4to, three parts in one volume (180 x 115 mm). 1-16, viii, 17-863, 2 ff. Contemporary stiff vellum, red lettering label to spine, light foxing to vellum. Title page somewhat toned, minimal foxing, else a very fresh and clean copy, excellent condition.

Lacunza was a Chilean Jesuit who was expelled with his Order to Italy in 1767. He settled in Imola where he led an isolated life during which he wrote his Venida del Mesías under the Jewish pseudonym of Juan Josafat Ben-Ezra presenting the text as that of a Jewish convert. His repeated attempts to obtain permission to publish the work were all unsuccessful. The book was first published posthumously in Cádiz during the Peninsular War when there was no censorship. Subsequently it was condemned by the Inquisition and put on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1819.

It nevertheless circulated widely in Europe and America. A second Spanish edition was published in London in 1816 and the first English translation in 1827 by the presbyterian Edward Irving who had studied Spanish for the sole purpose of translating the work. For Irving, William Miller and others Lacunza’s book was a source of revelation. There can be little doubt that Lacunza’s interpretation of the scriptures was prompted by the collapse of the old certainties brought about the abolition of the Jesuits. Lacunza argued that the day of the Lord would mark the beginning of his reign on earth with the judgement of the living, the conversion of the jews and the inauguration of a new society characterised by a thousand years of justice and peace. This day would be preceded by a general apostasy of the Catholic Church which would form part of the antichrist understood not as an individual but as a body of all the apostates and atheists on earth. After a thousand years of Christ’s reign on earth, the end of the world would come with the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement conceived of as a transmutation of the physical world to the plane of the eternal.

This copy was offered in Sotheby’s in 2007 (3,000-4,000 GBP, unsold, Sale L07409, lot 56).

Rare, in the U.S. we locate copies at Stony Brook, University of Texas Austin, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Library, University of Kansas, General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventist. In addition, a handful in European institutions and DIBAM.

Palau 129489; Backer Sommervogel IV, 1354.

Walter Hanish Espíndola, "El Padre Manuel Lacunza (1731-1801): Su hogar, su vida y la censura española," Historia [Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile], 8 (1969), pp. 181-185.

Juan Luis Espejo, "Cartas del Padre Manuel Lacunza", Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía, 9 (1914), p. 219.

Francisco Enrich, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Chile, quoted by Emilio Vaisse, "El Lacunzismo: sus Antecedentes Históricos y su Evolución," Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía, 4 (1917), pp. 410-411.

Walter Hanish Espíndola. "El Padre Manuel Lacunza," Historia, 8 (1969), p. 202.