9 Books Censored or Destroyed for Challenging Religion

5. Making a Whisper Real: The Three Impostors (17th c.)

It started as a rumor, spoken in hushed voices as far back as the 13th century, of a book that called Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad liars and fakes.

All of the whisperers agreed on the title – The Treatise of the Three Impostors – but nobody had ever seen the actual book.

Then all at once, in the late 17th century, copies of The Treatise of the Three Impostors were everywhere.

Religion, said the anonymous author, is born of ignorance and full of “vain and ridiculous opinions.” Ideas of God are “silly,” and the clergy use those ideas to keep the common people in “deplorable blindness.” Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad were “impostors” who intentionally duped their followers with the equivalent of magic tricks. Even the existence of God is seriously doubtful.

But who wrote it? Most historians say it was probably John Toland, a sassy Irish philosopher and freethinker. Toland was among the first to claim that he’d found a copy, and within a decade, he was writing one treatise after another attacking Christianity — in a tone and style very much like The Three Impostors.

Within a few years, The Three Impostors was the most widely read of the anonymous atheist documents flying around Europe, setting the stage for the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.