This book is based on my doctoral dissertation from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (1996) of the same title. As a master's student,
working on an entirely different project, I was well aware that many of
Newton's theological manuscripts were located in our own Jewish National
and University Library, but I was under the mistaken assumption that
scores of highly qualified scholars must be assiduously scouring them
and publishing their results. It never occurred to me to look at them at
all until, having fmished my master's, I spoke to Professor David Katz
at Tel-Aviv University about an idea I had for doctoral research.
Professor Katz informed me that the project I had suggested was one
which he himself had just fmished, but that I might be interested in
working on the famous Newton manuscripts in the context of a project
being organized by him, Richard Popkin, James Force, and the late Betty
Jo Teeter Dobbs, to study and publish Newton's theological material. I
asked him whether he was not sending me into the shark-infested waters
of highly competitive scholarship, and learned that in fact there were
only a handful of scholars in the world who actively studied and
published on Newton's theology. At the time the group consisted mainly
of Popkin, Force, Dobbs, Frank Manuel, Kenneth Knoespel, and David
Castillejo.