confession

First London Baptist Confession of Faith

1LCF · 1644 · 53 chapters, 53 paragraphs

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By

The seven Particular Baptist churches in London

Dates

first published 1644

Tradition

baptist, reformed

Also called

First London Confession; 1644 Confession; London Baptist Confession of 1644; The Confession of Faith of those Churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists

Related

Revised by First London Baptist Confession of Faith (second edition, 1646)

Follows

The Confession of Faith, Of those Churches which are commonly (though falsly) called Anabaptists, the printing “in the yeare of our Lord, 1644”, without the printer’s name (London); Wing C5789, ESTC R5039 · the scan (PDF) , from ProQuest

Transcribed

From EEBO-TCP A80329Checked against EEBO-TCP A34250: the proofs, all; where A80329 is wanting or a reference doesn’t exist, by Claude, for cco3, 2026-10-28Checked against a copy at ProQuest: all, word by word, every proof against the margin, and where each letter stands; the epistle and its subscribers for wording, on EEBO’s film of the same copy, by Claude, for cco3, 2026-10-28

License

Public domain

Notes

The Particular Baptists’ first confession, in 53 articles, subscribed by two or three men from each of seven churches in London, William Kiffen, John Spilsbery and Samuel Richardson among them, with their epistle “To all that desire the lifting up of the Name of the Lord Jesus” (prose/preface). Printed twice in 1644; this is the printing without the printer’s name (Thomason’s copy, E.12[24]), whose last two articles are both numbered LII, here 52 and 53. The other, Matthew Simmons’s (Wing C5790, EEBO-TCP A34250), has a free scan at archive.org. Imported from EEBO-TCP A80329 by scripts/import-tcp.mjs, its proofs checked against A34250, and then proofread against the PDF, word by word: the TCP’s text holds, and the scan moved article 14’s segments to where its letters stand, and joined those of 32 and 39, which print no letters. The references corrected are the printing’s own misprints (a verse that doesn’t exist) or the TCP’s misreadings of it, but article 46’s Jude 19, whose figure is blurred in this copy, as A34250 and the 1646 have it; each is in the commits that made them. The printing has no page numbers: page is its signature (the confession runs A3r–C4r). The PDF is EEBO’s film of Thomason’s copy (E.12[24]), with his “24” and “Octob: 16” on its title page, from ProQuest’s Early Modern Collection, with ProQuest’s credit line taken off each page: the text was read on it, and it is sharper than archive.org’s free scan of a microfilm of the same copy (per_early-baptist_the-confession-of-faith-_1644). Each paragraph’s leaf is its page of the PDF. EEBO has a second copy of Wing C5789, and the Angus Library (Regent’s Park College, Oxford) a third, photographed in colour (36.GA.c.13). Its revision of 1646 is flcf1646.

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flcf1644.json · 132 kB