Who were the Baptists? A review essay

Matthew Bingham has recently argued that the traditional historiography that links the 'General Baptists' and 'Particular Baptists' as they begin to develop in seventeenth-century England is inadequate. He proposes, instead, that we should link the Particular Baptists with the early Independents, styling them 'Baptistic Congregationalists', and regard the General Baptists as outliers to this broader alliance. In this essay I review his arguments, and offer evidence from seventeenth-century sources he has not referenced, to propose that, whilst his challenge is useful, in fact there is considerably more evidence of a pan-Baptist identity in the seventeenth century than he allows, and that his own proposed realignment has insuperable problems.