So, yeah, this is pretty obscure. There are really only two reasons for making a blog post like this. 1) It helps me compile my thoughts for use in a larger article or book some day. 2) Some seminary student may stumble across this and be able to use it as a starting point for a paper. That's about it. I'm not making any audacious claims; I'm just presenting some data that changes the way we look at a few of the early English Particular Baptist relationships. If anything, I might be integrating Henry Jessey more closely with the PB crowd (in full disclosure, I really like Henry Jessey; two of my favorite people from this era are Jessey and Tombes, and they aren't even considered "true" Baptists).
Reminder of what we have so far: John Tombes was pummeled by Westminster for asking them to debate infant baptism, and he turned to the early Baptists for advice. He received a written response signed by Benjamin Cox, Henry Jessey, and Hanserd Knollys with a postscript by Knollys confirming that a different congregation which included William Kiffin, Thomas Patient, and John Spilsbury also agreed with their position. We'll talk about the position itself in the next post (and its implications are fascinating); right now we're just concerned with the relationships. The best I can do with the date of their response is to limit it to either 1647 or 1648. Tombes connected with the who's who of early English Particular Baptists. In 1644, as the political winds were changing in England, a group of churches sharing convictions about believers' baptism and a Calvinistic soteriology decided to release a confession of faith as a way of demonstrating their reasonability (and to separate themselves from other baptistic groups that may have been a bit rowdier). They revised that confession in 1646 in response to some questions, particularly by Westminster divines. They re-re-released their confession in 1651 after further political developments, but we're mainly worried about the 1644 and 1646 versions. Here are the representatives that signed the confessions:
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