In 1770, a seventy-three-year-old John Gill finally completed the third volume of his Body of practical divinity, the first work of systematic theology to be written by a Baptist.Footnote 1 The volume, which comprises four books, runs the gamut of religious issues from daily prayer to the duties of Christian parenthood. Added to it, however, is an essay of a rather different nature, a dissertation on ‘the baptism of Jewish proselytes’, a rather abstruse topic for a volume which aimed to address ‘practical concerns’.Footnote 2 Stranger still, the dissertation attracted so much attention that it was published the following year, ‘at the desire of some’, in a separate volume ‘for the sake of such who may not choose to purchase the larger work’.Footnote 3 This essay, Gill’s last, aimed to prove that ‘Christian Baptism cannot be taken from, and founded upon, Proselyte-Baptism among the Jews’.
Gill was here challenging a then ubiquitous conception of infant baptism as rooted in the practices of the ‘Jewish church’, which had been argued for very convincingly by the renowned Hebraist, John Lightfoot, a century previously. This article reconstructs the development of this argument and its subsequent popularisation. In doing so, it reveals that by the middle of the seventeenth century, post-biblical Jewish sources had acquired far greater authority in England than the existing literature on ‘Christian Hebraism’ suggests.Footnote 4 It also foregrounds the significance of the Westminster Assembly as a rare forum in which the latest advances in scholarship were brought to bear upon questions of immediate significance. These advances were particularly significant in the realms of Hebraic scholarship, the importance of which was much more broadly appreciated by the bulk of assemblymen than previous historians have led us to believe. It is only possible to demonstrate this thanks to the work of Chad van Dixhoorn, who has now made available both the papers and minutes generated by the Assembly and John Lightfoot’s record of the same.Footnote 5 This article therefore owes a great debt to the work of van Dixhoorn, as well to that of Kirsten Macfarlane and Jason Rosenblatt, who have both used the formal scholarship of notable assemblymen in tandem with Assembly records in order to better understand the significance of their participation in these debates.Footnote 6
The importance of the Assembly’s Hebraists in the development of political thinking in England has been drawn out by the superlative work of Eric Nelson.Footnote 7 This article, however, makes the case that their contributions went far further even than this. Discussions of church membership, church hierarchy and, most significantly, baptism, all featured copious references to the practices of the ‘Jewish church’. This was on account of a by-then widespread understanding of the New Testament as a fundamentally Jewish text, which had been ‘written by Jews, and among Jews, and addressed to and concerning Jews’.Footnote 8 That Jewish sources should be cited in discussions about the contemporary Church and its ancient antecedent was axiomatic for those participating in this particular forum, even if they had disagreements as to exactly how much weight such evidence should carry.
Lightfoot’s argument for paedobaptism as a development upon the proselyte-baptism of the Jews was an outgrowth of the many and varied debates on the subject of baptism which had taken place in the Westminster Assembly. These had prompted Lightfoot to investigate the matter in very great depth in the process of preparing his ‘Talmudic’ New Testament commentary, the Horae Hebraicae. Its successful transmission from that august forum to a wide variety of more popular publications is testament to the authority that had accrued to Lightfoot and to his Jewish sources by the later seventeenth century. It is also testament to the growing sophistication of the anti-paedobaptist case, which had, by the 1640s, very successfully assimilated developments in covenant theology in order to undermine the baptism-circumcision parallel, by which paedobaptism had been most commonly justified in Reformed churches. This justification for infant baptism, dubbed ‘the paedobaptists Achilles’ by John Tombes, had been so successfully undermined by the anti-paedobaptists as to necessitate its total reformulation by John Lightfoot.Footnote 9 Lightfoot’s mastery, and careful manipulation, of the relevant Jewish sources enabled him to produce a compelling argument for infant baptism as recounting the now defunct biblical baptism.Footnote 10 Lightfoot’s success in this regard is testament both to his own scholarly ingenuity and to the then widespread acceptance of the utility of the post-biblical Jewish legal tradition for reconstructing the history of the Early Church.
The breakdown of the argument from the baptism-circumcision analogy
Baptism for seventeenth-century Reformed Protestants in England was conceived of as the means by which a child was initiated into the society of the Church. This conception of initiation was rooted in the notion, common to covenant theology, that the relationship between God and his people was unchanging even if the means by which that covenant was sealed had changed over time. This meant that the covenant that Abraham sealed with God in Genesis was that self-same covenant that early modern Christians sealed with God.Footnote 11 Whilst these two ‘signs’ of the covenant, circumcision and baptism, differed in kind, they cohered in substance.
