On 10 November 1711 the antiquarian scholar and bishop of the non-juring Church of England Dr George Hickes wrote to Dr Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, Oxford, mourning the recent passing away of a mutual friend:

Hickes's tribute was a fitting one, for England's finest biblical and patristic scholar at the dawn of the eighteenth century was a Prussian. John Ernest Grabe, a Prussian and Lutheran by birth and English resident and Anglican by choice, was a member of the respublica litterarum sacrarum, a self-conscious community of European scholars exchanging ideas and developing strategies for excavating the Scriptures, patristic texts and the history of the Church.Footnote ² His publications on the Septuagint and the writings of the church Fathers earned him international recognition as one of the foremost biblical and patristic scholars of his age at a time when in England the status of Scripture was coming under forensic assault from Deists and freethinkers. A scholar in exile, Grabe researched, wrote and published his works in Oxford and London. Here, he strove to forge the intellectual and political networks to facilitate his studies and laboured to bring complex works of erudition to completion despite limited financial resources. He developed contacts and friendships amongst Low and High Churchmen, as well as with many non-jurors, but he was never entirely at ease within the fissured post-Glorious Revolution Anglican community. His own peculiar liturgical predilections prompted him to take communion outside the ecclesiastical establishment, but when invited by the church hierarchy he willingly took up his pen against the controversial Arian scholar William Whiston in defence of prescribed orthodoxy.

Grabe's arrival on English shores was prompted by a crisis of belief. Born in Königsberg in East Prussia on 10 July 1666, into a family steeped in Lutheran theological scholarship, Grabe had been educated, and subsequently taught at, the city's university. Here, he became embroiled in a long-running dispute involving the syncretist, eirenic theology of George Calixtus, the Lutheran professor of theology who had sought reconciliation amongst the warring Christian Churches based on the principles of the Apostles' Creed and the consensus quinquesecularis. Grabe's expression of fundamental doubts over the validity of the Lutheran confession, made shortly after the high-profile defection to Rome in 1694 of the distinguished Lutheran theologian Johann Philipp Pfeiffer, drew down upon his head inevitable denunciation and he was obliged to leave.Footnote ³

Grabe was initially drawn towards Roman Catholicism as the only universal Church but he turned away from tempting offers of financial security from Jesuit quarters following exchanges with his friend, Daniel Ernst Jablonski, court preacher at Berlin and from 1699 bishop of the Moravian Church. Jablonski, who had studied in Oxford in 1680, encouraged Grabe to consider the Anglican Church.Footnote ⁴ He also helped him to learn English and wrote to his friend Patrick Gordon, rector of Reading, in late 1696 and early 1697 asking him to look out for Grabe upon his arrival.Footnote ⁵ Grabe was received into the Anglican Church in the chapel of the English envoy in Hamburg during Lent 1697 and shortly afterwards crossed the waters, his journey from Prussia to England, and from Lutheranism to Anglicanism, complete.Footnote ⁶

Grabe resolved to lay down roots in Oxford, the pre-eminent seat of biblical learning in England, where Archbishop Laud's patronage and munificent donation of books and manuscripts had bequeathed a rich legacy.Footnote ⁷ Here, he became acquainted with John Mill, the Principal of St Edmund Hall, a popular refuge for those of non-juring principles. Mill had assumed the burden placed upon him by Bishop Fell to produce the finest edition of the Greek New Testament ever seen, a project that finally saw the light of day in 1707 after thirty years of Herculean labour.Footnote ⁸ Mill's political allegiances tended to vacillate, earning him the nickname Johnny Wind-Mill, but his commitment to scholarship was unwavering and he had helped introduce the young Richard Bentley onto the highest stage of European learning.Footnote ⁹ The non-juring antiquarian and acerbic diarist Thomas Hearne, who took a considerable interest in the activities of the Prussian scholar, believed that Grabe ‘had not much Greek’ when he arrived in England, ‘but, at length, by Dr. Mill's help, he became well versed in such Greek as is us'd in Ecclesiastical Writings’. There is no evidence to suggest that Grabe's linguistic skills were deficient, but he certainly valued Mill's patronage.Footnote ¹⁰

Grabe found life in Oxford intellectually stimulating but financially precarious. He abandoned plans to write a book demonstrating the superiority of the English Church, the standard homage of the convert, and resolved to embark upon an ambitious publishing programme of Latin and Greek patristic texts.Footnote ¹¹ Some financial support reached him from home and King William bestowed upon him an annual pension of £100, which was continued by Queen Anne.Footnote ¹² Grabe helped Jablonski in the collation of manuscripts of the Jewish commentator and philosopher Moses Maimonides. He received a benefice at Worcester College, and a chaplaincy at Christ Church between 1700 and 1703. However, an insufficient and erratic income would prove a constant impediment to the fulfilment of his scholarly ambitions throughout his time in England.Footnote ¹³

