Jonathan Dickinson (April 22, 1688 – October 7, 1747) was a Congregational, later Presbyterian, minister, a leader in the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, and a co-founder and first president of the College of New Jersey, which later became Princeton University.

Born in Hatfield, Massachusetts on April 22, 1688, Dickinson studied theology at the Collegiate School of Connecticut, later known as Yale College, graduating in 1706.

His book Familiar Letters to a Gentleman, upon a Variety of Seasonable and Important Subjects in Religion was reprinted a number of times in America and elsewhere.

His pulpit oratory was centered on "temperance and harmony" and "devoid of antagonizing divisions, but which at the same time was appealing and innovative".

Classes began the fourth week in May in the parsonage of Dickinson's church in Elizabethtown, with a student body of eight or ten members.