The argument for baptism by analogy with circumcision was developed most fully by Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli.Footnote 12 It was to prove incredibly important to the paedobaptists because it allowed for the identification of Old Testament proof-texts in support of their cause. This argument would come under considerable pressure, however, as developments in biblical scholarship questioned the extent to which Old Testament models had informed the practices of the Early Church. As scholars began to disentangle the mores of the ancient Israelites from those of the early Christians, ‘the argument of Baptisme from circumcision’, which rested upon a presumed continuity between the two Testaments, was suddenly under threat.Footnote 13 At the same time, developments within covenant theology itself, wrought by John Cameron and John Ball, had given rise to an important distinction between ‘the promise’ of salvation which was sealed by circumcision, and its promulgation, which was sealed by baptism.Footnote 14 Circumcision, on this account, was emblematic of the carnality of Old Testament ritual, which aimed, first and foremost, at establishing the particularity of Abraham and his progeny.Footnote 15
Europe’s leading covenant theologians, by the middle of the seventeenth century, had, rather problematically, arrived at a position which closely approximated that reached by the continental Anabaptists of a century prior. They were now willing to admit of a two-fold covenant, which, in its Abrahamic form, served only as a foretaste of the grace which would be fully realised with Christ’s coming.Footnote 16 In this revised form, covenant theology, which had provided paedobaptists with a solid theological and exegetical basis for their position, now gravely threatened it.
The Westminster Assembly: the application of Jewish learning to the question of baptism
The body charged with resolving this and other theological and ecclesiological challenges in England was the Westminster Assembly, called by the Long Parliament in 1643, which would sit all the way through to 1652. It might be usefully thought of as ‘the last of the post-Reformation synods’.Footnote 17 The Assembly’s membership included some of the greatest scholars of the age including John Selden, John Lightfoot and Henry Hammond. These men were tasked with deciding upon the governance and practices of the English Church. Their decisions would be codified in a Directory of publique worship and a new catechism as well as a series of ‘Articles of Christian religion’. In this highly unusual context, ‘long-running ecclesiological debates’ were suddenly pressing, as competing church histories did battle and ‘Jewish and oriental learning’ assumed a rare contemporary political relevance.Footnote 18
Lightfoot is often remembered for the role he played both as participant in the Westminster Assembly’s debates and as chief chronicler of them.Footnote 19 His historical reputation was made, however, first and foremost by his Horae Hebraicae (1658–78), a masterful ‘Talmudic’ commentary on the New Testament. This work, which would remain in print well into the nineteenth century, provided a model for the application of Jewish scholarship to New Testament exegesis for over three hundred years.Footnote 20 Evidence of the remarkable endurance of Lightfoot’s scholarly reputation is to be found in the Baptist encyclopaedia of 1881, which could think of no greater praise for John Gill than that he had been referred to as ‘the Doctor John Lightfoot of the Baptists’, a moniker which was judged to flatter ‘Doctor Lightfoot more than Doctor Gill’.Footnote 21
In his Horae, Lightfoot picked up many of the threads of discussions which took place in the Assembly which had not been concluded to his satisfaction.Footnote 22 He turned to the subject of baptism time and again, wrestling with its origins, its spiritual significance and its relationship to circumcision. For Lightfoot, the significance of rooting contemporary practice in ancient models was axiomatic and it was to post-biblical Jewish sources that he looked for evidence.
