John Reeve (1608–1658) was an English plebeian prophet who believed the voice of God had instructed him to found a Third Commission in preparation for the last days of earth.
[3] It purports to be a message from Christ Jesus to the elect by way of his last prophet and is a forerunner to God's reappearance in the skies above earth on the Day of Judgment.
Reeve pronounced sentence of eternal damnation on two classes of people: those who heard of his commission but despised it, and those who continued to preach the message of the existing churches.
"After a debate which reveals the savagery of frightened men, Nayler was sentenced to be flogged, pilloried, branded, his tongue to be bored and then to be imprisoned indefinitely.
"[14] Earlier, in 1653, Reeve's General Epistle was rapidly making enemies amongst those who supported Oliver Cromwell's policy of religious toleration as well as those bitterly opposed to it – and for the same reason in both cases.
Reeve and Muggleton were arrested under the Blasphemy Act 1650, the Transcendent Spiritual Treatise providing the evidence.
Reeve was examined by the Lord Mayor of London, John Fowke, on three heads; self-deification, cursing Cromwell and denying the Trinity.
During this period, Reeve's A Remonstrance from the Eternal God (effectively his appeal to Cromwell) was printed and published by Jeremiah Mount and well received.
Professor William M. Lamont remarks that most of Reeve's contemporaries would have found this last item disturbingly blasphemous.
[19] It was to provide the subject matter for Reeve's final book, Joyfull News from Heaven, or the Souls Mortality Proved.
At the opening of this book it says that all writings come "of divine inspiration or human imagination"[22] So confident was Reeve that only the Commission of the Last Witnesses was of divine origin that he said in a letter of 15 August 1656 to Alice Webb "if the Lord Jesus does not bear witness unto our testimony and make it evident that he has sent us in a few months then you may conclude that there was never any true prophets .. " Reeve did not see himself as founding a faith so much as announcing imminent events to take place in the skies above London.
Some of its embedded expectations are quite explicit, such as harking back to the Book of Revelation or to the clear parallels with Moses' taking on the first commission.
We are told of Reeve's reluctance to assume his task, implying the matter derived from the will of God, not the pushiness of the prophet.
We are told of Reeve's earlier experiences which he had interpreted as being for his personal benefit alone, thus implying he is an old hand who can be relied upon to evaluate such things correctly.
William Lamont has argued that Muggleton had been the first to experience divine revelations and that Reeve was envious.
[25] Christopher Hill, on the other hand, has argued that Muggleton recast the events of 1651–52 after Reeve's death to put himself in a better light.
As time ticked by and the world remained stubbornly unchanging, something we might call "St Paul's syndrome" may have set in; making it necessary to accommodate this lengthening perspective.
In Reeve's last writings and letters he no longer mentions his fellow witness and his whole tone is of a man who feels himself alone and abandoned.
Firstly and predominantly, from Muggleton's autobiographical testament "Acts of the Witnesses" although this was written long after Reeve's death.