Stephen Godet argued in his dissertation that John Gill was a patristic scholar who used his scholarship to defend the doctrine of the trinity. However, countering Godet’s conclusion, Colton Strother thought that Godet had overstated his case that Gill was a patristic scholar, situating him as a Reformed Orthodox theologian, rather than a scholar of the early church.
With a growing interest in Gill’s trinitarian theology and his use of the Christian tradition in his theological formulation, the question of Gill’s status as a patristic scholar has relevance for further work in Gill scholarship In order to answer this question, the work of Irena Backus will be used to establish criteria which can be used as a baseline for what skills, resources, and proclivities one must have to be considered a patristic scholar.
After establishing this baseline, this paper will examine Gill’s own theological writings as well as the patristic sources available to him, including the remains of those donated by his executors to the Rhode Island College in 1772, now held as part of a collection in the John Hay Library at Brown University. The evidence will demonstrate that Gill possessed both the skills and resources necessary to be considered a patristic scholar.