Joseph Mede

Joseph MedeJoseph Meade, Joseph Mead. (1586 in Berden – 1638) was an English scholar with a wide range of interests. He was educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow in 1613. He is now remembered as a biblical scholar.Book of Revelation in England He was also a naturalist and Egyptologist. He was a Hebraist, and became Lecturer of Greek.Concise Dictionary of National Biography, under Joseph Mead.

Early life In the will of Thomas Meade of Berden, 1595Will of Thomas Meade of Berden, Essex, 1595, Consistory Court of London, at London Metropolitan Archives there is a bequest "Item I give and bequeath to Joseph my son sixty pounds of good and lawful money to be paid to him at his full age of one and twenty years."

According to Jeffrey K. Jue, in Heaven Upon Earth, “Little is known of Mede’s childhood, other than the fact that at ten years of age both he and his father fell ill from smallpox. His father never recovered and his mother remarried a certain Mr. Gower from Nasing. Mede had two sisters, Rebecca and Sister Casse.” That Joseph had a sister Rebecca is confirmed in his father’s will: “Item I give and bequeath to my two daughters that is to say Anna Meade and Rebecca Meade to every of [them] xxvii li vi s viii d of lawful money to be paid to them and every of them as they come to their several ages of xviii.”

According to Venn's Alumni Cantabrigienses, Thomas Meade, who had also been at Christ's College Cambridge, matriculating 1564, was "doubtless son of Edward Meade of Berden, Essex".

In 1603, while a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, Mede came across an open copy of Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism on another student's desk. Upon reading the book, he underwent a skeptical crisis. In search of some foundation for truth, he turned to studies of texts about the Millennium in the Bible.Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism : From Savonarola to Bayle: From Savonarola to Bayle p.64-65

Works His Clavis ApocalypticaIllustration of a timeline from the work (1627 in Latin, English translation 1643,online text Key of the Revelation Searched and DemonstratedHugh Trevor-Roper, Religion, the Reformation & Social Change (1956) says by the MP Richard More (p. 248); also CDNB, giving constituency Bishop's Castle, death in 1643.) was a widely influential work on the interpretation of the Book of Revelation. It projected the end of the world by 1716: possibly in 1654.Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, p. 33. The book also posited that the Jews would be miraculously converted to Christianity before the second coming.Scult, Mel (1978). Millennial Expectations and Jewish Liberties: A Study of the Efforts to Convert the Jews in Britain, Up to the Mid Nineteenth Century. Brill Archive. pps. 20–21.

Christopher Hill considers that Mede deliberately refrained from publication.A Nation of Change and Novelty (1990), p. 54. His interpretation of the Book of Daniel and The Apostasy of Latter Times were published posthumously. On demons, he explained at least some mental illness as demonic.Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p. 585; Mede, S. Iohn 10.20. He hath a Devill, and is mad, published posthumously; His collected Works were published in 1665, edited by John Worthington.

Theology Joseph Mede held Arminian theological views.

Influence Those following Mede in part as a chronologist and interpreter included Thomas Goodwin, Pierre Jurieu, Isaac Newton,Newton developed a method for the interpretation of prophecy based on the writings of the early seventeenth-century Cambridge divine, Joseph Mede. Mede's views were widely accepted and the scheme that Newton propounded to bring consistency to the unravelling of prophetic symbolism was not in itself controversial. (PDF) and Aaron Kinne (1745–1824). As a critical scholar of the Bible, he started the discussion of the possible multiple authorship of the Book of Zechariah, subsequently taken up by Richard Kidder (1633–1703) and many others.

Richard PopkinPimlico/Columbia, History of Western Philosophy (1998), p. 334. attributes Mede's interpretation to countering scepticism, which gave it power to convince others, including the Hartlib circle. John CoffeyPDF , p. 126. writes:

The ecumenist Scotsman John Dury, the German scientist Samuel Hartlib, and the Czech educationalist Comenius had each been profoundly influenced by the millenarianism of Alsted and Mede, and seem to have seriously entertained the idea that London was the centre from which human knowledge and divine rule would spread.

Coffey also says, however, that millenarianism was rare in the 1630s, coming in only later as an important force. William Twisse, of the Westminster Assembly, added a preface to the 1643 Key to the Revelation, a testimonial to its convincing power.Christopher Hill (1993), The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, p.304.

Among Mede's pupils at Christ's was Henry More. John Milton studied at Christ's in Mede's time, and is considered to have been influenced by his ideas; but scholars have not found evidence that he was a pupil.Mede, Milton and More: Christ's College Millenarians by Sarah Hutton, in Milton and the Ends of Time, edited by Juliet Cummins, , .

Those following Mede's views in Doctrine of Demons include Arthur Ashley Sykes and Dr. Richard Mead.

Joseph Mede

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