Jacob Bauthumley or Bottomley (1613–1692) was a significant English radical religious writer, usually identified as a central figure among the Ranters. He is known principally for The light and dark sides of God (1650). This work was regarded as blasphemous. After the Blasphemy Act of August 1650, he was arrested, convicted, and bored or burned through the tongue.

Bauthumley had served in the Parliamentarian

Roundhead

"Roundhead" was the nickname given to the supporters of the Parliament during the English Civil War. Also known as Parliamentarians, they fought against King Charles I and his supporters, the Cavaliers , who claimed absolute power and the divine right of kings...

 Army; Norman Cohn

Norman Cohn

Norman Rufus Colin Cohn FBA was a British academic, historian and writer who spent fourteen years as a professorial fellow and as Astor-Wolfson Professor at the University of Sussex.-Life:...

 states that he was in the Army while writing the pamphlet, and took part in Ranter and Quaker meetings in Leicestershire

Leicestershire

Leicestershire is a landlocked county in the English Midlands. It takes its name from the heavily populated City of Leicester, traditionally its administrative centre, although the City of Leicester unitary authority is today administered separately from the rest of Leicestershire...

 in the mid-1650s. Christopher Hill says he left the Army in March 1650. His family had earlier suffered ostracism, for permitting sermons by Jeremiah Burroughes to be said in their house; he was a shoemaker.

After the Restoration of 1660 he was a librarian in Leicester. He produced a book of extracts from John Foxe

John Foxe

John Foxe was an English historian and martyrologist, the author of what is popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, , an account of Christian martyrs throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the...

, published in 1676.

Views

He denied that the Bible was the Word of God, and that Christ

Christ

Christ is the English term for the Greek meaning "the anointed one". It is a translation of the Hebrew , usually transliterated into English as Messiah or Mashiach...

 was more divine than other men. He considered that the real Devil lay in human nature, while God dwells in the flesh of man.

E. P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson

Edward Palmer Thompson was a British historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class...

 calls his views 'quasi-pantheistic' in their re-definition of God and Christ, and quotes A. L. Morton

A. L. Morton

Leslie Morton was a prolific English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain...

to the effect that this is the central Ranter doctrine.