UK student cracks theologian Andrew Fuller's religious code

A divinity student in the UK has found a way to decipher hundreds of pages of shorthand notes left by leading Baptist theologian Andrew Fuller that has baffled academics for generations.

Jonny Woods from the University of St Andrews has worked out how to read shorthand notes left by Fuller, who is best known for founding the Baptist Missionary Society.

Hundreds of pages of his sermon notes are held in archives, but until now they have been a mystery to academics, the BBC reported.

The third-year undergraduate was able to decipher the shorthand after an academic traced a longhand equivalent.

Fuller, who was born in Cambridgeshire in 1754, became a Baptist minister. Such was his international standing, he was offered honorary doctorates by both Yale and the College of New Jersey - now Princeton.

While he wrote a number of influential works before his death in 1815, his early sermons and other documents have survived only as shorthand notes.

They remained inaccessible until Dr Steve Holmes, head of the School of Divinity at St Andrews University found one headed in longhand "Confessions of Faith, Oct. 7 1783".

He recognised this as the date of Fuller's induction into the pastorate of a church in Kettering and knew that he would have been required to give a confession of faith as part of that service.

Holmes then wondered if a copy of the confession printed in a biography might help him crack the code.

After discovering that the two texts were the same, he recruited Woods through the university's undergraduate research assistant scheme to help.

After just a few weeks the student was able to translate the shorthand, using the longhand version in the same way that the Rosetta Stone was used as a crib to unlock the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Holmes said: "When Jonny told me he could read these documents it was an astonishing moment.

"Andrew Fuller stands as the figurehead, the 'patron saint' almost, of the church tradition of which I am a part.

"To be reading words of his that no-one had read since he preached them in 1782 - it's one of those moments you live for as an academic."