William Whiston

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A book on a shelf can carry a name across two centuries while burying everything its owner cared most about. On the spines of the family Bibles’ tall companion volume — the folio Josephus that sat in Protestant households between the hearth and the front room — the name was Whiston, and almost no one who opened it knew that the man had been thrown out of Cambridge for heresy, or that he had spent forty years insisting the Church had gotten its central doctrine wrong since the fourth century. He translated the Jewish historian; he did not write him. The translation is what survived.

William Whiston (1667–1752), oil on canvas after Sarah Hoadly, c. 1720 (National Portrait Gallery, NPG 243) — National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

William Whiston was born on 9 December 1667 at Norton-juxta-Twycross in Leicestershire, son of the parish rector, and raised toward the family profession. He went up to Clare College, Cambridge, took his degree and a fellowship, and was ordained in the Church of England — the ordinary first movements of a clerical-academic life in the generation that came of age just as a new physics was rewriting what nature was. For a time he served as chaplain to John Moore, bishop of Norwich, the kind of patronage post from which a careful man rose. Whiston was not, in the end, a careful man. But the early ascent was real, and it ran straight through the most prestigious science of the age.

The comet and the chair

His entry into the first rank came with a single audacious book. A New Theory of the Earth, From Its Original to the Consummation of All Things (1696) set out to do something the moment hungered for: to read the opening and closing chapters of scripture as a continuous physical history, narrated in the new mechanics. The Creation, the Flood, and the promised final conflagration were not, on Whiston’s account, suspensions of the natural order but its lawful workings under a particular cause — and the cause was a comet. The earth itself, he argued, had once been a comet, its eccentric orbit rounded into a year by divine ordinance; the six days of Genesis were six years of cooling and settling; Noah’s deluge was the consequence of a second comet’s near approach, its tail and gravitational drag drowning the world in water drawn up and rained down; and the end of things would come by fire, another such body delivering the heat that prophecy foretold. It was Newtonian cosmology turned into sacred history — the book of nature and the book of revelation forced to speak the same language.

The book was dedicated to Isaac Newton, and it was read with interest by Newton himself and by John Locke, among the men whose attention then constituted a reputation. Whiston had grasped what Newton’s own unpublished theology only privately entertained: that the new physics could be made to serve, rather than dissolve, the literal authority of scripture. The payoff was institutional. In 1701 Whiston resigned his living to act as Newton’s deputy in the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge, and on Newton’s recommendation he succeeded to the chair itself in 1702. He was for several years exactly what the age admired: a working mathematician and natural philosopher who believed, and could argue at length, that reason and revelation converged. In 1707 he gave the Boyle Lectures, the endowed series in which natural philosophy was enlisted for the defense of religion. Nothing in this trajectory predicted exile.

Whiston as “Professor of the Mathematicks in ye University of Cambridge,” with vignettes of Norman’s and Whiston’s dipping-needles; line engraving by George Vertue, 1720 — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

The comet thesis was not eccentricity for its own sake; it answered a question the period treated as urgent. If the world was governed by the regular, calculable forces Newton’s Principia had described, then the great interventions of sacred history — a world made, a world drowned, a world to be burned — risked looking like ruptures in an otherwise lawful machine, and a purely mechanical cosmos could be made to do without a governing God altogether. Whiston’s wandering bodies closed that gap. They let the deluge and the conflagration be at once miraculous in their timing, ordained by providence, and natural in their means, executed by gravity and orbit. The comet was the instrument through which a literal Genesis and a Newtonian sky could occupy the same heaven. His near-contemporary Thomas Burnet had attempted a comparable reconciliation in the Sacred Theory of the Earth; what Whiston added was the specific celestial mechanics, the conviction that the cause could be named and, in principle, computed. The same impulse that drove the deists toward a clockwork deity who set the world running and withdrew — the position John Toland pushed toward in Christianity Not Mysterious — drove Whiston the opposite way, toward a God whose continuing action could be tracked across the sky. He spent his life on the boundary the deist controversy made dangerous, defending revelation with the very tools that, in other hands, were being turned against it.

