Primitive Christianity Research Articles

The Apostolic Fathers' First Thousand Years

The writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers (a term used by the Monophysite Severus of Antioch in the sixth century) present us not only with a fascinating theological literature but also with some difficult problems in regard to its nature. Thomas Elborowe translated Ignatius, Polycarp, and Barnabas and entitled his published work (London, 1668) “a prospect of the primitive Christianity, as it was left by Christ to his apostles, by the apostles to their disciples Saint Polycarp and Holy Ignatius, both contemporaries with and disciples to the Holy Evangelist and Apostle Saint John.” The neatness of this part of the prospect was somewhat marred by the inclusion of Barnabas. “His following epistle indeed,” Elborowe wrote, “may not prove so very acceptable to some, in regard of his strange explications of scripture, which are not after the modern and more refined mode. But it is to be noted that, when he wrote, Christianity was but in the cradle, and scarce advanced into her morning dress.” Nearly three hundred years later Mgr. G. Jouassard, writing in the Mélanges de science religieuse (1957), was facing problems not unlike those stated or implied by Elborowe. What is the value of the Apostolic Fathers? What kind of authority do they have? Are they any more valuable than such a document as the Epistle of the Apostles? They are hard to classify as literature and they come from a long period of time. Both “apostolic” and “fathers” are words which ascribe more importance to them than they really deserve.

The Origins of Infant Baptism — Child Believers' Baptism?

Baptism has been placed firmly on the agenda of ecumenical theology by the Lima Report, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry. It makes no attempt to resolve the question of baptismal origins, but judiciously summarizes the state of the debate: ‘While the possibility that infant baptism was practised in the apostolic age cannot be excluded, baptism upon personal profession of faith is the most clearly attested pattern in the New Testament documents’. The paucity of recent discussion of the beginnings of infant baptism may suggest that they are deemed insoluble, short of the discovery of new evidence. Theology, at any rate, may neither be able nor need to wait until historians of primitive Christianity reach a consensus. The possibility that infant baptism was practised relatively early, perhaps even in the New Testament Churches themselves, was no deterrent to Karl Barth's regarding it as theologically indefensible. Nevertheless, he could not ignore what he called ‘the brute fact of a baptismal practice which has become the rule in churches in all countries and in almost all confessions’, and he ventured his own explanation of the triumph of infant baptism and of the New Testament passages to which its advocates customarily appeal. His sharp critique of the tradition provoked a greater stir on the continent of Europe than in the English-speaking world. A fresh look at the historical question is certainly overdue, although its starting-point is bound to be the celebrated exchange between Joachim Jeremias and Kurt Aland of two decades ago. Ecumenical discussion, and in some Churches, ecumenical reality, call on both paedobaptists and credobaptists to examine the others' Practice with a new seriousness. In such a context the beginnings of the dominant tradition cannot healthily be left unscrutinised or treated as inscrutable.

Enabling Language in Paul

Paul of Tarsus, first-century Diaspora-Jew-become-Christian, became, through Augustine and Luther, the canonical theologian for Protestant Christianity. Consequently, his theology has been of overwhelming interest, whether in research, teaching, or preaching. This dominating concern with his theology, however, has diverted interest from other significant deposits Paul left us in his letters. F. W. Beare, in a study on “St. Paul as Spiritual Director,” has shown that this itinerant preacher of primitive Christianity has left us a record of his pastoral concerns that can still serve as a useful model for the modern pastor. A growing number of scholarly articles on Paul and women shows that while Paul sometimes simply reflects a male-dominated social reality, he occasionally envisions freedom and equality for women. Disappointment in other aspects of Paul's social perspective is largely overcome when that perspective is sought within his teaching on the church which, in his apocalyptic orientation, would be the continuing social reality.

