BUDNAEUS (BUDNY), SIMONE

BUDNAEUS (BUDNY), SIMON. — A 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. Initially, he adhered to Calvinist doctrines and enjoyed a chaplaincy under Prince Nicholas Radziwiłł at Kleck. Having professed the most extreme anti-Trinitarian doctrine—that is, that Jesus Christ was born like all other men, that He was not God nor assumed to the Godhead, as the Socinians taught, and that therefore no worship was due to Him—he was condemned at the Calvinist synod of Łukowice (1582) and later, in 1584, publicly excommunicated. Some believed he had become a Jew, but this does not seem certain, as it is reported that he sought readmission among the Reformed. Bock, however, believes he did so because he found no other way to regain the prebend he had lost through excommunication. B. translated the Bible into Polish (Zasław, 1572), wrote in Lithuanian a pamphlet on the justification of the sinner (Nieśwież, 1562), and a short dissertation on the topic: *That Christ is Not God* (1574).