Henry Dodwell

Henry Dodwell (October 16417 June 1711) was an Anglo-Irish scholar, theologian and controversial writer.

Life

Dodwell was born in Dublin in 1641. His father, William Dodwell, who lost his property in Connacht during the Irish rebellion, was married to Elizabeth Slingsby, daughter of Sir Francis Slingsby and settled at York in 1648. Henry received his preliminary education at St Peter's School, York.

In 1654 he was sent by his uncle to Trinity College, Dublin, where he became a scholar and fellow, receiving the Bachelor of Arts in 1662 and Master of Arts in 1663. Having conscientious objections to taking religious orders, he relinquished his fellowship in 1666, but in 1688 was elected Camden professor of history at Oxford. In 1691 he was deprived of his professorship for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary.

Dodwell retired to Shottesbrooke in Berkshire to be near his friend, Francis Cherry. As the movement behind the refusal to swear allegiance declined, with the death of William Lloyd who had been deprived of his bishopric, and the decision by Thomas Ken to relinquish his claim to the See of Bath and Wells, Dodwell returned to the Church of England in 1710.

He died in Shottesbrooke.

Dissertations upon Irenaeus

Printed 1689 in Latin under the title of Dissertationes in Irenaeum. These Dissertations are only prolegomena to what he further designed to show what the ancient heresies were, what disturbed the primitive Church, and their foundation.

We have at this day, certain most authentic ecclesiastical writers of the times, as Clemens Romanus, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who wrote in the same order wherein I have named them, and after all the writers of the New Testament. But in Hermas you will not find one passage, or any mention of the New Testament, nor in all the rest is any one of the evangelists named. If sometimes they cite passages like those we read in our gospels, you will find them so changed, and for the most part so interpolated, that it cannot be known whether they produced them out of ours, or some apocryphal gospels. Nay, they sometimes cite passages which most certainly are not in our present gospels.