From Early Anthropology to the Literature of the Savage: The Naturalization of the Primitive

From Early Anthropology to the Literature of the Savage: The Naturalization of the Primitive CHRISTIAN MAROUBY Why this sudden interest in various forms of "Otherness"? Beyond the obvious exotic or even escapist appeal of such explorations—per­ haps itself a sign of the times—it seems to me that several assump­ tions of a more theoretical nature, ev^n if not always explicitly for­ mulated, have recently contributed to making the Other a particular focus of attention. One critical factor, perhaps the most evident, is the importance attributed by various disciplines to what can be de­ fined as the specular mode: the Other functions as a locus of projec­ tions; it reflects, if only indirectly, the imaginary perceptions of a given culture. The discourse on the Other has thus become, for us, a priv­ ileged source of information on its elusive subject, be that subject a historical one. Another of those productive assumptions, more di­ rectly Foucaldian this time, is the idea that a culture defines itself as much by what it excludes from its dominant discourse, or rejects from its consciousness, as by what it admits into it; hence our interest in the marginal, the repressed, in those cultural objects which at a given time seem to elicit a kind of denegation. The Other, in this very dif­ ferent sense, is that which cannot be represented. There would of course be other ways of accounting for our present interest in Oth­ erness. The reason I have chosen to emphasize these two particular and complementary modes of operation is that in our period of con­ 289 290 / MAROUBY cern they can be seen to illuminate in an exemplary manner the fate of what is undoubtedly the most significant Other: the savage. In the long history of our relation to the primitive, the eighteenth century, and perhaps most strikingly the second half of that period, stands out as an exceptional time. In a strangely belated aftershock of the discovery, the mass of documentation and missionary relations which had for over two centuries been accumulated by explorers of the New World, and so largely ignored, seems finally to break through the defenses of Europe and elicit the kind of large-scale reaction one might have expected much earlier. The disquieting and even slightly threatening presence of an Other on the new Western horizons, which had for so long failed to have a significant impact on European con­ sciousness, suddenly captures its imagination and provokes, at least indirectly, an unprecedented wave of speculations on the origin and the nature of man. In a spectacular apres-coup that I am tempted to interpret as a return of the repressed, Europe is discovering America. Of that phenomenon, the most visible and celebrated manifesta­ tion, at once symptom and primary vehicle of a profound displace­ ment of representations, is the coming of the savage into literature. More precisely, it is a process of translation, or to pursue a certain analogy, a secondary elaboration, which allows the observations of early anthropology to pass into the mainstream of literature, and thereby to become accessible and acceptable to European conscious­ ness. From Lahontan's "sauvage philosophique" to Diderot's Supple­ ment au voyage de Bougainville and the melancholy waning of the tra­ dition in Chateaubriand's Chactas and Atala, the triumph of the savage is a literary promotion. What I would like to suggest, and as much as possible to exemplify in some detail, is that in this process of translation something essen­ tial—something which in original relations takes the form of an un­ resolved and immensely productive interrogation—is lost, or per­ haps more accurately, erased. While ensuring, and even celebrating, the admission of the primitive into the dominant discourse, the lit­ erary promotion of the savage is also the very operation by which the trauma of a true recognition is averted. Or to put it somewhat more explicitly, the literary representation of the primitive, and most per­ versely that particular version we have come to know as the "good" savage, can be seen to function as a strategy, however unconscious, through which Europe succeeds in protecting itself from the most radical implications of the discovery. What...

The Doctrine of the Trinity Achieved in 381

When we read the Creed of Constantinople of the year 381, which is generally called the Nicene Creed, we gain the unmistakable impression that we have travelled a long way from the opening verses of St. Mark's Gospel. This paper will consist of an attempt to answer the question, Was this journey really necessary? A number of negatives have been given to this question. It has been asserted that the doctrine of this creed was reached because the spirit of useless intellectual curiosity and of metaphysical speculation had gripped the theologians of the Church, so that the creed became only a stage towards ‘the bankruptcy of Patristic theology’ which was to be reached by the middle of the next century. It has been suggested, perhaps as a variant of the same argument, that this creed represents the capture of the original Judaeo-Christian message or gospel of primitive Christianity by a process of Hellenisation, a gradual approximation to late Greek, mainly Platonic, philosophy. The theory has even been put forward with a wholly misplaced confidence that the doctrine of the Trinity was produced in order to guarantee a celestial order and security corresponding to and supporting the order and security represented by the Christian Emperor himself. These are all explanations of the doctrinal journey which in one way or another see it as a superfluity or a deviation.

