Naked Before God: A History of the Adamite Tradition

Naked Before God: A History of the Adamite Tradition

For two thousand years, Christianity has harboured a secret it could never quite suppress. Buried in the second chapter of Genesis, in eleven words describing the first human couple as naked and unashamed, lies a question that has haunted the Western imagination ever since: what was lost when shame entered the world, and can it be recovered?

Naked Before God traces the extraordinary history of those who answered that question in the most literal way available to them. From the shadowy sect described by the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, through the medieval Brethren of the Free Spirit, to the Bohemian commune on the island in the Nežárka river where Jan Žižka's soldiers found naked men and women wandering through the forests in the spring of 1421, to the antinomian prophets of the English Revolution, to the Czech peasants of the Chrudim district still waiting for a messianic deliverer in 1849, the Adamite tradition was never simply about nudity. It was about the deepest promises that Christianity ever made, and the cost of taking those promises seriously.

Drawing on two millennia of theological argument, heresiological polemic, inquisitorial record, and the fragmented testimony of the communities themselves, Preston Boyle traces a tradition of radical Christian restorationism that the institutional Church repeatedly suppressed and history repeatedly forgot, but that the tradition's own promises kept generating, century after century, in new forms and new bodies.