ABSTRACT
Conyers Middleton showed a steely sense of truth, and when his High Church critics argued that the practices which he had fiercely denounced as superstition were of Jewish origin. Thomas Woolston was a serious thinker, defending a mystical interpretation of Christianity which he claimed had prevailed in the ancient Church. For seventeenth-century liberal Protestants, such as Grotius and Locke, the Resurrection was central to the rational demonstration of Christianity. Woolston's interpretations of the New Testament are more intelligible in the light of the recovery of Gnostic gospels and it remains possible that his allegorical version of Christianity was serious. A deist might have concluded that The Old Apology was a spring-back argument, implied that the proofs necessary to establish the truth of Christianity to the Jews and to the Gentiles were lacking. Woolston may have been involved in underground discussions even in the 1690s and he was reacting in The Old Apology to arguments the deists were advancing.
