ABSTRACT
The existence of Isaac Newton’s ‘Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture’ has long been known to scholars. Sent to John Locke in November 1690, when interest in the history and authenticity of the doctrine of the Trinity was already beginning to overwhelm theological debate in England, it is an impassioned but scholarly text. The ‘Historical Account’ comprises two analyses of the Trinitarian proof texts 1 John 5:7 (containing the so-called ‘Johannine comma’) and 1 Tim. 3:16; a so-called ‘Third Letter’ is extant in draft, which deals with about 20 other variant readings of Scripture. According to Newton these were all corruptions that either failed or succeeded in changing the text of the Bible as it was in the Textus Receptus of the Greek New Testament and in the King James Bible. Fascinatingly, Newton sent the ‘Account’ to Locke on the understanding that Locke would both get the tract on the comma translated into French and then published. Although Newton was notoriously loath to let any of his productions appear in print, he seemed strangely intent on releasing to a European audience a heterodox discourse on two of the most disputed biblical passages on the Trinity that would hit the Republic of Letters at the very moment when guardians of orthodoxy were most primed to detect heretical productions and discover their authors. 1
Although historians have examined efforts to publish it in the early eighteenth century, the ‘Historical Account’ itself has not received serious scholarly attention since the early nineteenth century, when Newton’s theological commitments were of interest and importance to both Unitarians and orthodox Anglicans. I am concerned here much more narrowly with the content of Newton’s text and also with the immediate aftermath of its composition. As a means of shedding light on Newton’s approach, I contrast the demonstrative approach adopted in his ‘Historical Account’ with that of the Oratorian priest, Father Richard Simon, in the virtually contemporaneous Critical History of the Text of the New Testament (1689). This provided an examination in unprecedented detail of printed editions of the New Testament, as well as of original manuscripts that were either cited in these editions or that he saw with his own eyes. Approaching the authenticity of the comma from opposite ends of the theological spectrum, there are dissonances and consonances between their positions. The latter is less surprising when one considers that both had in their sights the views of orthodox Anglicans. In the second half of the paper, I examine the work in the light of the intellectual relationship that had developed the previous year between Locke and Newton. 2
Although public discussion of the Trinity exploded in the early 1690s, it was James II’s Declaration of Indulgence in 1687 that facilitated publication of overtly antitrinitarian texts and doctrines. Many, like the anonymous productions of Stephen Nye and the posthumous reprinting of the writings of John Biddle, were financed by Thomas Firmin, and they triggered a spate of attacks from orthodox divines. Apart from the unhealthy stress on ‘reason’ and ‘private judgement’ that the orthodox feared in their writings, antitrinitarians invariably promoted a vision of a tolerant society in which people such as themselves could worship what they took to be the true religion without fear of persecution. These topics engaged the exile John Locke, former personal secretary to the Exclusionist Earl of Shaftesbury, who returned to England in the entourage of Princess Mary and organized the publication of three major works – The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Two Treatises of Government, and the Epistola de Tolerantia. Whatever his exact doctrinal allegiances, Locke’s sympathy for many religious and political views espoused by antitrinitarians ensured that his relationship with Newton would bloom when they met towards the end of 1689. 3
Newton’s stock rose at exactly the same time as Locke’s. The publication of the Principia Mathematica in 1687 had made good all the promise of his early work in mathematics and natural philosophy. He became a Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge in the Convention Parliament and was allied to a cohort of radical Whigs that included John Hampden, an erstwhile disciple and onetime patron of Richard Simon. Locke shared many of Newton’s views on toleration and religion, and, with his patron Lord Monmouth, strove to obtain for Newton a public position in London. Amongst other patronage-related activities Newton was approached to find a tutor for Monmouth’s son at the start of 1690 but after some months without contact Locke wrote a now lost letter to Newton enquiring about the nature of the comma. Newton wrote to Locke at the end of October saying that he would have responded sooner to this but that he had ‘staid to revise & send’ him the ‘papers’ Locke desired. As much as he may have wished to find out Newton’s view on this burning issue, Locke felt a continuing obligation to provide copy for his friend Jean Leclerc’s Bibliothèque Universelle; as we shall see, it was thanks to promptings by Leclerc that Newton revised his tract after reading Richard Simon’s Critical History of the New Testament. 4
The ‘consulting of Authors proving more tedious’ than expected, Newton advised Locke that he would have to wait until the following week for the papers. When it arrived, the opening sentence from Newton’s main discourse (sent on 14 November) reveals that Locke’s ‘curiosity’ about the authenticity of 1 John 5:7 had apparently been provoked by ‘the discourses of some late writers’ but Newton told Locke that he had come across new evidence concerning 1 Tim. 3:16 ‘wch I thought would be as acceptable to inquisitive men, & might be set down in a little room.’ The whole thing had now become extremely large, so Newton believed that it would be better if only the text relating to 1 John were ‘done into French’. Clearly Locke had raised the possibility of Leclerc or somebody else translating the text; as a master of anonymous publication he would have known exactly how to manage Newton’s anonymity. For the latter, this represented an ambitious and perilous exercise, but also another opportunity to strut the European stage, with the possibility of publishing it in English ‘after it has gone abroad long enough in French.’5
