George de Benneville

George de Benneville (born July 26, 1703 in London , † March 19, 1793 ) was a physician and an early representative of North American universalism .

Live and act

Benneville was born in London in 1703 as the youngest of nine sons of an aristocratic family of Huguenot-French origin. His father Georges de Benneville was an aristocrat from Rouen in Normandy who lived at the court of Williams III. was busy. In his youth, Benneville went to sea and began to deal more critically with his Calvinist origins. Back in London he was refused admission to the French Reformed Church due to his rejection of the doctrine of predestination . He later traveled to Normandy, where he preached to the Camisards (a subgroup of the French Huguenots) for two years before he was arrested and sentenced to death. Only because of a pardon from the French King Louis XV. could he save his life. From France he finally traveled to Germany and the Netherlands, where he stayed between 1723 and 1741 and mainly appeared as a preacher. Here he also met radical-pietist groups such as the Tunkers and the spiritualistic Schwenkfeldians . In Germany he also met Johann Conrad Beissel , who later emigrated to Pennsylvania and founded the Ephrata Cloister there in 1723 . Around the same time Benneville began Medicine study. After the German mystic Johann Christoph Sauer emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1724 and from there called on German Pietists in several letters to emigrate , Benneville also decided to emigrate to North America, where he worked in Sauer's print shop, among other things, printing the Bible edition that has become known as the Sauer Bible helped. Here Benneville also translated the Eternal Gospel by Paul Siegvolk (George Klein-Nicolai) into English. He later moved to the Oley Valley in Pennsylvania, where he worked as a doctor and where he married Esther Bertolet in 1745, with whom he had seven children. During this time he was in contact with the Herrnhutern and Schwarzenau Brethren and other Protestant groups and also visited the Ephrata Cloister, founded by Beissel, several times.

In 1757 the family moved to Bristol near Philadelphia, where he continued to work as a doctor. He helped treat the wounded during the Battle of Germantown in the American Revolutionary War in 1777 . In 1781 Benneville met the universalist preacher Elhanan Winchester , with whom he went on a missionary trip to Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Virginia between 1781 and 1787.

In 1793 Benneville died of a stroke. His wife Esther died two years later.

Web links

• John C. Morgan and Nelson C. Simonson: George de Benneville