Lightfoot first addressed the question of the Jewish origins of baptism in his first published work, Erubhin (1629), subtitled ‘Miscellanies Christian and Iudaicall.Footnote 23 This was a curious publication, apparently ‘penned for Recreation at Vacant hours’. It gives us a very good sense of what Lightfoot was reading in the years 1628–9, when he dedicated himself almost exclusively to studying the Sion College collections.Footnote 24 Within the work we encounter the germination of Lightfoot’s argument for baptism as a traditional Jewish initiation ritual, which was proffered as an alternative to circumcision in cases of mass conversions.Footnote 25 As Lightfoot cited no source for this claim here, it is very difficult to establish where it came from. I suspect, however, that his source was Hugh Broughton’s Commentary on the Book of Daniel, which Lightfoot would later prepare for publication. There, Broughton had written that the Gemara in Yevamoth 76 and Maimonides in Issurei Biah 13 had recorded that ‘in the days of David and Solomon, when many thousands of heathen became proselytes: they were admitted onely by Baptism’.Footnote 26 Neither of these sources makes this claim, however, though both state that, under Kings David and Solomon, converts were not accepted. Maimonides indicated that such converts as had undergone טְבִילָה (ritual immersion), rendered ‘baptism’ by Broughton, were not turned away immediately, however, but allowed to live among the Jewish people for a time in order to prove the sincerity of their conversions (Issurei Biah 13.15). Neither in the Gemara nor in the Mishneh Torah, as Gill indicated in his Dissertation concerning the baptism of Jewish proselytes, is there any indication that טְבִילָה (ritual immersion) or baptism was ever proffered as an alternative to circumcision.Footnote 27 In fact, the opposite is clearly stated in Issurei Biah 13.6: ‘A convert who is circumcised but not immersed or immersed but not circumcised, he is not a convert until he has immersed and been circumcised.’
Lightfoot’s account of baptism here was obviously inaccurate but it does reveal two things which are significant for our purposes. Firstly, it demonstrates Lightfoot’s, and indeed Broughton’s, longstanding interest in uncovering the Old Testament roots of the baptismal rite, and secondly, it reveals the limitations of Lightfoot’s Jewish scholarship in the years preceding his catalytic participation in the Westminster Assembly. There, for the first time, Lightfoot was forced to confront the weaknesses of the paedobaptist position to which he would continue to hold firm.
In the context of the English Civil War, anti-paedobaptist opinions, which might previously have been suppressed, were fast gaining popularity. As a result, significant time was taken up over the course of the Assembly’s sitting with discussions of this worrying phenomenon.Footnote 28 Robert Baillie, one of the Assembly’s Scottish commissioners, noted with particular concern the prevalence of anti-paedobaptist sentiment in the army.Footnote 29 Edward Calamy was especially disturbed by the growing enthusiasm for private baptisms in London, which had left many with the impression that baptism was ‘no church ordinance’.Footnote 30 The general consensus amongst the assembled was that anti-paedobaptist sentiment needed to be quelled. To this end, a particularly learned exponent of that view, John Tombes, was invited to explain his position such that it could be refuted. This would prove more difficult than the members of the Assembly had hoped.
Tombes’s case for ‘believer’s baptism’ was made before the Assembly in July of 1644, following which ‘a friendly conference’ on the subject was held between him and Stephen Marshall.Footnote 31 Tombes outlined his objections to infant baptism in terms of the revised covenant theology paradigm which had been proffered by leading Scottish theologian, John Cameron. Cameron distinguished between the foedus promissum of the Old Testament and the foedus promulgatum of the New. He argued that Abraham was not a recipient of the ‘pure Gospel-covenant’ but rather a ‘mixt’ covenant which entailed promises both ‘Evangelical’ and ‘Domestique’.Footnote 32 The evangelical promises were due to all who would hear ‘the Gospel’; the domestic promises, however, were ‘civil promises’, of prime significance only to ‘the House of Abraham’.Footnote 33 These were ‘signified and confirmed’ by circumcision to ‘Abrahams seed’ alone and were therefore not due to the ‘believers of the gentiles’.Footnote 34 ‘Christs disciples’, who had themselves been circumcised, still underwent baptism as a consequence of their having ‘professed repentance and faith in Christ’.Footnote 35 Therefore, Tombes argued, the New Testament proffered baptism not as analogous with circumcision but as a necessity for entry into the ‘Gospel-covenant’, which could not be fully realised in circumcision.Footnote 36
These arguments had significant implications not just for infant baptism but for the very structure of the English national Church, which granted membership to all from the point of baptism.Footnote 37 For Tombes, this posed a serious problem for there was not in England, nor anywhere else ‘such national-church as among the Israelites’, which was covenanted to God in its entirety.Footnote 38 The sealing of the covenant therefore had to be administered on an individual basis as was the case with the baptisms performed by ‘John Baptiste and Christs Disciples’, which ‘some affirme’ were rooted in the Jewish conversion rite.Footnote 39 This rite entered Gentiles ‘into the profession of Judaisme’ as opposed to the Jewish ‘political identity’, which was sealed through circumcision.Footnote 40
John Tombes refuted