Nevertheless, by 1698 Grabe was ready to publish the first volume of the Spicilegium patrum, a projected series illustrating and commenting on patristic texts from the Apostolic and sub-Apostolic era. The seventeenth century had witnessed a flowering of patristic learning in England. Henry Savile, mathematician, Grecian and Provost of Eton, purchased Greek type especially for the production between 1610 and 1613 of a sumptuous eight-volume edition of the works of the fourth-century Greek Father and bishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, to acclaim from Catholic as well as Protestant Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1633 the royal librarian Patrick Young published the editio princeps of Clement of Rome's first epistle to the Corinthians from the Codex alexandrinus (see p. 663 below). In 1645 a landmark edition of the Ignatian epistles by Archbishop Ussher reached the bookshelves, comprehensively defended in 1672 by John Pearson. Patristic works flowed from the Oxford presses under John Fell's aegis, including the bishop's own edition of the works of Cyprian, whilst the second volume of William Cave's Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria appeared in the same year as Grabe's first offering. Only France could surpass the production of patristic learning witnessed in England.Footnote ¹⁵

Grabe, like Isaac Casaubon before him, wholeheartedly endorsed this intellectual recourse to the authority of the early Church by the English theological community. His work included extra-canonical and unorthodox texts. He recognised that the publication of heretical texts could be ‘harmful to malignant intellects’, but declined to be drawn into a broader debate on the issue, maintaining that the comprehension of such texts was invaluable to an historical appreciation of the times of primitive Christianity.Footnote ¹⁶ Grabe demonstrated a marked reluctance to discard texts widely regarded as spurious, offering for instance a highly equivocal judgement on the supposed correspondence between Christ and Abgarus, the seventeenth toparch of Edessa, recovered by the early Christian writer Eusebius of Caesarea, and widely regarded by Protestant and Catholic scholars as spurious. Grabe denied, on the one hand, that the case for forgery had been made, but, on the other hand, declined to pronounce the texts definitely genuine.Footnote ¹⁷

Leaving the status of some texts indeterminate, Grabe was definite on the importance of such material at a time when the ‘precious blood of Christians’ was repeatedly being spilled over ‘internal differences’. He pleaded for a return to the guiding light of the Apostolic and post-Apostolic age and the worship of ‘the primeval and purer Antiquity following the Holy Scriptures’, leaving, in matters of minor disagreement, ‘each to his judgement in the safe ecclesiastical and Christian peace’. The scholar had a clear role to play in producing such harmony. The writings of the ancient Fathers, stripped of false, superstitious and idolatrous accretions, provided excellent explication of the faith handed down in the Scriptures. If more could be diligently recovered from the fragments of lost treatises scattered around the world, hidden in forged books, lying in dusty libraries, light could be cast on still doubtful and controversial aspects of Christian faith and practice, and disputes could be resolved or avoided.Footnote ¹⁸ Grabe assured his readers that he would omit nothing in his collection from the earliest writers that could be found in the libraries of England and across the continent, and appealed directly to ‘all librarians everywhere and other learned men’ that if they had ‘some whole record or fragment of age gone by, hidden away’, or if they knew of such texts existing elsewhere, to communicate this knowledge.Footnote ¹⁹ The second volume was published in 1699, but the anticipated third volume failed to materialise, the first of Grabe's projects to remain unfinished.

Other publications, though, flowed from the presses. In 1700 Grabe published a new edition of the First apology of Justin Martyr, a text explaining to second-century pagans the theology, morality and history of Christianity, and dedicated it to Henry Aldrich, dean of Christ Church, gaining favourable European reviews.Footnote ²⁰ The following year he put out a handsome edition of Irenaeus’ Adversus haereses, the principal source for the identification of Gnostic sects and heresies within the early Church by one of its most eminent theologians.Footnote ²¹ In 1703 he edited a Latin edition of the works of George Bull, celebrated author of Defensio fidei Nicenae and shortly to become bishop of St David's, with his own annotations interwoven into the texts. This attracted a degree of criticism, attributable perhaps to a foreigner passing comment on one of England's most prominent theologians, but Hearne's suggestion that the edition was constructed without Bull's permission was unwarranted.Footnote ²²

