John Spencer (1630–1693) was an English clergyman and scholar, and Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

On 3 August 1667, he was unanimously elected master of Corpus Christi College, a post he held for 26 years.

In 1685, appeared Spencer's major work, his De Legibus Hebraeorum, Ritualibus et earum Rationibus libri tres (Cambridge, 1685; The Hague, 1686).

According to Jan Assmann, "Spencer's project was to demonstrate the Egyptian origin of the ritual laws of the Hebrews."

"[4] Spencer drew on the classical writers of Greece and Rome, the Church Fathers, Josephus, and the Bible.

[5][6] Spencer concludes that "God gave the Jews a religion that was carnal only in its frontispiece, but divine and wonderful in its interior in order to accommodate his institutions to the taste and usage of the time...

Given the religious views at the time, it was indexed in The Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature: K.Q (by William Thomas Lowndes, published by W. Pickering, 1834, see p. 1722) as "a very learned but dangerous work, the great object of which is to show that the Hebrew ritual was almost entirely borrowed from the Egyptians.

She hid the student in a wardrobe (which college records state only opened from the outside) where he was left for a long time and asphyxiated.