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The title Unitarian in the course of the eighteenth century began to be applied to those who held the more extreme Arian or Subordinationist views, either in the Church of England or among the dissenting churches. According to these views, Christ is to be called divine only in a way quite subordinate to the divinity of the Father, and consequently to be regarded as a great human religious leader, albeit in some way divinely endowed. No Unitarian group effected a permanent separation from the church to which it belonged until Theophilus Lindsey seceded from the Church of England in 1773 and set up his independent Unitarian chapel in 1774, devising a liturgy consonant with the doctrines accepted by Unitarians and based on the Arian teaching of Dr. Clarke.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Unitarians were becoming a more powerful group, and they had notable influence in the academy at Warrington, where the word "rational" was used of their theology, and they used a "rational" liturgy. Gilbert Wakefield taught here for a time, and though he never attached himself officially to any Unitarian congregation, it appears that they regarded him as a prominent supporter of their views.
The most important Unitarian at the turn of the century was Thomas Belsham (1750-1829), an Independent minister who had received his first training at Kibworth, and then at Daventry, where he was teaching when he resigned in 1789, feeling that he could no longer teach Trinitarianism. He went to the academy at Hackney, where Unitarianism was already strong and where Wakefield was teaching. In 1794 he became an official Unitarian minister, and in 1805 occupied Lindsey's pulpit at the Essex Street Chapel. Belsham wrote the Memoirs of Theophilus Lindsey, originally published in 1812 and republished in 1873.
Our immediate concern with Belsham is his connection with the production of an official Unitarian Version. It appears that Belsham was the principal editor, although the work itself is anonymous. The Preface of the fifth edition, 1819, gives some account of the history of the version and a plain statement of Unitarian views. The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Practice of Virtue had been formed by Unitarians to publish Unitarian literature and to spread "pure and practical" Christianity. This society intended to produce a text of the New Testament "divesting the sacred volume of the technical phrases of a systematic theology which has no foundation in the Scriptures themselves." In 1791 the society approached Dr. Wakefield with a view to securing his permission to print his text (issued in that year) as their own. Dr. Wakefield, who had much sympathy for the Unitarians, agreed most readily, but some obstacle connected with the publishing rights prevented the realization of this plan. When the matter was taken up again a few years later, an "unfortunate event"-presumably Dr. Wakefield's imprisonment from 1799 to 1801-and his subsequent death in 1801 compelled the society to abandon the idea of having Wakefield's text. In 1806 they finally decided to adopt Newcome's text as the basis of their version, which appeared in 1808 as The New Testament in an Improved Version, upon the basis of Archbishop Newcome's New Translation; with a corrected text. It was decided to place at the foot of the page the reading of the Authorized Version where it differs, but this practice was abandoned in the fourth and fifth editions. In fact the text is not notably altered. It was apparently known at the time that the edition
was Belsham's work, for Dr. Stock, bishop of Killala and Achonry, a relative of Dr. Newcome (who had died in 1800), addressed an indignant expostulation to him in 1809 for having without any warrant adapted Dr. Newcome's text for his own sectarian purposes. But the "Improved Version" had several further editions, the fifth being in 1819, a copy of which has "Unitarian Version" on the back. [This title did not appear on the first editions, since until its repeal in 1813, the Act of 1698, forbidding anti-Trinitarian teaching as blasphemous, prevented the overt dissemination
of Unitarian doctrines.]
In 1822 Thomas Belsham published under his own name an edition of The Epistles of Paul the Apostle, translated with exposition and notes.
Ten years later another version of the Epistles by a Unitarian appeared in two volumes: St. Paul's Epistles illustrated; including a new translation, by Charles Eyre, Clerk. Ipswich, 1832. Charles Eyre (1784-1864) was a somewhat eccentric person. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he took orders, but later became a Unitarian. He then took to journalism and became the proprietor of three newspapers at Colchester. He was interested in the movement that led to the Reform Bill of 1832. He later took to farming near Dedham in Essex, but when his family pressed him to give up farming, he committed suicide. His translation is mentioned by Cotton and the Dictionary of National Biography.
The next Unitarian biblical work appeared in the next decade with the important work of Samuel Sharpe (1799-1881), who was a banker until his retirement in 1861. He became a Unitarian in 1821 and remained a keen member of that group all his life. He had a passionate interest in Egyptology, and published his first work on this subject in 1836, the first of twenty works on Egypt and its history and literature, including an important Vocabulary of Egyptian Hieroglyphics. His studies also included other oriental subjects. Shortly after his first work on Egyptology had been published, he turned his attention to the translation of the Bible. In 1840 he published his New Testament, translated from the Greek of J. J. Griesbach, which was the second text to be based
on that edition of the Greek. It is, in fact, a revision of the Authorized Version according to the critical text of the Greek; he expressly states that he will alter the Authorized Version as little as possible. In 1865 he brought out in three volumes his Hebrew Scriptures translated, which was a revision of the Authorized Version of the Old Testament. His New Testament had eight editions, and his Old Testament four editions, the last published in 1881. He continually worked over his text, and the various editions show small alterations and improvements. "As a translator
he was distinguished less by originality of scholarship than by excellence of judgment; he is successful beyond others in the difficult experiment of removing the archaisms without impairing the venerable dignity of the English Bible." He held that Hebrew should be read and studied without points, and wrote a grammar on this system in 1877.
Sharpe is of special interest to us for his connection with the Revised Version. The New Testament Company for the production of the Revised Version was to include one Unitarian, as it also included three Presbyterians, one Congregationalist, one Baptist, and one Methodist. Convocation in 1870 invited four Unitarian scholars to select a member of their denomination to take part in the work, and Sharpe was one of the four scholars thus invited.
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