The fourth-century corruption

What broke the career was not science but a reading of history. Sometime in the years after he took the chair, Whiston immersed himself in the early-Christian corpus — above all the Apostolic Constitutions, a body of church-order texts he came to regard as the most ancient and authentic Christian witness, more reliable than the later creeds. Out of that study he formed the conviction that the doctrine of the Trinity, as fixed by the councils of the fourth century, was a corruption: a departure from a purer faith in which the Son is subordinate to, and not coeternal with, the Father. This was, in substance, the teaching the councils had condemned under the name of Arius — the Alexandrian presbyter whose insistence that the Son was created, and not of one being with the Father, set off the controversy resolved at Nicaea. Whiston did not think he was reviving a heresy. He thought he was restoring primitive Christianity and that the orthodoxy of his own church was the innovation.

He had not arrived there alone, nor in silence. He had followed hints from his friend Samuel Clarke, the rationalist divine and Newton’s closest theological ally, whose own Scripture-Doctrine of the Trinity would press a related subordinationist reading — though Clarke’s careful prose and survivable Convocation censure stand at a different temperature from Whiston’s open profession and total expulsion. Where Clarke hedged and weathered, Whiston published. To form an opinion and to print it were, for him, nearly the same act. The conviction reached his colleagues as scandal, and in 1710 the university deprived him of the Lucasian professorship and expelled him from Cambridge. He set out his case at length in Primitive Christianity Revived (five volumes, 1711–1712), arguing the antiquity of the Constitutions and the fourth-century falsification of the creeds, and pressing the claim that he, not the bishops, held the older faith.

A trial that ended without a verdict

The expulsion was an academic act; the church moved next. In 1711 the matter was carried before Convocation, which voted an address for his prosecution, and in the years following a Court of Delegates was appointed by the lord chancellor to try him for heresy — the articles against him exhibited by a clergyman named Pelling, Whiston answering with a written defense and a public correspondence that he then printed. The machinery turned slowly and never reached its end. The death of Queen Anne in 1714 and the accession of George I altered the political ground; the new king pardoned those accused of heresy under the old reign, and the proceedings against Whiston were dropped. He was never formally convicted and never formally cleared. The case simply lapsed — which left him, for the rest of his life, a man who had lost his chair and his Cambridge standing over a charge that the law had declined to settle.

The shape of the episode is precise, and easily flattened. The early-eighteenth-century English church was not a body that burned men; the penalty for Whiston’s heterodoxy was social, professional, and ecclesiastical exclusion, not the stake. What the episode measures is the limit of toleration in the age of Newton — how far an argument could be carried in public before the institutions that had honored the natural philosopher disowned the theologian. Newton himself, whose private papers show his own deep antitrinitarian convictions, kept those convictions hidden and kept his honors; Whiston, who said the same kind of thing aloud, kept neither. The scholar Stephen Snobelen has argued that the rupture between the two men turned less on doctrine than on publicity — that what Newton could not forgive was not the heresy but the open speaking of it. The judgment is well taken: the boundary Whiston crossed was as much about silence as about substance.

The long heterodox afterlife

For the more than forty years that remained, Whiston lived outside the institutions that had launched him, and lived loudly. He settled in London and made his living as a public lecturer — on astronomy, on mathematics, on prophecy — in coffee-houses and hired rooms, a recognizable figure of the early Enlightenment in which natural knowledge had become a paying spectacle for a literate public. He poured out pamphlets. He kept arguing his Arian case, kept defending the Constitutions, kept revising primitive Christianity. He took up the problem of finding longitude at sea, proposing signalling schemes with Humphry Ditton and helping to agitate for the parliamentary reward that became the Longitude Act of 1714 — a reward he pursued and never won. Late in life, his objection to the Athanasian Creed grown absolute, he left the Church of England altogether and in 1747 joined the General Baptists, following his conscience out of the established church as he had followed it out of the university.

Whiston late in life; etching by Benjamin Wilson, 1753 — Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Through all of it ran the millenarian thread. Whiston expected a literal fulfillment of biblical prophecy — a coming apocalypse, a real second coming and reign — and, unlike more cautious students of the end, he was willing to attach dates. The same comet that had drowned the antediluvian world reappeared in his end-time reckoning: the celestial bodies that had executed the Flood would return to execute the conflagration, and their orbits, he held, could be made to yield the timing. The date-setting drew ridicule even from those who shared his broad heterodoxy, and it has shaped a later reputation in which Whiston figures as a brilliant man given to enthusiasm, the comet-theorist and Arian who could not keep himself from predicting the end. The portrait is not quite just. The same temperament that produced the prophetic arithmetic produced the serious work — the readiness to follow an argument past the edge of respectable opinion was a single disposition, and Whiston’s contemporaries, who watched him do both at once, did not always find it easy to sort the two. James Force’s study William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (1985) makes the case that the consistency is the point: that Whiston was not a careless mind but a relentlessly literal one, applying a Newtonian confidence in plain causes to scripture, doctrine, and prophecy with the same instrument, and accepting the costs.

