William Whiston (1667–1752) thought the charge against him had history backwards. He was accused of departing from Christian orthodoxy, but he believed the churches had departed from the first Christian faith. His rejection of the Trinity and defence of a subordinate status for the Son cost him his Cambridge professorship in 1710. A return to the original teaching had become an offence against the institution in which he taught.
The appeal to origins extended through his other work. In A New Theory of the Earth, comets helped explain the physical causes of biblical catastrophe. Whiston wanted the account of nature and the account of sacred history to describe the same world. Difficulties in interpreting one could therefore prompt revisions in how the other was understood, without persuading him to surrender either.
After his expulsion he continued to lecture, publish, and argue about prophecy. His translation of Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian, eventually reached readers far beyond those who followed his doctrinal disputes. Among the histories it made familiar was the account of early knowledge preserved on pillars against destruction. A person could encounter that story through a widely read English book without accepting Whiston’s explanation of the Trinity or his theory of comets.
His career shows how unevenly a body of religious learning could travel. His university career ended while publishers and readers gave parts of his work a much longer life. The controversy that mattered most to Whiston was not necessarily what later audiences remembered. The materials he translated entered other people’s investigations, where accounts of knowledge surviving a catastrophe could support new claims about the recovery of humanity’s earliest past.