The gospel literature as a source for the history of primitive Christianity

The gospel literature as a source for the history of primitive Christianity

Christian Origins in Sociological Perspective

Why are there four Gospels, each apparently written for a different purpose? Why did certain writers use a letter-like form for what seems to be essentially a theological treatise? Why is there no New Testament gospel consisting entirely of the sayings of Jesus, as there is, say, in the Gnostic Nag Hammadi discoveries? Why does John's Gospel speak of God's love for the world and yet distinguish the community so sharply from the world? Common to all these important questions is their connection with an understanding of the world in which Christianity arose. One of the most important developments in recent years has been the application of methods and perspectives derived from the social sciences to illuminate that world. Professor Kee's own Community of the New Age, a detailed examination of the church in which Mark's Gospel was written, was a pioneering work in this respect, as was Gerd Theissen's sociological study, The First Followers of Jesus. This new book is simpler, and more general, and is meant as an introductory report on the use of sociological approaches to New Testament theology. The opening chapter outlines the ways in which these approaches are used and describes in broad terms how earlier historians of primitive Christianity have correlated their history writing with a variety of non-historical factors. Subsequent chapters consider the different attitudes towards contemporary cultures adopted by the various groups, documented in the New Testament, varying modes of leadership, the nature of other religious movements in the Graeco-Roman world that also claimed special revelation or access to divine mysteries, and the way in which ritual and myth tended to develop. Finally, the functions of the New Testament writings themselves are reconsidered in a survey which takes into account not only their original aims but also the uses to which they were actually put. Here is a fresh approach which shows that the New Testament still has surprises in store for us.

‘The Problem of the Lord's Supper’ as Matrix for Albert Schweitzer's ‘Quest of the Historical Jesus’

It is not always remembered that the important and influential work of Albert Schweitzer on the historical Jesus – both as historian of ‘the quest’ and as proponent of an apocalyptic Jesus who was messiah yet who proved amenable to Schweitzer's own emphasis on ethics – rests within the matrix of another, perhaps even broader topic, that of the origin and development of the Lord's Supper. For Schweitzer's first published work in biblical studies, his dissertation for the licentiate in theology degree in 1900, was a ‘Critical Presentation of Various Recent Historical Concepts of the Lord's Supper’, and his initial ‘Sketch of the Life of Jesus’, published 1901 and destined to be reiterated and expanded in his books on Jesus of 1906 and 1913, was Part II of a wider study on ‘The Lord's Supper in connection with the Life of Jesus and the History of Primitive Christianity’.

The origins of the drug-free therapeutic community.

SummaryIn this paper an attempt is made to trace the origins of the drug‐free therapeutic community. Virtually all such programmes in North America may be traced to Synanon, which in turn may readily be traced back through Alcoholics Anonymous to the so‐called Oxford Group. At this point the line of evolution becomes less evident. But an examination of various aspects of the background and career of Dr. Frank Buchman, founder of the Oxford Group, suggests a strong link with the Protestant Reformation and, through it, with the forms and practices of primitive Christianity as embodied in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is suggested that the present‐day therapeutic community is only the most recent reincarnation of a particular type of religious organization which dates from at least the Intertestamentary Period.

The Formula-Quotations of Matthew 2 and the Problem of Communication

This paper takes its cue from L. Hartman's study of ‘Scriptural Exegesis in the Gospel of Matthew and the Problem of Communication’,1and more specifically from two comments on that paper made by Professor M. D. Hooker.2The first was to the effect that the title of Hartman's study involved a promise which was not fulfilled, in that he did not in fact deal significantly with ‘communication’, in the sense of discussing what the ordinary reader might have been expected to get out of Matthew's scriptural quotations and allusions. The second was the related question whether the ordinary Jew of New Testament times, as opposed to the professional theologians or the exegetes of Qumran, could be expected to have as full an acquaintance with the Old Testament as Hartman assumed. This last point reminded me of a principle set out in a recent article by Humphrey Palmer, which neatly articulated a persistent doubt which I have felt when reading suggestions of sophisticated midrashic developments in the Gospels: ‘The complexity of allusion intelligible to a modern scholar with lots of books and little else to do is much greater than that accessible to any member of Jesus' audience.’3A civilization based on the printed book may be in danger of forgetting that a scroll of even one Old Testament book was in the first century an inconvenient and expensive luxury, and so of assuming an ease of reference which is more appropriate to the age of the ‘pocket Bible’ than to primitive Christianity.

