David Jennings (pastor)

David Jennings (1691–1762) was an English Dissenting minister and tutor, known also as the author of Jewish Antiquities.

He was the younger son of the ejected minister John Jennings (1634–1701), whose ministry to the independent congregation at Kibworth was continued by his elder brother John. David passed through the Kibworth grammar school, and studied for the ministry (1709–14) at the Fund Academy in Moorfields, under Isaac Chauncy and his successors, Thomas Ridgley, D.D., and John Eames. His first sermon was at Battersea, 23 May 1714. In March 1715 he was chosen evening lecturer at Rotherhithe; in June 1716 he became assistant to John Foxon at Girdlers' Hall, Basinghall Street; on 19 May 1718 he was called to succeed Thomas Simmons as pastor of the independent congregation, Wapping New Stairs. Here he was ordained on 25 July 1718, and in this charge he remained till his death.

At the Salters' Hall debates of 1719 he sided with the non-subscribers, though a Calvinist. In 1733 he was selected by William Coward as one of the lecturers in Bury Street, St. Mary Axe; he became one of the Coward trustees in May 1743, and in August 1743 one of the Coward lecturers at Little St. Helen's.

Jennings's career as a divinity tutor began in 1744, on the death of Eames, whose successor he became under the Coward trust, the "congregational" fund at this point transferring its support to another academy. The presbyterian board sent him no students till 1758. Jennings extended the course of study from four years to five, and abandoned the boarding school model. The lectures were given in Wellclose Square, at the residence of Samuel Morton Savage, the tutor in classics and philosophy. Unlike his brother John, Jennings did not attempt lectures on an independent plan. The divinity textbook on which he lectured was the ‘Medulla Theologiæ’ of the Dutch divine, Van Marck. His lecture notes on the Moses and Aaron of Thomas Godwyn became the posthumous work on Jewish Antiquities, by which Jennings is best known.

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