“Notorious and Convicted Mutilators”: Rammohun Roy, Thomas Jefferson, and the Bible

This article links two famous individuals from different parts of the world who produced in the same year (1820) similar extracts of the four gospels. It argues that this was the result of globalizing processes that diffused unconventional views of the Bible to three continents and made international celebrities out of heterodox writers. The hitherto unconnected stories of Rammohun Roy and Thomas Jefferson are also used to shed light on a long, bitter controversy in Britain about the doctrine of the Trinity, a controversy that followed the flow and counterflow of ideas and people between core and periphery fashioned by empire.