Grabe also branched out into wider publishing activity, involving himself in a new edition of Ezekiel Spanheim's Dissertationes de praestantia et usu numismatum antiquorum, a monumental treatise on coins containing a synopsis of all significant European scholarship from the previous two centuries. In February 1703 Spanheim, now ambassador extraordinary from the king of Prussia to Queen Anne, contracted with the London bookseller Richard Smith to reissue the work, and Grabe acted as one of the witness signatories to their agreement.Footnote ²³ The following year Smith surrendered half his stake in the project to Grabe and one John Warner.Footnote ²⁴ It appears that Warner covered both his and Grabe's share of the costs, and Grabe did not repay his partner until October 1708.Footnote ²⁵ Grabe sought to maximise the book's sales, with at least 100 copies being sent to Holland, and further copies sent to a bookseller in Leipzig.Footnote ²⁶ Magdalen College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Dublin, were amongst the subscribers.Footnote ²⁷ However, the venture proved financially unrewarding and by the summer of 1708 the relationship between Grabe and Warner on the one hand, and Smith on the other, had broken down and the contract was annulled through the arbitration of the bookseller Samuel Keeble.Footnote ²⁸

Grabe also retained an interest in religious developments in his homeland, and was involved in a project to persuade Frederick i of Prussia to initiate far-reaching ecclesiastical and theological reform within his domains, including the reintroduction of episcopacy. The prime movers of this project were Johann Gottfried Leibniz and Grabe's friend Jablonski. Jablonski had met current and future luminaries of the English Church including Bishop Fell and William Wake during three years in England as a pupil of the Moravian bishop Adam Samuel Hartmann, who had secured from Charles ii two royal scholarships for prospective ministers of the Unitas Fratrum to study theology at Oxford.Footnote ²⁹ Grabe's edition of Irenaeus was dedicated to Elector Frederick i of Prussia, urging the monarch to reform the Church there doctrinally, liturgically and hierarchically according to the model of the early Church.Footnote ³⁰ The previous year Frederick had been persuaded to appoint bishops in his territories as part of a rapprochement with the English Church with encouragement from Archbishop Tenison and Bishop Lloyd of Worcester, who had ordained Grabe deacon in 1700. In 1704 Grabe was involved in the publication of the German translation of the English Prayer Book at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder.Footnote ³¹ In January 1705 Grabe wrote to Francis Atterbury, dean of Carlisle, whose somewhat tempestuous alliance with Robert Harley afforded him considerable political influence, imploring him to plead with Queen Anne to further the project. Grabe, along with many High Churchmen and non-jurors, wanted Prussian bishops to be consecrated by their English counterparts, continuing the apostolic succession. However, by the time of Grabe's death the project had become becalmed due to the lack of interest among Low Churchmen in England and apathy in Prussia.Footnote ³²

By 1705 Grabe was immersed in the study of the Septuagint, with the encouragement of Mill and Bishop Lloyd. His attention was focused on the Codex alexandrinus, a fifth-century manuscript of the Old and New Testaments. Sir Thomas Roe, James i's representative in Constantinople, had obtained this text from Cyril Lucaris, patriarch of Constantinople, after lengthy negotiation. It had been presented to Charles i in 1628.Footnote ³³ The acquisition of this manuscript provided European Protestantism with a potential rival to the pre-eminent Septuagint authority, the Codex vaticanus, which rested in the seat of papal power at Rome, and had formed the basis of the authoritative 1587 Sixtine edition.Footnote ³⁴

The fruits of this unexpected treasure, however, were slow to materialise, despite a growing appreciation among Protestant scholars of the riches that the eastern Church could yield up and Oxford's burgeoning reputation for Greek and oriental learning. Patrick Young's plans for a complete edition of the manuscript were never realised. Alexander Huish provided a collation of the New Testament portion for the London Polyglot Bible (1653–7), but the editor, Brian Walton, gave precedence to the Codex vaticanus as presented in the Sixtine edition.Footnote ³⁵ This represented an implicit acknowledgement that the case for the Codex alexandrinus had not yet been made; this was the challenge that Grabe took up on behalf of European Protestantism.