The publication of Tombes’s Two treatises on infant-baptism in the final days of 1645 was greeted with dread by the Westminster Assembly. A special committee was quickly established to formulate an official response to the ‘dangerous and schismaticall practices’ that were advocated therein.Footnote 41 This response would come in the form of a fairly substantial work entitled A defence of infant-baptism, swiftly drawn up by Tombes’s old sparring-partner, Steven Marshall. Marshall’s defence of infant baptism mostly consisted in the reassertion of the baptism-circumcision analogy, which Tombes had very competently rejected. For Marshall, that all ‘Reformed divines’ and even John Ball, whom Tombes had cited so approvingly, accepted that ‘Circumcision and Baptisme’ both ‘sealed the entrance into the covenant’ should have been enough to close the case.Footnote 42 He did acknowledge, however, that Tombes had raised a very interesting point with regard to the role of baptism in the Jewish conversion process for ‘the learned Gentleman Mr. Selden, and Mr. Ainsworth on Gen. 17 and Mr. Lightfootes Elias Redivivus’ had all made mention of ‘the use of Baptisme’ in ‘the Jewish church’.Footnote 43 This was, in fact, Marshall argued, the beginning of ‘a good Argument’ for infant baptism because, as Selden had demonstrated out of a vast array of Jewish sources, ‘infants of the gentiles were made proselytes’.Footnote 44 If therefore, as Tombes had claimed, Christian baptism did turn out to be rooted in the Jewish practice of proselytical baptism, this would be very problematic for the anti-paedobaptist cause.
Whilst Marshall’s refutations of Tombes’s arguments were largely conventional, his engagement with the question of the Jewish conversion process indicates a shift in the paedobaptist-anti-paedobaptist debate in England away from covenant theology and towards establishing the historical foundations of the baptismal rite. Both Marshall and Tombes accepted that the origins of baptism should be fundamental to its contemporary administration, and, for both, these origins could be uncovered through careful study of the relevant Jewish literature. For Marshall, that both Maimonides and the Talmud, sources cited by Selden on this question, affirmed that Jewish proselyte-baptism was undertaken by children greatly undermined the anti-paedobaptist position.Footnote 45 The use of Jewish legal texts here as historical sources is instructive for it demonstrates the significance that these held for the Westminster Assembly. Historians have tended to assume that the Hebraic scholarship of Lightfoot and Selden was of very little interest to the other members of that body, though this turns out not to have been the case.Footnote 46 As the minutes of the Assembly’s further discussions on baptism show, this was widely understood to be a subject to which both Jewish law and Jewish biblical commentary could speak authoritatively.
The Westminster Assembly on the proper modes of baptism
The Assembly’s first debate on the subject of baptism, which considered the legitimacy of private baptisms, revealed the extent of the threat that anti-paedobaptism was perceived to pose.Footnote 47 This question got to the heart of the two different biblical bases for baptism considered in the debate between Tombes and Marshall, the public baptisms recorded in the New Testament or the private circumcisions recorded in the Old. For Lightfoot, the rite of circumcision, which is administered on the eighth day of a Jewish boy’s life, could not always have taken place in synagogue for ‘in great townes’ this would have meant almost daily public circumcisions.Footnote 48 On this basis, he argued that baptisms, which paralleled circumcisions, should be held either in public or in private, just as circumcisions had been.Footnote 49 Despite the force of Lightfoot’s argument, which affirmed the familiar baptism-circumcision parallel, the assembled did not vote to permit private baptisms. It is likely that the deciding factor in this instance was the rising tide of anti-paedobaptism, which, it was decided, would be best combatted through the compulsory baptism of children in local parish churches.Footnote 50 What this debate reveals is that even though the baptism-circumcision parallel remained the predominant basis upon which infant baptism was justified, making arguments as to how baptisms should be performed by analogy with the performance of circumcisions proved difficult. Most assemblymen seemed to expect baptisms to mirror those recorded in the New Testament, which were of adults, not children.Footnote 51
A later debate on the permitted modes of baptism yielded further confusion. Many assemblymen were of the view that baptism by full immersion, as undergone by Jesus, was preferable to the more common mode of baptism by sprinkling.Footnote 52 Lightfoot, who was concerned that to permit baptism by dipping could lead ministers to ‘countenance to anabaptists’, made an authoritative intervention in opposition to this popular proposal on that basis.Footnote 53 He purported to show that the ancient Israelites had entered into the covenant at Mount Sinai by ‘sacrifise, sprinkling & baptisme, but that was not by dipping, but sprinkling’.Footnote 54 This was a truly astonishing claim which completely overturned the assumptions of all present, none of whom appear to have been familiar with the proof-text Lightfoot proceeded to present, which was a comment by Rashi on Exodus xxiv.6. The verse recounts the sacrifices brought before the Israelites received the Law: ‘And Moses took half of the blood, and put it in basons; and half of the blood he sprinkled on the altar.’ The cited comment reads: ‘Two basins, one for half of the blood drawn from the burnt offerings and one for half of the blood drawn from the peace offerings, in order that the blood of both could be sprinkled upon the people.’