He stood, too, at one end of a long argument about the Trinity that did not end with him. The antitrinitarian current he had spoken aloud ran on through the century in quieter and louder channels alike — through dissenting and rational Christianity, and toward the unitarian and liberal Protestant movements of a later age. John Wesley, who knew Whiston’s reputation well and drew on his Josephus for sacred history, kept a careful distance from his doctrine; a more direct line runs forward to the nineteenth-century American Theodore Parker, the Transcendentalist minister for whom a Christianity stripped of its later dogmatic accretions was the whole program. Whiston would not have recognized himself in every heir — his quarrel was with a fourth-century corruption, not with creeds as such, and his attachment to the Apostolic Constitutions was as literal and as confident as his physics. But the gesture of measuring the church against its own earliest record, and preferring the record, was one he made early and at maximum cost.

The Josephus

Amid the pamphlets and the predictions, Whiston produced the work that outlived everything else. In 1737 he published his English translation of the first-century Romano-Jewish historian — The Genuine Works of Flavius Josephus, comprising the Antiquities of the Jews, The Jewish War, and the lesser pieces — with his own dissertations attached, including his characteristically confident handling of the disputed passage on Jesus. The translator was Whiston; Flavius Josephus, the chief extra-biblical witness to Second Temple Judaism and its destruction by Rome in 70 CE, was the author, and the two are not to be confused — a folio’s worth of distance separates the man whose name is on the spine from the man whose history fills the pages. The version was workmanlike, faithful enough, and arrived in plain reach of ordinary readers, and it took hold as nothing else of Whiston’s did. It became the standard English Josephus and held that place for more than two centuries; one count records over two hundred reprintings since 1737, and by the later eighteenth century it was the most common English Josephus in circulation across the American colonies as well as at home. Generations who never heard of the Lucasian chair or the Court of Delegates met Whiston as the voice that carried Jerusalem’s fall into their parlors. The translation is still in print, and its text continues to serve readers in digital form, hosted in full among the classical and Jewish sources of the Perseus Digital Library.

The record and the scholarship

The primary record of Whiston’s life is unusually full because he wrote it himself: the three-volume Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston (1749–1750), composed in his eighties, supply the chronology of the comet theory, the chair, the Arian conversion, the expulsion, and the lapsed prosecution in his own voice, defensive and exact by turns. The contemporary ecclesiastical paper-trail survives alongside it — among other items, the printed Several Papers Relating to Mr. Whiston’s Cause Before the Court of Delegates, which preserves the articles exhibited against him and his written defense. The standard Victorian summary, still useful for its dates and its bibliography, is the entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, freely available at Wikisource.

Modern scholarship has rehabilitated Whiston from caricature. James E. Force’s William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge University Press, 1985) is the first full-length study, reading the science, the heresy, and the millenarianism as the unified output of a single literal-minded Newtonian rather than the scattered enthusiasms of an eccentric. Stephen D. Snobelen has worked the relationship with Newton most closely, arguing in William Whiston, Isaac Newton and the crisis of publicity that the rupture between the two antitrinitarians was a matter of disclosure rather than doctrine, and tracing in William Whiston: No Longer an Arian the shifts in Whiston’s own later self-description. The arc of the heresy proceedings themselves — the 1709–1714 trials that never reached a verdict — has its own dedicated study in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History under the title “Whiston’s Affair”: the trials of a Primitive Christian.

The two Whistons rarely meet. The historical man is a study in exactly how much heterodoxy the age of Newton could tolerate and where it drew the line — undone not by bad science, which his peers respected, but by an unfashionable reading of the creeds spoken too plainly to ignore. The remembered man is the translator whose Josephus sat for generations on shelves where the controversy that defined his life was never so much as a rumor. That the two so rarely meet would have puzzled Whiston himself, who thought the literalism that fixed his Josephus and the literalism that cost him his chair were the same faculty, exercised without flinching on whatever it was turned toward.

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