BUDNAEUS (BUDNY), SIMONE

BUDNAEUS (BUDNY), SIMONE. - Polish heretic, born in the first half of the 16th century in the duchy of Mazovia (according to Krasinski, in the grand duchy of Lithuania), died after 1584. At first he adhered to Calvinist doctrines and held a chaplaincy with Prince Nicola Radziwill at Kleck. Having professed the most extreme antitrinitarian doctrine, namely that Jesus Christ had been born like all other men, that he was not God nor assumed into the Divinity, as the Socinians taught, and that consequently no worship was due to him, he was condemned at the Calvinist synod of Luclavice (1582) and later, in 1584, was publicly excommunicated. Some believed that he had become a Jew, but this does not seem certain, since it is said of him that he sought readmission among the Reformers. Bock, however, believes that he did so because he found no other way of again enjoying the prebend that had been taken from him by excommunication. B. translated the Bible into Polish (Zaslav 1572), wrote in the Lithuanian language a pamphlet on the justification of the sinner (Nieswicz 1562), and a brief dissertation on the subject: that Christ is not God (1574).