I welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church history.

Charles Jennings was born in the year 1700.

My guess is that most of you don't know him.

But I also guess that many, many of you have heard his work.

Jennings wrote the libretto of Handel's Messiah.

First, we'll look at Jennings' life, and then we'll look at his famous libretto.

His family had significant means, and he grew up on a sprawling estate in Leicestershire, England.

That's located about 90 miles straight north of Oxford.

When the time came for college,

Jennings went those 90 miles south and studied at Balliol College in Oxford. When he got there

in 1716, Balliol was all of 453 years old. Deep in its history, John Wycliffe had been a master at Balliol.

Well, after college, and for the next 20 years or so, he managed his family estate.

He was a devout Christian, and he fought against Deism.

Deism was on a meteoric rise in England in the 1700s. Of course, deism

denies the virgin birth, denies that Jesus is the God man, and absolutely denies the gospel. And

so much of Jenin's efforts were aimed at responding to and answering Deism. He was also a patron

of the arts. In 1735, he began his collaborations with Handel,

who was living in England at the time. First came the oratorio Saul, and then followed Israel and

Egypt. And then in 1741, he began work on the Messiah. It was also Jennings who commissioned the famous and sort of standard

portrait of Handel hanging in London's National Portrait Gallery. Right around 1770, Jennings began

working on critical editions of Shakespeare's Place. This was really the first undertaking of

critical editions with footnotes, and Jennings managed to publish five of Shakespeare's plays. This is really the first undertaking of critical editions with footnotes,

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