On the fourth of March, 1729, Thomas Woolston appeared at Guildhall before the Court of King’s Bench. Formerly a Fellow of Sidney College, Cambridge, he stood answerable to four distinct informations, each concerning a treatise devoted to the miracles of Jesus. The prosecution did not censure him merely for having written upon matters of religion: it maintained that his literal readings reduced the Gospel narratives to absurd fables, and that his raillery transformed Christ into a juggler or an impostor. Woolston, for his part, averred that he sought to vindicate the Gospel by expounding it after an allegorical manner.
The first trial opened with the arguments of the King’s counsel: Woolston had once been a learned divine, yet his books exhibited the miracles as romances and tissue of contradictions, rather than holding them forth as proofs of divinity. They reproached him, in particular, with having wrested a passage of Saint Augustine concerning the Transfiguration. The defence did not contest that Woolston had published the work. It disputed the criminal intent: the text professed an intention to honour Jesus, and explained that divers passages were to be understood as figures or prophecies rather than in their literal sense. It cited, to this end, Origen, Hilary, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, Theophylact, and Erasmus. The prosecutor replied that this muster of authorities could not mend his translation of Augustine, which he held to be corrupt. He likened the defence to the case of a seditious libeller who should subjoin “God save the King” upon his final page: a profession of piety, said he, could not alter the tenor of the foregoing leaves.
Counsel then directed that the passage be read wherein Jesus expels the buyers and sellers from the Temple. Woolston deemed it hard to conceive that one man, even armed with a scourge of small cords, could have routed a multitude that contained none of his disciples. He conceded that one might suppose a terror struck by divine power, yet asked why Jesus should wax wroth against a place he knew to be doomed to destruction. The prosecutor presented these inquiries as a derision of Christ’s authority; the defence insisted they served only to demonstrate that the relation was not to be taken literally.
The discourse proceeded thence to the devils cast out of the possessed and driven into a herd of swine, to the Transfiguration, and to the turning of water into wine. Touching the episode of the swine, Woolston inquired why the possessed dwelt among the sepulchres, and whether the inhabitants of that country had truly kept beasts which the Jews did not eat. He maintained that such particulars cast doubt upon a literal reading. Touching the Transfiguration, which he pronounced dark and obscure, he asked how the Apostles had heard a voice from heaven, and adverted to the stratagems of mountebanks. The King’s counsel perceived therein a design to turn the Gospels into mockery; the defence invoked the Fathers of the Church and their allegorical interpretation.
Thomas Tuskin testified that he had purchased the first book directly from Woolston, at his lodgings in the Old Jewry, for one shilling. The defence conceded the publication; the dispute turned entirely upon the sense and the tone. At the close of this first hearing, the jury found him guilty of having written, printed, and published the book. The jurors, sworn anew, were to hear further extracts, yet they would confront the selfsame question: where did allegorical exposition end, and where did outrage begin?
In the second discourse, Woolston returned to the miracles of healing, charging the Evangelists first with failing to specify the malady of the woman who had suffered an issue of blood for twelve years; she might, he wrote, have had no more than a slight bleeding. Seeing that she pressed through the crowd, he insinuated she could not have been so grievously sick, and then suggested that the staunchness of the blood might have hastened her end. He mocked, moreover, a virtue which, by his account, departed from Jesus with such facility. The woman bowed down for eighteen years became under his pen an imaginary invalid; touching the Samaritan woman, he made merry over the expectation of a fortune-teller, and asked why men should have travelled out of their way to consult Jesus, whom he thus likened to a conjurer. These lively instances fed the second trial, wherein the defence appealed to allegory whilst the Crown saw only a profanation of sacred things. The jurors found him guilty of this second publication. Woolston extended his strictures to all the cures: for want of determining the degree of infirmity, the narratives might, in his view, be attributed to nature or to the skill of a chirurgeon. The restoration of missing limbs would have constituted a sign far less easily explained away.
In the third treatise, Woolston turned his attention to the blighted fig-tree and the cripple of Bethesda. He compared the conduct of Jesus to the fury of a man whose dinner is not ready—a man who oversets chairs and stools because his meal tarries. He asked, furthermore, where Judas was, who had the bag and the provision. At Bethesda, beside the pool where the sick lay waiting, he suggested that the man who had kept his bed for thirty-eight years was afflicted chiefly with sloth, and that the angel came down, perchance, merely to wash himself. These images, rehearsed at the bar, provoked the indignation of the King’s counsel. They maintained that the author did not merely advance an interpretation, but diminished the compassion and the power of the miracles. The jury delivered a third verdict of guilty.
The fourth information concerned the healing of the man born blind and the marriage in Cana. Woolston compared the miracle of the blind man to the application of a remedy, likening Jesus to an empiric who succeeds without any knowledge of anatomy. He cited Sir William Read, a mountebank of no scholarly breeding, who had cured, by his reckoning, thousands of distempered eyes; he inquired whether Read or Jesus had healed the greater number. Touching the wine, he bantered upon the circumstance that the guests had already well drunk. The jurors were sworn a fourth time; they found him guilty of having published this volume likewise.
The court sentenced Woolston to pay a fine of one hundred pounds, to suffer one year’s imprisonment, and to give security for his good behaviour during the remainder of his life. He was bound in his own recognisance for two thousand pounds, with two sureties of one thousand pounds each, or four of five hundred. The publication, which his counsel had not denied, thus recoiled upon him at every reading. The shilling paid by Tuskin had established the sale of the first volume; the passages read aloud before the court had converted the matter into one of blasphemy. Woolston had sought to enforce another manner of reading the miracles.