William Jones

William Jones was born at Gresford, Wrexham in Wales, the son of William and Mary Jones, and raised at Poulton, Cheshire. He started work as an apprentice in Chester in 1780, and encountered a Baptist congregation there. In 1782–3 he moved to London, where he was in the congregation of Abraham Booth, returning to Chester after about a year.

When Archibald McLean preached in Chester for some weeks in autumn 1786, Jones was drawn to him and was baptised by him. HIs congregation joined the Scotch Baptists. In 1786 he also married Maria or Elizabeth Crane, daughter of Thomas Crane of his congregation in Chester. He moved to Liverpool as a bookseller in Castle Street, in 1793, buying the business from his brother-in-law, and publishing McLean's work A Defence of Believer-Baptism. At this period he held religious services in his home, possibly also attending those led by Samuel Medley. In the late 1790s McLean set up a Liverpool congregation in Lord Street, with John Richard Jones of Ramoth. William Jones was an elder of this church.

In 1812 Jones moved to London, working as a bookseller. He was either a minister or elder of the church in Windmill Street, Finsbury, for the rest of his life. By the late 1820s, suffering financial troubles, Jones was taking on work writing books for the bookseller and publisher Thomas Tegg, who had built up a significant business printing and selling abridgements of popular works. The popular work was not his most successful material however: 'His publications included a Life of Abraham Booth (1808), a Biblical Cyclopædia (1816); a Dictionary of Religious Opinions (1817), a Christian Biography, 1829, and later biographies of Adam Clarke, Rowland Hill, and Edward Irving. He also edited the works of Archibald McLean and Samuel Stennett. In 1846, his Autobiography was edited and published by his son. Jones also edited a series of periodicals: Theological Repository (1800) and Christian Advocate (1809), and after he moved to London the New Evangelical Magazine and New Baptist Magazine (ceased publication in 1826). Others included the The Baptist Miscellany and Particular Baptist Magazine (which ran for six years from 1827).

The American art student Peyton C. Wyeth who formed Jones's contact with Alexander Campbell in the mid-1830s after Jones published lectures on the Apocalypse (1829). His Millennial Harbinger introduced the theories of Alexander Campbell, around 1835: though he later broke with the Campbellites, his representation of their ideas assisted in the foundation of the Churches of Christ in the UK, drawing on constituents from Scots Baptist churches.

Jones published material which circulated strongly among the Scotch Baptists, emphasizing restorationism, and opposed established religion. His millennial and Scottish base perhaps were reflected in his interest in Edward Irving, and he shared with Irving the millennialism which emerged from the titanic wars against Napoleon. These wars, both in their onset, course and resolution, also ejected significant numbers of Italians and others into the intellectual tidelands of relatively free and liberal London. The first issue of Jones History of the Waldenses emerged in 1812, was reissued in expanded edition in 1816, and reprinted again in 1817 as A History of the Christian Church. This was picked up by Baptist organizations (such as the Freewill Baptists), was republished both in the USA and the UK, and went through a number of editions. The book was compiled out of Mosheim, Milner and the other standard works, in order to present a more approachable version to those 'whose views of the gospel of Christ, and of the nature of His kingdom in this world, happen to coincide pretty much with his own.' (Jones 1816: iii-iv) In addition to the French sources (such as Brez's Histoire des Vaudois ou des habitans des vallées occidentales du Piémont, Paris 1796), Jones also had access to oral sources - the Italian intellectual diaspora in London, for example, included booksellers such as the Rolandi brothers - a former Napoleonic officer and civil engineer from a large family based in mountainous Quarona north of the valleys, Giovanni Battista Rolandi left Italy after the Restoration, and set up as a bookseller in London. His brother, Pietro joined him in 1821 - together they would publish a range of Italian works, including a translation of the Book of Common Prayer in Italian, and act as intermediaries for British intellectual interests in Italy. (Rossi 2017)

For Jones, mainline Protestant historiography had been corrupted by the 'mystery of iniquity' which was the Catholic Church and its narrative of itself. He held that the Albigensians were merely a branch of the Waldensian movement in southern France, subjected to a 'disgusting caricature' by the Catholic Church imposed upon the past by 'Papal slander' and 'Protestant credulity' (Jones 1816: vi). In later editions, he identified the Waldensians and Albigensians as the 'two witnesses' spoken of in the Book of the Revelation, which were finally to be overcome and killed by the Beast (Rev. xi.7). (Jones 1837: ix) Ironically, he found Hume's skeptical History of England to be a more credible source. He dismissed common approaches to organizing church history (such as apostolic succession) as 'a mere fiction', an effectively untraceable imposition on history which enabled the magisterial churches to replicate their domination. Rather, the organizing principle of the history of the Church was the work of God's redemption among the elect. This, he proposed, was to be traced from the Novatians, through Arius, the Paulicians, the Cathars, the Paterines to the Waldensians, up until the Reformation. This argument found a ready audience - Jones declared himself well pleased in the second, expanded edition, that it 'excited an unusual degree of interest in the minds of Christians of every denomination', and set about expanding the dissenting contributors to the history of the Church (the Lollards, for example, and the Hussites). (Jones 1816: xvi) A popularizer who was keen to sell books, Jones gestured importantly to the Waldensians as a solution to various historical problems in Protestant thought, and others (such as Sims, Gilly and others) would pick up his ideas and use them to support their own causes. Jones was not pleased with this, and wrote critically of Gilly's false assumptions and tendency to glide over the critical apparatus needed to truly interpret the Waldensian place in history. The Waldensians for Jones were a line of primitive Christianity which ended with the events of 1686, and was continued by his own Baptists and like believers.

Jones died in Islington on 21 January 1846, and was buried in the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground.

Notes

• Jones, J. Idwal. (1959). Jones, William (1762 - 1846). Welsh Biography Online.

• Jones, J. Idwal. (1946). William Jones, A Memoir (1946).

• Jones, William (1816), A History of the Waldenses, connected with a Sketch of the Christian Church from the Birth of Christ to the Eighteenth Century (London: Gale and Fenner).

• Jones, William (1837). The History of the Christian Church from the Birth of Christ to the XVIIIth Century. (Dover: Freewill Baptists; 5th edition)

• Jones, William (1846). Autobiography of the late William Jones, M.A. (London 1846).

• Lee, Sidney, ed. (1892). "Jones, William (1762-1846)" . Dictionary of National Biography. 30. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

• Murray, Derek B. "Jones, William". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15109. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

• Rossi, Federica (2017). 'Rolandi, Pietro', in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 88 (2017), https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/pietro-rolandi_(Dizionario-Biografico)/, accessed 3 May 2021.