodowick

▪ English religious leader

born July 1609, London, Eng.

died March 14, 1698, London

      English Puritan religious leader and anti-Trinitarian heretic whose followers, known as Muggletonians, believed he was a prophet.

      After claiming to have had spiritual revelations, beginning in 1651, Muggleton and his cousin John Reeve announced themselves as the two prophetic witnesses referred to in Revelations 11:3. Their book, A Transcendent Spiritual Treatise upon Several Heavenly Doctrines, was published in 1652. They further expounded their beliefs in A Divine Looking-Glass (1656), maintaining that the traditional distinction between the three Persons of the Triune God is purely nominal, that God has a real human body, and that he left the Old Testament Hebrew prophet Elijah, who had ascended to heaven, as his vice regent when he himself descended to die on the Cross.

      According to Muggleton and Reeve, the unforgivable sin was disbelief in them as true prophets. Although some notable men became Muggletonians, the group's notions provoked much opposition. Muggleton was imprisoned for blasphemy in 1653, and his own followers temporarily repudiated him in 1660 and again in 1670. His attack on the Quakers led their leader, William Penn, to write The New Witnesses Proved Old Hereticks (1672). Tried for blasphemy in 1677, Muggleton was convicted and fined £500. His sect survived until the early 20th century.

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