How did the Christadelphian faith come into existence? That is the question this book sets out to answer, through the letters of John Thomas to Alexander Campbell between 1833 and 1847. It is well established that Dr. John Thomas (1805–71) was the means, under God, of ‘rediscovering’ in
the nineteenth century the original gospel of Jesus Christ and the teachings of the first-century Christian Church. But how and when did John Thomas come to understand what the Bible actually teaches? Did the key truths of the Christian gospel come to him all at once, ‘fully formed’? Or did Dr. Thomas “search the Scriptures,” as Jesus advised his contemporaries to do when he saw that their understanding was faulty (John 5:39)? And if the things “most surely believed among” the Christadelphians today owe their origin, initially at least, to John Thomas’ careful searching of the Bible—his “search for a biblical faith”— then why did he first join the Campbellite community, only
to spend the best part of fifteen years discovering that many of their principal beliefs were not biblical?