In neither the verse cited nor its corresponding comment is there any mention of the sprinkling of water. That Lightfoot was aware of this is made clear in his journal in which he refers explicitly to the ‘sprinkling of blood’, which he claimed was accompanied by the ‘sprinkling of water’ as was recorded in Hebrews ix.19.Footnote 55
The following day, the Assembly came to vote on the precise wording which would accompany the baptismal ceremony in the Directory of public worship. Whilst many seemed to want to leave ministers with some leeway as to the performance of this rite, by merely stating that baptism by sprinkling was ‘lawful’, Lightfoot argued strongly against this proposition. For him, sprinkling had to be declared ‘sufficient’ and the possibility of baptism by dipping could not be mentioned at all.Footnote 56 His colleagues eventually agreed with him and thus the resultant Directory defines baptism as ‘sprinkling and washing with water’ children, such that they might be considered ‘Christians, and federally holy before baptisme’. Not only was this mode of baptism to be deemed ‘sufficient’, but no ‘other ceremony’ was to be added to it.Footnote 57 Lightfoot had thus successfully marshalled his Jewish learning to convince his colleagues that baptism by full immersion was no more ancient than baptism by sprinkling and that therefore full immersion could, justifiably, be excluded from the Directory.
The success of Lightfoot’s intervention in this instance demonstrates two things. Firstly, it shows the Assembly to have been very receptive to arguments from Jewish sources and, secondly, it shows that these sources were not familiar to the vast majority of its members. Lightfoot’s argument from Rashi was accepted without challenge because of the level of learning required to challenge it. His expertise as a Hebraist was generally acknowledged by his colleagues who, on that basis, looked to him to rule authoritatively from ‘the pandects of the Jews’.Footnote 58
Lightfoot returns to the question of infant baptism
Lightfoot’s later work reveals him to have greatly developed his thinking on baptism and many other subjects following his participation in the debates of the Westminster Assembly.Footnote 59 Much of this work demonstrates the extent to which he was aware of the limitations of what the Assembly had concluded. On the subject of baptism, in particular, Lightfoot appears to have been painfully aware of the inadequacy of the official response to Tombes, who had exposed the weaknesses of the baptism-circumcision analogy as a basis upon which infant baptism could be justified. In the Assembly, Lightfoot had argued strongly for the parallels between infant baptism and infant circumcision, though in his later work he took great pains to ground the origins of the baptismal rite in Jewish proselyte-baptism.Footnote 60 This was not in itself controversial, for Marshall too had accepted the characterisation of biblical baptism as rooted in the Jewish conversion process, which explained why its requirements were not documented in the New Testament, whose first readers would all have had first-hand knowledge of it.Footnote 61 Lightfoot’s contribution, however, was to incorporate Tombes’s characterisation of the Abrahamic covenant as containing both ‘evangelical’ and ‘civil’ elements into his justification for paedobaptism.Footnote 62
Whilst accepting that the roots of the baptismal rite lay in conversion to Judaism, such conversions, according to Lightfoot, were civil, not religious in character. Whilst Tombes had argued that the essence of proselyte baptism was its signifying the entry of the proselyte into the ‘profession of Judaism’, Lightfoot claimed that its greatest significance lay in its simulating a ‘re-birth’ into a new religion.Footnote 63 Through the Jewish conversion process, a Gentile was re-born as a Jew and a slave re-born as a freeman.Footnote 64 In fact this notion of proselytical re-birth was taken so literally that Maimonides had ruled that a special prohibition had to be introduced such that a brother and a sister who had both converted to Judaism could not marry according to Jewish law.Footnote 65
