¹ See The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–89), Locke to King, 1 Nov. 1703, letter 3364, vol. 8, p. 101; King to Locke, 4 Nov. 1703, letter 3367, vol. 8, p. 104; 16 Nov. 1703, letter 3382, vol. 8, p. 121.

² See Locke, Correspondence, letter 1357, vol. 4, p. 197; letter 1405, vol. 8, p. 28; also The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull et al., 7 vols (Cambridge: Published for the Royal Society at the University Press, 1957–77), letter 362, vol. 3, p. 147; letter 365, vol. 3, p. 152. In one of Locke's manuscripts (Bod. MS Locke c.28, fo. 88r) there is a diagram of Newton's schema of the apocalypse, and in Locke's interleaved 1648 Bible (Locke 16.25) there are ten annotations that bear the initials ‘IN’. Locke and Newton had an ongoing hermeneutical discussion involving the latest works of biblical criticism, textual criticism and controversial theological doctrines to be extracted from the Bible at a time when the historical criticism of the Bible began to make its mark on the intellectual scene. Both questioned, at least in private, the authenticity and, in some cases, the authorship of the received biblical text. See Champion, Justin A. I., ‘“Acceptable to Inquisitive Men”: Some Simonian Contexts for Newton's Biblical Criticism, 1680–92’, in Popkin, Richard and Force, James (eds), Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 77–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ The account of the two corruptions of scripture is printed in Newton, Correspondence, letter 357, vol. 3, pp. 83–122. The original of the letters is to be found in the New College Library, Oxford, MS 361/4 fos. 2–41. Newton also composed another letter concerning twenty-eight other corruptions in the Bible, but it is not known whether Locke ever received this. The full text of this letter was only published in 1961 and is printed in Newton, Correspondence, letter 359, vol. 3, pp. 129–42.

⁴ The Comma Johanneum was a clause contained in translations of 1 John published in the 3rd edn of the Textus Receptus (1522). Because of the widespread use of the Textus Receptus for translations (including that of the New Testament in the Authorised Version of 1611), the reading was widely disseminated. The reading containing the clause (in italics) is as follows: ‘For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one’ (1 John 5:7–8). In his theological notebook (Keynes MS 2, p. 19), Newton had noted that many ancient manuscripts did not include this clause, nor did many early patristic writers mention it, even though it would have served their ‘trinitarian’ purposes to have done so.

⁵ Locke, Correspondence, letters 1381, 1446, 1457, and 1465, vol. 4, pp. 248, 353–54, 376, and 387; also Newton, Correspondence, letters 382 and 384, vol. 3, pp. 192 and 195.

⁶ See Force, James E., William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 10–24Google Scholar, and passim. During the 1690s, esp., a considerable debate surrounded the meaning of the Trinity, and theologians themselves could not agree on its proper exposition. The debate became so contentious that King William III issued an order to stop preaching on the subject and to prosecute those who did. See John Higgins-Biddle, introduction to Locke, John's Reasonableness of Christianity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), p. lxviiiGoogle Scholar. And although the Toleration Act of 1689 had protected religious dissenters to a certain degree, there was still no protection for those who wrote against ‘the doctrine of the blessed Trinity’. In fact, the Act for the Suppression of Blasphemy and Profaneness of 1698 restricted gainful employment for those who ‘by printing, teaching, or advisedly speaking, denied any one of the persons of the Holy Trinity to be God’. See Brewster, David, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1855), vol. 2, pp. 338–9Google Scholar. In Scotland, Thomas Aikenhead (1676–97) was tried under Scotland's Blasphemy Act and hanged on 8 Jan. 1697 for allegedly denying the Trinity.

⁷ Arianism is a christological view which takes its name from Arius, a fourth-century priest, who held the view that God the Father and Jesus the Son were not co-eternal. For Arius, Jesus was a divine being, but he was created by (and therefore inferior to) God. Arianism was embroiled in the theological controversies of seventeenth-century England, and often associated with Socinianism and Unitarianism (see Wiles, Maurice, Archetypal Heresy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 62–164Google Scholar). For Newton's connection to Arianism, see Westfall, Richard S., Never at Rest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 315Google Scholar; Force, James E., ‘Sir Isaac Newton, “Gentleman of Wide Swallow”?: Newton and the Latitudinarians’, in Force, James E. and Popkin, Richard H. (eds), Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 119–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mandelbrote, Scott, ‘“A Duty of the Greatest Moment”: Isaac Newton and the Writing of Biblical Criticism’, British Journal of the History of Science 26 (1993), pp. 281–302CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, pp. 77–93.

⁸ See Bod. MS Locke c.43, pp. 12–13, printed in Nuovo, V., John Locke: Writings on Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 23–4Google Scholar. The preponderance of scriptural evidence supports ‘Non Trinitas’ as opposed to ‘Trinitas’, but Locke draws no conclusion.

⁹ See Edwards, John, Socinianism Unmask'd (London, 1696), p. 82Google Scholar; Stillingfleet, Edward, The Bishop of Worcester's Answer to Mr. Locke's Second Letter (London, 1696), pp. 4–5Google Scholar, and Milner, John, An Account of Mr. Lock's Religion (London, 1700), pp. 33–8Google Scholar.

¹⁰ See Locke's Letter to the Bishop of Worcester, in The Works of John Locke in Ten Volumes (London, 1823), vol. 4, p. 4; Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, Works, vol. 4, pp. 195–208.

¹¹ Over a decade earlier while in France, Locke had noted in his journal that he had seen some early manuscripts which did not include 1 John 5:7. See Lough, John, Locke's Travels in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), pp. 252–3Google Scholar.

¹² Locke, Correspondence, letter 3275, vol. 7, pp. 772–3. During this visit, Locke also told Newton that he was working on his commentary to Romans; see also Francis Limborch to Locke, 29 Dec. 1702, letter 3233, vol. 7, p. 729.

