This chapter addresses two distinct, if often conflated, claims. The first is that the theology of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan undermined Christian orthodoxy and perhaps even theism itself. The second is that this was an intention of the text, which required Hobbes to engage in rhetorical techniques that amounted to a form of esoteric writing. The chapter argues that certainty on these assertions is unattainable, but that the balance of evidence favors affirmation of both. Both the allegation that Hobbes was a self-aware heretic or atheist, and the allegation that he wrote duplicitously, were contemporary charges that have never disappeared. The former allegation (heresy or atheism) predated Leviathan in fact, while the latter (esoteric writing) only seriously attached itself to Hobbes’s masterwork and his subsequent defenses of it. Focusing on Leviathan, the chapter contextualizes these allegations as they moved through generations of commentary and then into modern scholarship. It constitutes a report on the state of the debate from the perspective of a committed participant.