Early in 1705 Grabe published a bold statement of the position he intended to stake out, in the form of an extended letter to Mill, adopting the same form of acknowledgement to his scholarly patron as had Richard Bentley before him.Footnote ³⁶ He observed that the primacy of the Codex vaticanus, endorsed by Pope Sixtus v, had suffocated the study of the Septuagint in the Roman Catholic Church and restricted scholarly inquiry and research in Protestant countries. His investigations had revealed that, certainly as far as the Pentateuch was concerned, the Alexandrian manuscript was undoubtedly superior to the Roman with fewer faults, mutilations and interpolations.Footnote ³⁷

On 21 March 1705 Grabe entered into articles of agreement with the London stationer Thomas Bennet, who had published Adversus haereses, and Richard Smith to publish the first volume of the Septuagint – the Octateuch.Footnote ³⁸ Grabe agreed that Bennet and Smith would each receive a fourth part of the profits accruing from the publication, in return for which they would contribute accordingly to the expenses of production and advance Grabe the sum of £30. The print run would be 1,010 books in small paper folio, 110 in large paper folio, and 1,000 in octavo. The price to subscribers ranged from 10s. for the octavo version to 24s. for a large paper copy.Footnote ³⁹ Grabe agreed to prepare the copy for publication, and revise every sheet during printing. Humfrey Wanley was employed to regularly check the work against the Alexandrian manuscript. Wanley, whose interest in palaeography and Old English had secured him the patronage of Bishop William Lloyd, had stayed briefly at St Edmund Hall in 1695 before being invited by Arthur Charlett, Master of University College, to reside there. His catalogue of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the Librorum veterum septentrionalium, was published in 1705 as the second volume to George Hickes's Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus. Wanley had left Oxford in December 1700 under a cloud, his career advancement apparently blocked, and taken up residence in London, where he served as assistant secretary and later secretary for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, a group to which Grabe also belonged. The High Church Greek scholar, and later bishop of Oxford, John Potter, who shared Grabe's commitment to the authority of the primitive Church, also oversaw the final text.Footnote ⁴⁰

Grabe's enterprise, advertised from 1705 in printed proposals,Footnote ⁴¹ drew considerable interest from scholars in England and on the continent. Frederick of Prussia sent a present, and subscriptions came in from across Europe. Grabe sought to associate the clerical hierarchy with the work, and many were forthcoming, subscribing personally and recommending the work to their diocesans. The ‘Republic of Letters’ was an invaluable information highway for scholarly enterprise in the eighteenth century, and Grabe was well placed to reap the benefits. On the continent, Protestant and Catholic scholars rendered invaluable service by sending variant readings from manuscripts. Such scholars included the Benedictine Bernard de MontfauconFootnote ⁴² and the Swedish theologian and future archbishop of Uppsala Erik Benzelius.Footnote ⁴³ In a regular exchange the Dominican Michael Lequien provided variant readings and offered information on Latin, Greek, Arabic and Syriac manuscripts in the French Royal Library and in the collections of the Sorbonne.Footnote ⁴⁴ Perhaps most useful was Laurentius Alexander Zacagnius, Keeper of the Vatican Library, to whom Grabe sent a copy of the Spicilegium patrum. Zacagnius returned the favour, as the conventions of the ‘Republic of Letters’ required, sending Grabe a manuscript facsimile from the Codex vaticanus made upon the skin of an ox's gut, together with other variant readings.Footnote ⁴⁵ He passed on part of it to the Bodleian Librarian John Hudson, a friend who contributed £100 to Grabe's project.Footnote ⁴⁶ Grabe also acknowledged a debt to two Cambridge scholars, Thomas Richardson of Peterhouse, and Robert Canon of King's College. They made available to Grabe their transcriptions of manuscripts from the collection of Isaac Vossius, sold to Leiden University after his death in 1689.Footnote ⁴⁷

Hearne also took an interest in the design of the project. Grabe's preference was to include notes on the text at the bottom of each page, but as early as September 1705 Hearne was aware that Grabe had concluded that the costs would be too great and that the work would be printed without notes.Footnote ⁴⁸ A couple of days later Grabe showed Hearne a specimen of this design, with defects in the Alexandrian text supplied from other manuscripts, and parallel passages of Scripture indicated, but no annotations.Footnote ⁴⁹ It seems that Bentley as well as Mill offered advice on the project, though Hearne dismissed the Cambridge scholar as ‘a known Enemy to the University of Oxford’ and ‘no Friend to Mr. Grabe in this undertaking’, and described Mill and Bentley collectively as ‘no considerable Encouragers of other mens undertakings’.Footnote ⁵⁰ There is no evidence that Grabe ever doubted Mill's support, but the reflection on Bentley may not have been totally wide of the mark. Writing to Hearne in December 1707, Dodwell expressed his sorrow that the learned of Cambridge had taken against Grabe's work.Footnote ⁵¹

