How did the Reformed of the 16-17th centuries understand general equity as it relates to capital crimes? This post seeks to create a list of names to help answer that question. For now, this is just a list of names, but the explicit quotations will be added in when a I have time.
I have tried to keep this list to explicit citations that indicate a certain crime necessarily must be punished (in ordinary circumstances) specifically by death. Were this list considering people arguing for punishment *up to and including death*, this list would be colossal and include most premodern historical figures. Although not every theologian has explicitly mentioned every crime in their writings, there are at least a few who I am near absolutely certain would affirm in nearly every category, those theologians being John Cotton, George Gillespie, Samuel Rutherford, Johannes Piscator, William Gouge, Thomas Cartwright, Theodore Beza, Heinrich Bullinger, and Franciscus Junius. These men also represent those who have written the most out of everyone here on the topic of civil punishments. This does lead me to believe that there was widespread agreement among the Reformed that the following list of punishments ought to be punished capitally, even if specific theologians do not ever explicitly state this. Indeed, in my own research, there are at least two crimes that appear to be near-universally affirmed as necessarily capital by the Reformed, those being murder and adultery (the only exception that I have ever found being Thomas Goodwin to adultery). Although this list is mainly concerned with the Reformed of the 16-17th centuries, I have also decided to include some other sources such as pagans. I believe that Draco and Cicero would support much here, I am however, having a hard time finding specific quotations from them and thus I cannot place them on the list until and if that happens. If anyone wants to see a specific quotation, feel free to ask, and I will provide substantiation. The adultery list is one I have been making for some time, and sadly, I have forgotten where I found many citations. Nevertheless, a quick Google search, "[Name] death penalty adultery" and some digging should turn out results. I can assure you though that I did my best to keep this list as a whole, and that section in particular, as accurate as possible. This is also a good resource for that section, although I refused to use it in the links, as I am searching for direct (English) quotations.
Gross Idolatry:
Theodore Beza
Plato (atheism and private shrines)
Blasphemy:
False accusation of capital crime (Deut. 19:18-19):
Code of Hammurabi
Murder:
Manstealing:
Code of Hammurabi
Adultery:
Code of the Assura
Code of Eshnunna (at least for the woman)*
John Calvin
Ulrich Zwingli
John Knox
John Downame
Henry Barrow
Theodore Beza
*as far as I can tell, most of the Reformed and ancient societies count adultery as a crime agaisnt the man. This, I believe, strongly argues for the general equity of such an arrangement and would make the most sense out of things with the woman being under the care of and being the property of her husband as the head of the household, the basic unit of society. For this reason, John Holt calls it the “highest invasion of property.” It also makes good sense of Jesus's divorce sayings insofar as he is going beyond what civily and by the common law counts as "adultery" or "murder" and goes towards the moral heart-attitudes behind these things so that it can be said that married men "commit adultery" in their hearts with unmarried women. Civily and by the common law, sex between a married man and an unmarried/unbethrothed woman would count as fornication, which they usually punished by beatings and/or fines. By the common law, adultery is a crime against the man. If civil laws prosecute sex between a married man and an unmarried woman as “adultery” they are only evidencing their confusion to correctly reason about nature and miss the very reason for heinousness of adultery which makes it worthy of the death penalty in the first place. Such laws are unjust by excess. And even if it were to happen that by increased crimes, the penalty for formicstion were for a time increased to death, as I reason may happen by reason of extradordinary circumstances, they ought not to be punished under the name of “adultery” but as “fornication” since it is important to call things as they truly and metaphysically are, and not by the names of other things.
Sodomy:
Bestiality:
Code of the Nesilim (but only with pigs or dogs 🤨)
Incest:
Code of Hammurabi (with mother)
Code of the Nesilim
Striking/cursing of parents:
Witchcraft/sorcery:
Some of the best resources on general equity that I have come across can be read here:
It should also be known that Beza (who coined the term "general equity"), Piscator (whose commentary on Exodus stands behind 19.4), Gillespie (a Westminster divine and one of the chief expositors of 19.4), and Junius (who wrote the greatest treatise on the subject of the era) all held that the capital penalties for all moral Mosaic crimes still apply today (put more accurately, whoever civilly by the common law is liable to the death penalty according to the law of Moses, likewise the same person must be considered liable to the death penalty in our time).
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