Life

He was born in Guestwick

Guestwick

Guestwick is a village and a civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. The village is south-west of Cromer, north-west of Norwich and north-east of London. The village lies west of the nearby town of Aylsham. The village lies far from any High roads. The nearest railway station is at...

, Norfolk

Norfolk

Norfolk is a low-lying county in the East of England. It has borders with Lincolnshire to the west, Cambridgeshire to the west and southwest and Suffolk to the south. Its northern and eastern boundaries are the North Sea coast and to the north-west the county is bordered by The Wash. The county...

. He studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Gonville and Caius College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college is often referred to simply as "Caius" , after its second founder, John Keys, who fashionably latinised the spelling of his name after studying in Italy.- Outline :Gonville and...

, where he was B.A. in 1623, M.A.and Fellow in 1628. He was removed from his fellowship in 1644, but restored in 1660. While in exile, he taught Arabic and Hebrew in Rotterdam

Rotterdam

Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam on the Rotte river, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre...

.

Works

He suggested a Talmudic origin of some of the New Testament

New Testament

The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....

parable

Parable

A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...

s. His Joma:Codex talmudicus (1648) was a Latin translation of and commentary on Yoma

Yoma

Yoma is the fifth tractate of Seder Moed of the Mishnah and of the Talmud. It is concerned mainly with the laws of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur, on which Jews atone for their sins from the previous year...

, the tractate of Seder Moed.

In The King's Supremacy Asserted (1660) he denied the possibility of a “mixed monarchy”. Monarchy

Monarchy

A monarchy is a form of government in which the office of head of state is usually held until death or abdication and is often hereditary and includes a royal house. In some cases, the monarch is elected...

, he said, was "the government of one alone."

De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio (1670) was a work on the origins of the English language and people. It agreed with Samuel Bochart

Samuel Bochart

Samuel Bochart was a French Protestant biblical scholar, a student of Thomas Erpenius and the teacher of Pierre Daniel Huet...

 in its emphasis on the Phoenicians, and followed in part Verstegan in making English identity largely Germanic. It influenced Aylett Sammes (c. 1636 – c. 1679), author of Britannia Antiqua Illustrata. It took a linguistic interest in origins, matching Welsh words to the Greek language. David C. Douglas

David C. Douglas

David Charles Douglas was a historian of the Norman period at the University of Cambridge and University of Oxford. He joined Oxford University in 1963 as Ford's Lecturer in English History, and was the 1939 winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.-Works:* William the Conqueror: The Norman...

regarded it as too credulous.