In an effusive dedication to Queen Anne, Grabe declared his eagerness to fulfil his duties both to the Church and the ‘Republic of Letters’ in presenting the sacred words of God. He enlarged upon the argument set out in the Epistola ad Millium, stressing that the Septuagint text was clearer than the often obscure Hebrew and providing a number of examples of how the Alexandrian manuscript was preferable to the Roman one.Footnote ⁵² He recognised that there were difficulties with the Alexandrian text, and provided a detailed list of these in each of the biblical books. There were a number of grammatical problems, involving the corruption of consonants, vowels and diphthongs, and he provided examples of some of the corrections he had printed. Bearing all this in mind, the text printed was that of the Alexandrian manuscript as it should be.Footnote ⁵³

Grabe treated with polite scepticism the tradition that Thecla the Martyr, the heroine of the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla who dedicated herself to a life of perpetual virginity after hearing the Apostle Paul preaching, had written the Alexandrine text, preferring Brian Walton's suggestion of a later composition around ad 396.Footnote ⁵⁴ On the broader value of the Septuagint, he recognised that some patristic authorities, notably Jerome, had expressed reservations. Jerome's criticisms of the Greek text, he suggested, were misguided, based either on his reliance on poor translations in his time, or a failure correctly to appraise the manuscripts. If the Septuagint, highly valued in the time of the early Church, could be rescued from the misinterpretations that had plagued its history, it was, he maintained, the version best able to help in the understanding of Moses and the Prophets. Therefore, it was essential for biblical scholars to collate the variant readings of the Greek manuscripts, and consult the ancient Fathers, Philo and Josephus, to try to restore the original text. Grabe wished that Isaac Vossius, who had controversially championed the Septuagint over the Hebrew text, were alive to undertake this work, but in his stead he laboured by the grace of God and the benevolence of good friends.Footnote ⁵⁵

The production of the multi-volume Septuagint edition required a constant flow of funds to keep the press busy, and once more Grabe's irregular income caused inconveniences. The printer Mary Hall informed him on 8 February 1708 that she was unable to release copies of the ‘Greek Bibles’ as he had requested, as she had yet to receive ‘the Remainder of the Money due upon the account of printing’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Grabe requested a detailed breakdown of the charges, which was forthcoming with the comment that it had been ‘so exact before that I thought you needed it not again’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The total bill was £180 1s, including composition, presswork, ‘necessaries’, carriage of paper and delivery of books to subscribers, of which £46 14s.6d. was outstanding.Footnote ⁵⁸ After further consultation, Mary Hall acknowledged that actually her accounts were inaccurate, but it was not until June 1709 that Mrs Hall accepted that Grabe had settled all amounts owed.Footnote ⁵⁹ Sales, meanwhile, were progressing slowly. On 8 April 1708 Grabe and Smith went over their accounts and agreed that the remaining copies of the Octateuch, estimated at around 1,200, should be divided up, three parts to Grabe, the fourth part to Smith.Footnote ⁶⁰ Grabe published the fourth and final part of the edition in 1709 out of sequence, but the second and third parts, prepared from his transcripts, were not published until after his death.Footnote ⁶¹ Grabe blamed the ‘unhappy Delay’ on the difficulties and expense of obtaining manuscript collations from overseas and other causes upon which he mysteriously declined to enlarge on the grounds that it would ‘reflect upon others’.Footnote ⁶² Nevertheless, the hiatus did enable Grabe to take up his pen in answer to the natural philosopher and theologian William Whiston.

Whiston, a graduate and fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, chaplain to John Moore, bishop of Norwich, and from May 1702 Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, had risen to prominence with the publication of his first work, A new theory of the earth, in 1696. In this millenarian-tinged cosmological work, blending Newtonian gravitational physics and new geological theories borrowed from John Woodward, Whiston argued that the biblical account of creation was conformable to reason and philosophy if a comet was the divinely ordained cause of the Flood.Footnote ⁶³ Works on biblical chronology and revelation followed, and in 1707 Whiston delivered the prestigious Boyle lectures, subsequently published.Footnote ⁶⁴

Around 1705 Whiston learned that his fellow Newtonian Samuel Clarke had come to doubt the accepted Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity, and that Newton was similarly inclined to Arian views.Footnote ⁶⁵ Whiston returned ad fontes, to the earliest Christian records, to investigate. His conclusion, as he recorded a few years later, was dramatic and uncompromising:

Whiston raised his Arian views with Grabe. He professed himself dissatisfied with orthodox defences of the accepted doctrine proffered by the Prussian and others, concluding that ‘if our best Writers for Orthodoxy have nothing but such poor, unintelligible, ill Grounded Evasions as these to support their Faith withal, ‘tis high time to lay them all aside; and to have our Recourse to the Original Primitive Texts and Testimonies themselves for Satisfaction’.Footnote ⁶⁷

