Some students of Handel's works, observing the connection in the late eighteenth century between the growth of Methodist choral societies and the popularity of Handel's oratorios, and their subsequent association, have projected backwards and linked the writing of the oratorios with the rise of Methodism. There are two issues here. First, is there any concrete evidence that the principles of Methodism were carried into the texts of Handel's oratorios? Second, does there seem to be any similarity in the religious temper of the two expressions of religious faith? It is on the second that the link has been based; the first has not been considered.

The first can be answered with a simple negative; it is historically impossible. The ‘conversion’ of Whitefield and the Wesleys, from which the beginning of the Methodist movement can be dated, occurred in 1738. None of the oratorio librettists writing after 1738 whose religious position is known to us was a Methodist. Jennens was devoted to the cause of the Church of England and the acceptance of its doctrine. Miller was a clergyman and reputedly High Church. Morell, also a practising clergyman, campaigned, as his Three Choirs sermon attests, for the general adoption of choral services in parish churches (anathema to Wesley). Nor is it possible that the audiences for whom the oratorios were written were Methodist. Historians of the movement agree that the real growth of the society began only in the 1750s.