Pauline Inconsistency: I corinthians 9: 19–23 and galatians 2: 11–14

Paul's own behaviour is not as open to scrutiny as that of some of his congregations. Comparisons are possible, with limited success, between the reports of his actions in Acts and what he himself says in his letters. Certain kinds of behaviour can be guessed at through a careful analysis of his letters. Rarely, however, do we have in his letters a passage that is as pregnant with implications – particularly for an understanding of his behaviour – as I Corinthians 9. 19–23. The purpose of what follows is to explore an inconsistency between what Paul says about his own behaviour in that passage and what he says with regard to Peter's behaviour in Galatians 2. 11–14. Attention will be focused on ethics, apostolic accommodation, and the relation between Paul and Peter as primitive Christian missionaries.

The Sermon on the Mount: Its Literary Genre and Function

In his presidential address before the annual meeting of Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas in 1977,' Professor Giinther Bornkamm raises the problem of the literary Gattung of the Sermon on the Mount (SM). It is certainly appropriate to address this problem because the literary Gattung needs identification2 regardless of whether the SM is a composition of the gospel writer, as Bornkamm maintains, or a pre-Matthean composition, as I have suggested.3 Bornkamm immediately states his conclusion that he does not see any real analogy to the literary Gattung of the SM in either primitive Christian or Jewish literature.4 This conclusion,

REVIEWS

The Melchizedek Tradition. By Fred L. Horton Jr Paul: Apostle of the Free Spirit. By F.F. Bruce Community of the New Age. By Howard C. Kee New Testament Interpretation. Edited by I. Howard Marshall A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament. By Samuel Sandmel Perfection in the Virtuous Life, By Ronald E. Heine Consolation Philosophy: Greek and Christian Paideia in Basil and the Two Gregories. By Robert C. Gregg The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. By J.B. Russell The Sexual Language: An Essay in Moral Theology. By Andre Guindon The Church and the Homosexual By John J. McNeill Explorations in Theology. Vol. 1. By D.E. Nineham Faith and Reality. By Wolfhart Pannenberg Meditation on Freedom and the Spirit. By Karl Rahner Voices in the Wilderness. By John Bowden The Centre of Christianity. By John Hick The Becoming Church. By John Adair The Once and Future Liturgy. By J.D. Crichton The Liturgy Today and Tomorrow. By Joseph Gelineau The Original Vision: A Study of the Religious Experience of Childhood. By Edward Robinson A Sense of Presence. By Timothy Beardsworth This Time‐Bound Ladder; Ten Dialogues on Religious Experience. Edited by Edward Robinson Education, Nihilism and Society. By David Holbrook Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era? Reflections on the Holocaust. Edited by Eva Fleischner Hero, Artist, Sage or Saint. By Richard W. Coan Molyneux's Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception. By M.J. Morgan Ockham, Descartes, and Hume: Self‐Knowledge, Substance, and Causality. By Julius R. Weinberg, edited by William J. Courtenay, William H. Hay, and Keith E. Yandell Ecclesiastical Administration in Medieval England. By Robert E. Rodes, Jr Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from Bogomil to Hus. By M.D. Lambert Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village, 1294–1324. By Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie The Correspondence of Erasmus, Volume IV. Translated by R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson, annotated by James McConica The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649. By Murray Tolmie The Dissenters: I. From the Reformation to the French Revolution. By Michael R. Watts Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America. By Winton U. Solberg The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman. Volume XXXI. Edited by Charles Stephen Dessain and Thomas Gomall Orthodoxy and Nationality. Andreiu Saguna and the Rumanians of Transylvania, 1846–1873. By Keith Hitchens

God, time, and eternity

God is the ‘high and lofty One who inhabits eternity’, declared the prophet Isaiah, but exactly how we are to understand the notion of eternity is not clear. Traditionally, the Christian church has taken it to mean ‘timeless’. But in his classic work on this subject, Oscar Cullmann has contended that the New Testament ‘does not make a philosophical, qualitative distinction between time and eternity. It knows linear time only…’ He maintains, ‘Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a timeless God. The “eternal” God is he who was in the beginning, is now, and will be in all the future, “who is, who was, and who will be” (Rev. 1:4).’ As a result, God's eternity, says Cullmann, must be expressed in terms of endless time.

