Scholar and Pastor
by Doug Kutilek
Throughout the 1600s and well into the 1700s, formally college-trained scholars were rare among English Baptists. Not because Baptists lacked men of intelligence or were particularly anti-intellectual, but because admission to Oxford and Cambridge was strictly limited to members of the Church of England, and Baptists as yet had no colleges of their own. One exception to this rule was Henry Jessey (1601-1663; the family name is also spelled Jacie and Jessy). But even he began as an Anglican, becoming a Baptist in mid-life.
Jessey’s father was an Anglican pastor, and he gave particular attention to the education of his son. At age 17, Henry was sent off to St. John’s College at Cambridge, where he spent six years, securing both the B.A. and M.A. degrees. His father died during these college days, and Jessey was quite poor, and only with the strictest personal economies did Henry have sufficient money for food and to “hire” (rent) textbooks. Besides the necessary fluency in Latin, he learned Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic/Syriac.
But much more important than the knowledge he acquired in his college days, at age 21 he came to a personal knowledge of Christ as Savior through the study of the Bible. Sensing a call to the ministry, he was ordained — as an Anglican priest — in 1627. For a decade, Jessey served as the private chaplain in the home of landed aristocrats of dissenting (non-Anglican) religious persuasion, during which time he devoted himself to studies to expand his already good knowledge of Scripture. One area of special study for him was ancient Jewish and rabbinic literature.
In 1633, he was expelled from the pastorate of an Anglican congregation because his Biblical convictions compelled him to refuse to adhere to the superstitious rituals prescribed by the Church. In 1637, he became pastor of an underground dissenting congregation in London, the famous Jacob-Lathrop church. While pastor there, his personal Bible study led him to the conclusion that immersion alone was the prescribed Biblical mode of baptism, and for several years he immersed all infants brought to him for baptism. During this same period, his church lost a growing number of members to the Baptists, and so Jessey examined further the Biblical subject of baptism, concluding that only those who had personally repented and believed in Christ were proper candidates for baptism. He testified to his faith in 1645 by being immersed by Hanserd Knollys. Jessey well-demonstrates A. T. Robertson’s aphorism, “Give a man an open Bible, an open mind, a conscience in good working order, and he will have a hard time to keep from being a Baptist.”
Jessey pastored for a time two churches simultaneously in the Southwark region of London (south of the Thames), one Anglican and one Baptist. Two centuries later, Spurgeon would pastor in this same neighborhood.
Like Apollos, Jessey was “mighty in the Scriptures,” especially the original Greek New Testament and Hebrew Old Testament, copies of which he constantly carried with him, and which he said were his sword and his shield. He was spoken of as a “living concordance,” since he could finish almost any quotation of Scripture started by another, and cite the proper reference, chapter and verse. The “great work” of Jessey’s life, in his own estimation, was a complete revision of the common English Bible, to bring it into closer conformity to the originals and to clear it of numerous places where it “spoke the language of prelacy” (Anglican ritual). He worked with other scholars in this project, including John Rowe of the University of Aberdeen. The work was completed before Jessey’s death, but never published. I have been unable to discover if his manuscript still exists.
Never marrying, Jessey devoted his time and resources to the Lord and people. He was constantly collecting funds for the relief of the poor (besides contributing from his own meager resources), providing nearly the whole support for some 30 families, and once collected several hundred pounds for the relief of the suffering poor Jews in Jerusalem. Jessey was premillennial by conviction, and believed that the conversion of the Jews was an essential condition before the Second Coming would occur. He personally observed a Saturday Sabbath, but did not impose his personal views on the churches he pastored.
With the Restoration of the Stuarts in the person of Charles II in 1660, and the Act of Conformity that followed, Jessey ran afoul of the law and was imprisoned (not his first confinement) under horrible conditions for several months. He was released five months before his death in September 1663.
Jessey’s mortal remains lie somewhere among the 120,000 dissenters buried in London’s Bunhill Fields, awaiting the resurrection of the righteous.