In the summer of 1708 a Cambridge friend, Richard Allin, pressed Whiston to examine closely the Apostolical constitutions, in which the Clare scholar found confirmation of his Arian hypothesis.Footnote ⁶⁸ The text of the Apostolical constitutions had been unknown to the west until its rediscovery in Crete in the sixteenth century. A Latin epitome, published at Ingolstadt in 1546 by Carolus Capellus, revealed its contents to the learned of Europe. In 1563 the Jesuit Franciscus Turrianus edited the full Greek text, and Bovius composed a Latin translation, both published at Venice.Footnote ⁶⁹ The text purported to be a collection of ecclesiastical canons and regulations and bore the name of the first-century bishop Clement of Rome. Protestant and Catholic scholars almost universally regarded the work as suppositious, dating it between the fourth and sixth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁰

Whiston, however, acclaimed it ‘plainly sacred’, written by Clement at the command of the Apostles at Jerusalem and transmitted to the churches as a secret and sacred rule of faith to be passed down through the generations. He blamed its disregard by the ecclesiastical establishment on its ‘plain Christianity or Arianism’, and informed the archbishops of Canterbury and York that the Church was continuing to foist fraudulent doctrine on the Christian community.Footnote ⁷¹ Whiston composed an essay on the Constitutions, but Dr Laney, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, refused to grant it a licence. On a visit to London, Whiston showed the essay to Grabe.Footnote ⁷²

In 1709 Whiston pursued his unorthodox interpretation of early Church history in Sermons and essays upon several subjects, in which he blamed Christian discord on the failure of parties to follow Scripture and seek out the arbitration of the primitive Fathers, and held the clergy to account for condemning as heretics those who found in these primitive sources the beliefs of the earliest Christians.Footnote ⁷³ He expanded the scriptural canon to include the two epistles of St Clement, the Apostolic constitutions and the Shepherd of Hermas.Footnote ⁷⁴ He appended a Latin treatise on the Trinity ascribed to the third-century presbyter Novatian, without translation or commentary, that described Christ as possessing a derivative and subordinate divinity bestowed by the Father.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hearne described Whiston's collection as a ‘most pernicious Book’ that ‘would soon make a vast number of Hereticks and Schismaticks’.Footnote ⁷⁶ He had heard that Grabe had been invited by the archbishop of York to refute Whiston, but thought that Grabe, ‘having some odd Notions himself’, and being far from a ‘rational or a clear writer’, would produce ‘an indifferent piece of work’.Footnote ⁷⁷

In October 1710 Whiston's open opposition to the prescribed doctrine of the Trinity caused him to be deprived of his chair and banished from the university. As his tumultuous exit from Cambridge played out, his assault on orthodox patristics continued unabated. He published a work on the Ignatian epistles, claiming, in contradistinction to recent Protestant scholarship, that there were ten, not seven, genuine epistles and that the longer versions of them, not the shorter, represented the unadulterated originals. These were ‘in great measure deriv'd’ from the Apostolic constitutions. The shorter versions were abridgements, constructed in the fourth century by Athanasius, whom Whiston, like Newton, believed corrupted and forged Christian texts to support his novel determinations and pervert the true faith, particularly regarding the Trinity.Footnote ⁷⁸

In 1711 Whiston, now settled in London, published An historical preface to primitive Christianity reviv'd. He detailed the progress of his research and his interaction both with the ecclesiastical hierarchy and an array of scholars including Grabe. This included reports of conversations in which Whiston maintained that Grabe had owned ‘with great Zeal and Concern in general, the genuine Truth and Apostolical Antiquity’ of the Constitutions, and appeared ‘utterly at a loss’ for any Arian interpolations in the text. Moreover, Whiston had found his conviction reinforced by an examination of two Arabic manuscripts in the Bodleian Library relating to the Constitutions, which he had examined with the help of the oriental scholar and chaplain to Robert Harley, Simon Ockley.Footnote ⁷⁹ These, he claimed, contained the early Christian text entitled The doctrine of the Apostles, a work referred to in patristic sources, but subsequently lost. Whiston concluded that, whilst copies of the Constitutions had been placed in particular churches, an extract, the Doctrine, had been more widely promulgated. Whiston proposed a four-volume publication that would include a new edition of the Constitutions, in Greek and English, a translation of the Arabic Doctrine of the Apostles, and other texts. Whiston sought subscribers, tantalisingly inviting his readers to join a clandestine reading network by promising not to publish a list of those who took up his offer.Footnote ⁸⁰