For Lightfoot, as for Marshall, the Law did allow for the conversion of children as per the Talmudic principle of the permissibility of procuring a benefit for one’s fellow without his knowledge. Jewish status, when conceived as a benefit, could thus be procured on behalf of a minor.Footnote 66 Proselyte baptism, contrary to Tombes’s assertions, therefore was not so much the sign of a ‘profession made’ but a physical testament to a spiritual rebirth, which could be consented to on behalf of a minor.Footnote 67 Christian baptism, for Lightfoot, was rooted in this notion of rebirth through ritual immersion. In baptism, one was reborn to a new inheritance, to the kingdom of heaven.Footnote 68 For the first Christians, baptism had an even more fundamental significance than this, however, for not only were they coming into a new inheritance, but they were renouncing their former religion, be that Judaism or paganism.Footnote 69 This conception of the relationship between the first Christian baptisms and baptism as it was administered in his own day forced Lightfoot to revisit the revised covenant theology paradigm that Tombes was operating within which distinguished sharply between the foedus promissum of the old covenant and the foedus promulgatum of the new. This was a framework within which Lightfoot could operate comfortably, for, as a Reformed Protestant, he understood the coming of Christ to have entailed the renunciation of ‘the doctrine of justification by the works of the law’.Footnote 70 This was the inheritance that the first to be baptised as Christians were renouncing. Children born of Christian parents who had never held firm to this doctrine did not renounce it through baptism. The Church had therefore to evolve a new initiation rite appropriate to them since they had known no other religion.Footnote 71 Infant baptism for early modern Christians then was not biblical baptism, he conceded, but rather an ablution which signified the washing away of sin ‘by the blood of Christ’.Footnote 72 Biblical baptism entailed ‘a deeper and more stricter washing’ which aimed at removing the stain of a former ‘religion, namely Judaism or paganism’.Footnote 73 The harshness of biblical baptism, Lightfoot argue, should not be imposed on those born into the faith, who had no prior religion to be cleansed of.Footnote 74 Paedobaptism, for Lightfoot, observed ‘in a triple way the history of the New Testament’.Footnote 75 It recounted the evolution of God’s relationship to his chosen people, through Jewish conversion, John’s baptisms and Christian baptism thereafter. Paedobaptism signified the entry of a child into this divine inheritance.Footnote 76
Lightfoot’s clever reconceptualisation of the religious significance of infant baptism would prove influential. It demonstrated, in the first instance, that this was a rite of great antiquity and, in the second, that neither the circumcisions recorded in the Old Testament nor the baptisms recorded in the New supplied a model to be followed by contemporary Christians. It is important to note, however, that the historical evidence that Lightfoot used to build his case was sorely lacking. Whilst he was able to prove that there was a legal rationale for the conversion of a child, this did not actually demonstrate that which he claimed it did, namely that ‘paedobaptism in the Jewish Church, for the admission of proselytes, was so well known, customary, and frequent – indeed, almost nothing was more known, customary and frequent’.Footnote 77 The conversion of children in Jewish law is actually a very complex matter, for such conversions are only considered binding once the child in question reaches the age of majority, at which point he can decide for himself whether or not he wishes to live out the rest of his life as a Jew. The Talmudic principle upon which Maimonides, whom Lightfoot cited on this point, relied to make the case for a conversion of a minor is derived from the Gemara in Ketuboth 11a where the ambiguous status of a minor convert is thus spelled out. Whilst it is conceivable that Lightfoot himself was not aware of this Gemara, it is cited in full in Selden’s De jure naturali and therefore his decision not to mention it was obviously deliberate.Footnote 78 That Lightfoot could get away with this sleight of hand is, once again, indicative of both the authority he projected as an expert Hebraist and of the rarity of that authority.
