Robert Robinson (Baptist)

Robert Robinson (27 September 1735 – 9 June 1790) was an English Dissenter, influential Baptist and scholar who made a lifelong study of the antiquity and history of Christian Baptism.

His father died when he was aged five, but his maternal grandfather, Robert Wilkin, a wealthy gentleman of Mildenhall, who had never reconciled himself to his daughter’s lowly marriage, disinherited his grandson, with an inheritance of ten shillings and sixpence.

Robinson was able to buy an eighty-acre farm by the river at Chesterton, where he kept cattle and sheep, grew barley and wheat, and dealt as a corn and coal merchant with barges plying the Cam.

Robinson, however, seemed to rebuff the notion that he doubted the full divinity of Jesus Christ, a doctrine held by the Unitarian Church.

"[citation needed] Of Robinson's publications, his most prominent are: Arcana, or the Principles of the Late Petitioners to Parliament for Relief in the Matter of Subscription (1774); A Plea for the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ in a Pastoral Letter to a Congregation of Protestant Dissenters at Cambridge (1776); History and Mystery of Good Friday (1777); History of Baptism and Baptists (1790); and the posthumously printed Ecclesiastical Researches (1792).