The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity

The life of the Jura fathers the life and rule of the holy fathers Romanus, Lupicinus, and Eugendus, abbots of the monasteries in the Jura Mountains : with appendices, Avitus of Vienne, Letter XVIIII to Viventiolus, Eucherius of Lyon, The passion of the martyrs of Agaune, Saint Maurice and his companions [and] In praise of the desert, Tim Vivian, Kim Vivian, Jeffrey Burton Russell, Oct 1, 1999, Biography & Autobiography, 240 pages. .

Book Reviews

AbstractBook reviewed in this article History: Choice and Conmztment. By Felix Gilbert. The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity t o Primitive Christianity. By Jeffrey Burton Russell. T h e Economy of the Roman Empire: Quantitative Studies. By Richard Duncan. Jones. The Northern Barbarians, 100 BE.‐A.D. 300. By Malcolm Todd. Renaissance Rome, 1500‐1559: A Portrait of a Society. By Peter Partner. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors: The Destruction of Hiberno‐Norman Civilization. By R. Dudley Edwards. Church and People 1450‐1660: The Triumph of the Laity in the EngEish Church. By Claire Cross.Church and Society Henry VZZZ to James Z. Edited by Felicity Heal and Rosemary O'Day.The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602‐3. Edited, with an introduction, by Robert Parker Sorlien. The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century English Political System. By David Cresap Moore. The British Revolulion 1880‐1939. By Robert Rhodes James. Asquitlz. By Stephen Koss. Slim: The Standardbearer‐A Biography of Field‐Marshal The Viscount Slim. By Ronald Lewin. Winston S . Churchill. Volume V: 1922‐1939, The Prophet of Truth. By Martin Gilbert. The Age of Louis XIV: The Rise of Modern Diplomacy. By William James Roosen. Etienne‐Denis Pasquier: The Lasl Chancellor of France. By James K. Kieswetter. Peasants Into Frenchmen: The hfodernization of Rural France, 1870‐1914. By Eugen Weber. In First Gear: The French Automobile Industry to 1914. By James M. Laux. The Germans. By Erich Kahler. The Last Kaiser: A Biography of Wilhelm II, German Emperor and King of Prussia. By Tyler Whittle. German and Pole: National Conflict and Modern Myth. By Harry Kenneth Rosenthal. Poland in the Twentieth Century. By M.K. Dziewanowski. The Russian Autocracy in Crisis: 1905‐1907. By Ann Erickson Healy. Vladivostok under Red and White Rule: Revolution and Counterrevolution in the Russian Far East, 1920‐1922. By Canfield F. Smith. The United States in Norwegian History. By Sigmund Skard. The Last Great Subsistence Crisis in the Western World. By John D. Post. The Outsiders: The Western Experience in India and China. By Rhoads Murphey. Chinese Exclusion verms the Open‐Door Policy, 1900‐1906: Clashes over China Policy in the Koosevelt Era. By Delbert L. McKee. A Divided People. By Kenneth S. Lynn. Society, Freedom, and Conscience: The American Revolution in Virginia, Massachusetts, and New York. By Jack P. Greene, Richard L. Bushman, and Michael Kammen. Revolutionary Ladies. By Philip Young. The American Revolution and “A Candid World.” Edited, with preface and introduction by Lawrence S. Kaplan. The Old Religion in the Brave New World: Repections on the Relatioti Between Christendom and the Repubplic. By Sidney E. Mead. Medicine at Harvard: The First 300 Years. By Henry K. Beecher, M.D., and Mark D. Creation by Natural Law: Laplace's Nebular Hypothesis in American Thought. By Ronald L. Numbers. Success in America: The Yeoinnn Dream and the Industrial Reoolution. By Rex Burns.Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker.Out of the Sweatshop: The Struggle far Industrial Democracy. Edited by Leon Stein. Catholic Aciivisnz and ihe Ziadustrial Worker. By Neil Betten. Communications Workers of Aine The Story of a Union. By Thomas R. Brooks. The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States. By Humbert S. Nelli. Africans and Seminoles: from Removal fo Einancipalion. By Daniel F. Littlefield,Henry Highland Garnet: A Voice of Black Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century. In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue. By Norton Sosna.Black Ethos: Northern Urban Life and Thought, 1890‐1930.Eficiency and Expansion: Foreign Trade Organization in the Wilson Administration Ballotr before Bullets: The War Referendum Approach to Pence in America, 1914‐1941. By Ernest C. Bolt.Roosevelt and Romanism: Catholics and American Diplomacy, 1937‐1945. Hoosevelt and Churchill 1939‐1941: The Partnership That Saved the West. By Joseph P. Lash. Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941‐1945. By Michael S. Sherry.A Loyal Opposition in Time of War: The Republican Party and the Politics of Foreign Policy from, Pearl Harbor t o Yalta.The American Dream in the Great Depression. Minstrels of the Dawn: The Folk‐Protest Singer as a Cultural Hero. By Jerome L. Rodnitzky. Growing Old in America: The Bland‐Lee Lectures Delivered at Clark University. By David Hackett Fischer.Our Appalachia: An Oral History. Edited by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg.