Grabe's engagement with Whiston was by archiepiscopal invitation, but there was also a degree of personal animosity. His academic ardour was aroused by what he perceived as an ill-informed trespassing into learned territory by ‘a Presbyter only of the Church of England’. Moreover, he was incensed at the aspersion cast on his theological probity, in conversation and print, by the intimation that he agreed with Whiston regarding the antiquity and integrity of the Apostolic constitutions.Footnote ⁸¹ John Gagnier, a French convert from Catholicism whose scholarly activities in England were patronised by Archbishop Sharp and Bishop Lloyd of Worcester, assisted Grabe to read through the two manuscripts Whiston had identified. Grabe started by rebuking Whiston for not adhering to scholarly convention by identifying them to the academic community as part of the Huntingdon collection in the printed catalogue ‘under the general Number of 5830 and 5850’.Footnote ⁸² Together, they trawled through the collection of Arabic manuscripts and books in the Bodleian, looking for anything relating to The doctrine of the Apostles. As far as the manuscripts were concerned, their investigations led Grabe to conclude that the Arabic Didascalia was ‘nothing else but a Translation of the first six entire Books of the Clementine Constitutions’, with a number of idiosyncrasies attributable to the licence of the Arabic interpreter. He pronounced himself ‘perfectly amazed’ at the claims made on its behalf by Whiston as to its being the lost Doctrine of the Apostles, a text deserving of inclusion in the canon.Footnote ⁸³ Surely, Grabe postulated, out of ‘common Prudence and Piety’, Whiston would not have ventured upon printing a work as a sacred text without fully determining its nature and contents, lest he should ‘prostitute that Sacred Name and Authority to the Scoffs and Derision of Infidels’.Footnote ⁸⁴

Grabe accused Whiston of slipshod scholarship, claiming that he had been informed by such who had observed Whiston in the Bodleian Library that he had ‘spent there but a little Time, and very few Hours only about the two Manuscripts’. Ockley, seeking to extricate himself from a dispute in which he found himself on the wrong side, confirmed to Grabe that he had only provided Whiston with translations of chapter titles and occasional passages.Footnote ⁸⁵ He later stated that he had always disparaged the authenticity of the Arabic manuscripts, and thought it an unhappy consequence when someone undertook ‘to dictate to all Mankind in a Part of Learning which they are themselves entirely ignorant of!’Footnote ⁸⁶ Grabe agreed, suggesting that Whiston should restrain his desire to be considered great, and be more aware of his fallibility, when embarking upon matters of such consequence.Footnote ⁸⁷ Whiston countered by claiming that in order to preserve individual reputations and their collective deceit of the wider public, Grabe and his fellow scholars obeyed the dictates of prudence that ‘they must not own plainly in publick what they cannot but think and grant in private’.Footnote ⁸⁸

Whiston appealed to a reasonably educated, informed and interested audience, but not one that participated in the usually Latinate discourse of biblical criticism, and he drew Grabe reluctantly into addressing this broader strand of public opinion. Whiston deliberately sensationalised his claims, making bold announcements of his discoveries and inviting ‘establishment’ scholars to dispute with him, whilst proving adept at shifting his ground when they identified weaknesses in his argument. He sought to undermine anticipated hostile responses by portraying the ‘learned’ as a closed coterie perpetuating in public long-standing frauds regarding scriptural texts that they acknowledged as such in private. Grabe, less practised at addressing a non-academic audience, nevertheless appreciated the necessity of undermining the credibility of his opponent. He questioned his authority in addressing such matters, suggested that he lacked the temperament and knowledge to make balanced and informed judgements. He demeaned Whiston's scholarly credentials and working practices, intimating that he was unworthy of membership of the ‘Republic of Letters’. The vast majority of their readers would have been incapable of coming to an independent judgement as to the scholarly merits of their respective positions. Whiston was persuasive, but Grabe acquitted himself more creditably than Hearne had feared.