¹³ Praising Newton's understanding of theology and scripture, Locke once wrote to his cousin that ‘Mr. Newton is really a very valuable man not onely for his wonderful skill in Mathematicks but in divinity too and his great knowledg in the Scriptures where I know few his equals’. Locke, Correspondence, Locke to King, 30 April 1703, letter 3275, vol. 7, p. 773.

¹⁴ Locke, Correspondence, letter 3287, vol. 8, p. 1; also Newton, Correspondence, letter 664, vol. 4, p. 405. These papers have not been found, and the one comment that does survive in Newton's letter concerned Locke's paraphrase of 1 Cor. 7:14. Locke did not substantially alter his paraphrase, but clarified it somewhat by inserting the phrase ‘as to his issue’ in the manuscript, probably as a concession to Newton's comment. See the manuscript note in Arthur W. Wainwright's edn of Locke's A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 1:337.

¹⁵ Locke, Correspondence, letter 3287, vol. 8, p. 2; also Newton, Correspondence, letter 604, vol. 4, p. 406.

¹⁶ Yahuda Var. 1, Ms Newton, 8.2, fo. 4. The Newton manuscripts are at the National and University Library in Jerusalem and the author wishes to thank the library and staff for their kind permission to reproduce this manuscript. The Yahuda collection contains the largest collection of Newton's theological material, though very little of it has been published. For a history of the manuscripts, see the articles by Richard Popkin, ‘Newton as a Bible Scholar’, and ‘Newton and Fundamentalism II’, in Force and Popkin (eds), Essays on the Context of Newton's Theology, pp. 103–18 and 165–80, and ‘Plans for Publishing Newton's Religious and Alchemical Manuscripts, 1982–1998’, in Force, James E. and Hutton, Sarah (eds), Newton and Newtonianism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), pp. 15–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Scholarly research on the issue of Locke's trinitarian sympathies is inconclusive at this point. In his introduction to Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity, Higgins-Biddle suggests that Locke's views on the Trinity ‘remain unknown’ (p. lxxiii). John Marshall, in his comprehensive survey of Locke's religious views, John Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), makes a strong case based on circumstantial evidence that Locke personally rejected the idea of the Trinity in the 1690s (pp. 323–451), and develops these ideas further in ‘Locke, Socianism, and Unitarianism’, in Stewart, M. A. (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), pp. 111–82Google Scholar. Victor Nuovo, however, argues that Locke was probably more sympathetic to the trinitarian position in ‘Locke's theology, 1694–1704’, in Stewart (ed.), English Philosophy in the Age of Locke, pp. 183–216. Arthur Wainwright briefly summarises the evidence in his introduction to A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 37–9.

¹⁸ Marshall, John Locke, pp. 424–5.

¹⁹ Wainwright, Paraphrase and Notes, vol. 2, p. 768.

²⁰ See Marshall, John Locke, p. 424.

²¹ Ibid, p. 425, n. 21.

²² As Marshall writes, ‘at no point in the Paraphrase did Locke give any support for the Trinity’ (ibid., p. 425). In a theological note to his commentary on Eph. 1:10, however, Locke does affirm the pre-existence of Christ before the rebellion of Satan and his angels. ‘‘Tis plain in Sacred Scripture’, Locke writes, ‘that Christ at first had the Rule and Supremacy over all, and was Head over all’ (Paraphrase and Notes, vol. 2, p. 616). But while the argument in favour of the pre-existence of Christ does indicate that Locke was not a Socinian, it does not necessarily imply that he was a trinitarian (Marshall, John Locke, p. 426). Newton himself also believed in the pre-existence of Christ, but the Son was not co-eternal or co-equal with the Father.

²³ There is always the possibility that Locke received the very manuscript which is currently in the Yahuda Collection, but that is doubtful. There would have been no reason for Locke to have returned the manuscript fragment to Newton unless, of course, it is included in the ‘little packet sealed up and directed to Mr. Newton’ that Locke instructed Peter King to deliver in his final days (Correspondence, letter 3647, vol. 8, p. 415).

²⁴ See Keynes MS 9, p. 1; Martin Bodmer MS, ch. 1, p. 17, and ch. 14; and esp. the discussion in Wiles, Archetypal Heresy, pp. 82–6, from which the quotes are taken.

²⁵ See the Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. Higgins-Biddle, p. 114. Elsewhere in the Reasonableness, Locke equates the ‘Son of God’ with ‘the Messiah’ (see pp. 27–8, 34, 36, 40, 60).

²⁶ Ibid., p. 113, and Bod. MS Locke e.2, fo. 3r; also Wainwright, Paraphrase, vol. 2, p. 702.

²⁷ Both Edwards and Limborch criticised Locke here for specifying that Adam and Christ were sons of God in the same sense. See Reasonableness, ed. Higgins-Biddle, p. 113, n. 5.

²⁸ Wainwright, Paraphrase and Notes, p. 487, n. §. Wainwright's explanatory note to this passage points out that Locke is careful not to imply that Jesus becomes the son of God only at the resurrection (ibid., p. 769), nevertheless, for Locke as for Newton, the resurrection is ‘the most eminent and characteristical marke’ of the sonship of Christ. It is also significant that Locke had originally described the distinguishing characteristics of Jesus’ ‘sonship’ as his ‘<miraculous> conception and birth of a virgin; and his resurrection from the dead’ (MS Locke e.2, fo. 4r; Wainwright, Paraphrase and Notes, p. 703). In the final version, Locke drops the virgin birth as a mark of the son of God and only mentions the resurrection and immortality. Though one cannot say for certain that this change was due to Newton's influence, the change is consistent with Newton's comments.