The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, by Jeffrey Burton Russell

<i>The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity</i>, by Jeffrey Burton Russell

The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Jeffrey Burton Russell

<i>The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity</i>. Jeffrey Burton Russell

Primitive Christianity revived: religious renewal in Augustan England

The restoration of Charles II seemed to the men of the church of England the miraculous inauguration of a golden age—‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Sion: then were we like unto them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy.’ The clerical beneficiaries of the settlement of 1662 had much to rejoice them; the act of uniformity symbolised the secure replanting of the Laudian ideal, an ideal which, as R. S. Bosher has shown, had stiffened and intensified in the years of adversity. The restored church was more certain of itself, more intransigent in its jure divino episcopal claims, than the church of the 1630s. This new assurance was nourished by the flowering of anglican patristic learning which is so striking a feature of the later seventeenth century. The magisterial works of Ussher and Pearson on the Ignatian epistles, of Pearson and Fell on Cyprian, and of Bull on the ante-Nicene fathers, each contributed to a deepening sense of the continuity of the church of England with the catholic church of the first centuries. More and more the appeal to antiquity became the criterion of orthodoxy, and in that antiquity anglicanism found not merely its origins, but, occasionally and increasingly, a mirror image of itself. William Beveridge told his hearers at St Peter’s Cornhill.there are [some] who blame our Reformation as defective, as if the Church were not reformed, not purged enough from the errors it had before contracted; but if such would but lay aside all prejudices and impartially consider the constitution of our church, as it is now reformed, they might clearly see that as there is nothing defective so neither is there anything superflous in it, but that it exactly answers the pattern of the Primitive and Apostolical Church itself, as near as it is possible for a national church to do it.

‘Whiston's Affair’: the trials of a Primitive Christian 1709–1714

Historians of the eighteenth century have written of William Whiston, if at all, with an ill-concealed smile. ‘The engaging Whiston’, that ‘most amiable of heretics’, is duly noted in every account of the development of Arianism in England, but his lunatic vagaries are kept well to the fore. Yet Whiston has some claims to serious historical attention. His heresies were considered dangerous enough to provoke the champions of both high and low-church to counter attack, and to unite the warring factions in the turbulent Convocation of 1710/11 in a concerted attempt to silence ‘this corrupter of our common Christianity’, this ‘fallen star of our church’. To Whiston, rather than to Samuel Clarke, belongs the dubious credit of having revived the Arian heresy in England, and although Clarke's less flamboyant teaching was ultimately more influential, Whiston, in converting the dissenters Joseph Hallett and James Peirce to Arian views, was indirectly responsible for the conflagration at Salter's Hall in 1719, and the spread of Unitarianism in English dissent. The story of the discovery of ‘Primitive Christianity’ and the prolonged persecution which Whiston's attempts to propagate his new gospel provoked is not widiout elements of farce, but there is a serious side to the episode. The abortive attempt to cite Whiston before the ‘court of Convocation’ in 1711, and his subsequent prosecution in the Court of Delegates, were seen by churchmen as yet another demonstration of the impotence of the Church of England in the face of her enemies, and by latitudinarians and unbelievers as a dangerous attempt on the liberties of protestant Englishmen. Like the Sacheverell trial, to which it forms a pendant, the Whiston affair was, while it lasted, a cause célèbre, and casts further light on the eighteenth-century debate on the place and function of the Church in Society.