THE NEW TESTAMENT: SOCINIANS, GNOSTICS AND PLATONISTS

A quarter-century or more separates these episodes in Le Clerc's authorial and editorial career from his publication of the Historia Ecclesiastica duorum primorum a Christo nato saeculorum in 1716. The latter need not have been a climactic work in his active life, and it is Gibbon's interest in it, and consequently our own, which accounts for its position in this study. A central role in Le Clerc's career may have been played by an incident about 1694, when – being dissatisfied with his position in the Netherlands – he wrote to Gilbert Burnet, now bishop of Salisbury, whom he had known in Amsterdam in the mid-1680s, to enquire whether he might hope for an academic or ecclesiastical appointment in England. Burnet was obliged to reply – as, after the incident of the Naked Gospel, Le Clerc should have known for himself – that his reputation as a Socinian or some other kind of anti-Trinitarian was far too well established for any such move to be possible. Le Clerc responded by composing a commentary on the first chapter of the Gospel according to St John, in which he sought to explain in what sense he was a Trinitarian – though we know that he thought the doctrine of consubstantiality far from clearly established in the ante-Nicene church. He carefully dated this commentary, which he more than once republished, from Amsterdam between April and September of 1695.