John Thomas, born in London in 1805 and trained in medicine, arrived in America in 1832 and immediately fell in with the Campbell movement, which suited his conviction that everything should be settled from the text. He and Alexander Campbell fell out through the 1830s over the nature of man, the resurrection, and what a person must understand to be validly baptised; Campbell regarded him as a divisive speculator, and Thomas was eventually disfellowshipped. He was rebaptised in 1847 on his own revised understanding — an act which implied that his earlier baptism, and by extension most people's, was void. Elpis Israel, published in London in 1849, sets out the whole system including a detailed reading of prophecy and a prediction of the restoration of the Jews to their land, made a century before it happened, which the community regards as vindication. Thomas died in 1871. Robert Roberts, a Birmingham printer who was fourteen when he heard Thomas lecture, edited The Christadelphian magazine from 1864 and gave the community its organisational shape.