An eighteenth-century Baptist confronts Lightfoot’s legacy
The great enthusiasm with which Lightfoot’s account of infant baptism was taken up demonstrates, first and foremost, the surprising authority that had accrued to Jewish sources and those who studied them by the middle of the seventeenth century in England. It also points to the grave threat that anti-paedobaptism was believed to pose during the English Interregnum and beyond, such that new arguments from relatively unfamiliar sources were quickly integrated into the mainstream. Whilst the contemporary historian should not be convinced by Lightfoot’s arguments, his fellow paedobaptists greatly appreciated his rooting of infant baptism in the origins of Christianity, which could be reconstructed from Jewish legal sources. The deeply-felt need to defend infant baptism was on account of the dangerous implications for church membership implicit in the anti-paedobaptist position. As John Gale pointed out, to dismiss the case for infant baptism was to accept that, as things stood, most so-called ‘Christians’ were ‘not rightly initiated’ into the body of the Church and as such had ‘no Title therefore to Church-Membership’.Footnote 79 For this reason, despite their limitations and even their broad incomprehensibility, Lightfoot’s arguments, which were believed to be deeply rooted in the authoritative ‘Jewish writers’, were given pride of place in the paedobaptist’s armoury. As one letter of 1657 from William Outram to Lightfoot indicates, Lightfoot was understood to have ‘reconciled’ many to the necessity of infant baptism.Footnote 80 George Bright, in his Life of Lightfoot (1684), would list his ‘proving Infants Baptism against the Antipaedobaptists of those times’ as among his crowning achievements.Footnote 81 William Wall’s History of infant baptism (1705) would further enshrine Lightfoot’s ‘historical’ justification for paedobaptism for generations.Footnote 82 This work, which would remain in print until well into the 1890s, was, according to Gill, the basis upon which paedobaptists felt they could ‘swagger’ into debates with Baptists, entirely confident that history was on their side.Footnote 83 Their case rested, however, on the attribution of great authority to the post-biblical Jewish legal tradition, which had been codified in ‘the Talmuds’ some ‘three or four hundred years after the time of John the Baptists, Christ, and his apostles’.Footnote 84 For Gill, the weakness of the anti-paedobaptist cause in England had been entrenched by the Hebraists of the seventeenth century whose arguments relied upon the historical authority of Jewish law.Footnote 85
This article has revealed the problems with Lightfoot’s arguments to have been far more serious than those pointed to by Gill, whose primary accusation against his illustrious forebear was one of anachronism. Lightfoot has been shown to have misrepresented evidence drawn from Jewish sources in order to convince his audiences of the strengths of the paedobaptist position.Footnote 86 This demonstrates that the status accorded to the Jewish legal tradition at this time was far greater than has previously been appreciated despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that few had the facility to truly engage with it.
Lightfoot has also been shown to have been a profoundly creative thinker, whose facility with the Talmudic literature powerfully served the cause of orthodoxy in England. Tombes’s application of the revised covenant theology framework of Cameron and Ball, which distinguished sharply between the foedus promissum and the foedum promulgatum, had significantly undermined the case for infant baptism. Through his careful manipulation of Jewish sources, Lightfoot was able to employ this very same framework to strengthen the case for the same. Whilst recent scholarship has alerted us to the significance of Hebraism for the development of political thinking in this seventeenth century, this does not go nearly far enough. The Westminster Assembly, as Chad van Dixhoorn has shown, devoted much more time to questions of theology than of ecclesiology, which is not reflected in the extant literature.Footnote 87 This article has revealed the work of the Assembly to have had profound implications for the development of the case for paedobaptism in England. At the heart of this work lay the rediscovery of the post-biblical Jewish legal tradition, which was authoritatively represented in the Assembly by Selden and Lightfoot. This enterprise, in Lightfoot’s own words, began with the recognition that ‘all the books of the New Testament were written by Jews, and among Jews, and addressed to and concerning Jews’.Footnote 88 Whilst existing accounts of ‘Christian Hebraism’ have showcased the vast range of works that such thinking gave rise to, they have yet to reveal just how mainstream it had become by the middle of the seventeenth century.Footnote 89 Lightfoot’s arguments for infant baptism from Jewish sources proved difficult to contradict on account of their obscurity, though, if anything, much to Gill’s frustration, this only served to enhance their authority. The frequency with which Lightfoot would be cited on this issue, and many more, over the course of the eighteenth and even nineteenth centuries is testament to the weight that Jewish legal sources carried in theological debate far beyond the elite circles of ‘Christian Hebraists’ with which we are familiar. Lightfoot’s contributions to Assembly debates made plain to him the utility of Jewish sources for Christian theological exegesis, which was the cause to which he dedicated his subsequent and hugely effective scholarly career.
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