Although Grabe proved a willing defender of religious orthodoxy on behalf of his adopted confession, his personal relationship with the Church of England remained ambiguous. Deeply pious, and somewhat superstitious, Grabe observed a strict personal regimen, fasting regularly and reserving a tenth of his income for charitable purposes.Footnote ⁸⁹ Living, as he continually did, in restricted financial circumstances, he evidently knew many of those to whom he gave money – widows, young women with children, disabled soldiers and others struggling below the poverty line – and received a number of personal pleas for financial assistance. He also offered religious counselling to some, urging them to resist the evangelising of Catholic priests that had once nearly tempted him.Footnote ⁹⁰

Nevertheless, Grabe remained by choice on the fringes of the Anglican Church. It is unlikely that he received the sacrament in the Hamburg chapel in 1697 or ever participated in communion services according to the prescribed rites in England, despite having been ordained deacon.Footnote ⁹¹ He travelled to London on occasion to take communion with Edward Stephens, the liturgist and campaigner for moral reform, until Stephens's death in 1706. Stephens, nicknamed Father Stephens or Abbot Stephens by contemporaries on account of his strident piety, was one of the driving forces behind the Society for the Reformation of Manners in the 1690s. He was a vocal critic of the Anglican Church in his later years, accusing the establishment of formalism, a disinclination to combat vice and corruption and a misguided preoccupation with enforcing religious uniformity.Footnote ⁹²

Members of his small religious society gathered to take communion according to the rites of Stephens's own liturgy inspired in part by the Greek Church. Stephens, who claimed to have been admitted to Orthodox communion by Archbishop Neophytos of Philippopolis when he visited London in 1701, believed that the Anglican establishment had strayed from the liturgical models of the ancient Church. He argued that the liturgy contained in the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, drawn up by the ‘false prophet’ Archbishop Cranmer, was defective. He composed his own liturgies, one designed for public use and published in 1696, drawing on the first Book of Common Prayer of Edward vi's reign and the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637, and another for the private use of his congregation, borrowing substantially from the eighth book of the Apostolic constitutions.Footnote ⁹³ Grabe shared Stephens's admiration for the Greek Church and concurred with his judgement that the liturgy had been altered during the reign of Edward at the suggestion of foreign Calvinist divines. This alteration, unjustifiable in Grabe's opinion, revolved around removing the epiklesis, the ‘Taking away the Oblation or Sacrifice of Bread & Wine before Consecration, & turning it into a Sacrifice of Praise and Thanksgiving after Consecration’. Some of Grabe's non-juring friends continued to seek union with the eastern patriarchs after the Prussian's death, but without success.Footnote ⁹⁴

On 22 August 1711 Grabe wrote to Lord Treasurer Harley. He had suffered an accident boarding the Oxford coach, resulting in medical expenses. Furthermore, his pension had not been paid and so his debts had mounted to ‘about threescore pounds’, leaving him ‘very uneasy & ashamed’ to see his creditors. His physician had suggested a period of recuperation in Tunbridge Wells, and Grabe requested the release of the last three-quarters of his pension owed to enable him to make the journey.Footnote ⁹⁵ Harley immediately released all back payments and sent an additional present of £50. Grabe, however, died on 3 November. Harley ordered that a monument be erected to him in the south transept of Westminster Abbey, depicting a scholar with an open book in one hand and a quill in the other.Footnote ⁹⁶

During his time in Oxford, and from 1705 increasingly in London, Grabe earned the respect of a scholarly community in which he felt at home. He maintained his personal, scholarly, and political links with his homeland, liaising with Spanheim and playing an active role in Jablonski's projects, as well as corresponding with Hanoverian theologians. He was able, as a Prussian subject, to stand aside from the non-juring schism. He enjoyed the patronage of Whig churchmen like Bishop Lloyd and Archbishop Sharp, and High Churchmen bending with the political wind like Mill, and was also welcomed by the Jacobite Francis Cherry to Shottesbrooke Manor, the spiritual home of the non-jurors. Perhaps one can detect in Hearne's observation that Grabe, in some things a Lutheran, in others a Roman Catholic, and in others an Anglican, framed a religion of his own making, a note of grudging admiration.Footnote ⁹⁷

Committed to the values of the ‘Republic of Letters’, Grabe surrounded himself with like-minded scholars. He overcame linguistic hurdles and the unfamiliarity of a new country to develop friendships and contacts within the academic and publishing communities that enabled him to pursue his biblical and patristic studies unimpeded. He believed in the need for responsible and educated biblical and patristic scholarship to define and support the identity, doctrine and practice of the true Church. His interest in ancient biblical, patristic and historical texts dovetailed with the scholarly pursuits in Oxford of Mill and others, and enabled him to contribute significantly to a brand of religious erudition increasingly becoming identified with the High Church wing of Anglicanism. However, financial insecurities, an over-optimistic appreciation of the market for learned tomes and a rather wayward focus prevented Grabe from completing all his projects. William Whiston, perhaps a lesser scholar but certainly a greater controversialist, was too elusive a quarry. Hickes compared Grabe to an architect who left behind grand buildings, some incomplete, others existing only in plans. Others merely observed that he never finished what he started.Footnote ⁹⁸