No account of the Lexington confrontation from 1775 contains this line, and John Adams wasn’t there. The earliest telling researchers have found is Charles A. Jennings’s web article “No King But King Jesus” (Internet Archive capture, April 2001 ↗), which gives no source and credits Rev. Jonas Clarke “or one of his company.” Wikiquote ↗ lists the Adams credit as misattributed.
“We recognize no sovereign but God, and no king but Jesus!” misattributed to John Adams. No 1775 source has it; the earliest telling found is a 2001 web article by Charles A. Jennings that credits Rev. Jonas Clarke “or one of his company.” (Quotle.info)
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to John Adams. Use the credit shown above instead.
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In context
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Provenance
Where the line actually comes from
Earliest telling found
Charles A. Jennings, “No King But King Jesus,” Truth in History website (archived April 2001)
Speaker it names
“Rev. Jonas Clarke or one of his company” — not John Adams
Setting claimed
Lexington Common, morning of 19 April 1775, in reply to Major Pitcairn
Period evidence
None: Clarke’s own narrative and the eyewitness depositions record no such reply
The next morning British Major Pitcairn shouted to an assembled regiment of Minutemen; “Disperse, ye villains, lay down your arms in the name of George the Sovereign King of England.” The immediate response of Rev. Jonas Clarke or one of his company was: “We recognize no Sovereign but God and no King but Jesus.”
Web article, archived 2001
In this version John Adams appears only as a guest at Clarke’s house the night before, and the reply is credited to Clarke’s side. Elsewhere on the same archived page, a caption says it was Sam Adams and John Hancock who stayed with Clarke, which is correct.
Wikiquote ↗ lists the line under John Adams’s Misattributed quotes. It traces the line to Jennings’s 2001 article, which credits “Rev. Jonas Clarke or one of his company,” and notes that Clark’s own account makes no mention of any such reply.
The April 2001 Internet Archive capture ↗ of Jennings’s page gives the Lexington story with no source and has the wording “We recognize no Sovereign but God and no King but Jesus.”
Fake History (2010) ↗ found a word-for-word copy on the Eads Home Ministries site (by January 2006). That copy swapped the speakers to “John Adams and John Hancock.” Fake History also checked Clark’s narrative and Frank Warren Coburn’s account, which draws on depositions, and found the reply in neither.
Historian J. L. Bell, in Boston 1775 (2014) ↗, calls Jennings’s version “what might be the earliest telling.” He notes that not one of the dozens of first-hand descriptions of the Lexington confrontation includes the words.
No eighteenth-century source for this wording exists. The earliest telling found is a 2001 web article by Charles A. Jennings, so the line can’t be treated as public domain on the strength of a 1775 date. Because the wording has no established author, Quotle.info doesn’t assert a copyright status.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How it got pinned on John Adams
The line is presented as a defiant reply on Lexington Common in April 1775, but it has no period source. In the earliest version found, the reply came from Rev. Jonas Clarke’s side. The speaker then changed as the story was copied.
✕
Popular creditJohn Adams Wasn’t there
John Adams wasn’t at the encounter. It was Samuel Adams who had stayed at Clark’s house with John Hancock, and both fled after Paul Revere’s warning, according to Fake History ↗. Wikiquote suggests the mistake arose because Jennings mentions John Adams and John Hancock just before Clark (Wikiquote ↗).
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Swapped speakersJohn Adams and John Hancock Copy edit
The Eads Home Ministries site (by January 2006) reproduced Jennings’s account almost word for word but replaced “Rev. Jonas Clarke or one of his company” with “John Adams and John Hancock” (Fake History ↗).
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Earliest version foundRev. Jonas Clarke or a minuteman No evidence
This is the speaker in Jennings’s 2001 article, but Clark’s own narrative of the morning records no such reply (Wikiquote ↗). J. L. Bell adds that Clarke wasn’t on the common during the confrontation (Boston 1775 ↗).
✕
The slogan itselfSeventeenth-century English radicals Older phrase
“No king but King Jesus” was a slogan of the Fifth Monarchists during the English Interregnum (Wikiquote ↗). “No King but Jesus” was also the title of a 1652 pamphlet by the English republican Henry Haggar (Boston 1775 ↗). Neither connects it to Lexington or to Adams.
✓There is no evidence that anyone said this at Lexington. The full Lexington sentence first appears, as far as researchers have found, in a 2001 web article that credited Rev. Jonas Clarke’s side, and later copies swapped in John Adams. Wikiquote lists it as misattributed ↗.
Context
Why the story caught on
The documented Revolutionary-era line is different. Fake History ↗ points to a British parliamentary record of 22 April 1774. In it, Sir Richard Sutton read a governor’s letter saying that an American would claim no master, “nor any Governor but Jesus Christ.” The same post argues that the “king” form spread after Senator John Ashcroft, in a May 1999 speech at Bob Jones University, described “We have no king but Jesus” as a slogan of the American Revolution. Only after that, Fake History says, was the line grafted onto the Lexington story.
J. L. Bell adds that the one contemporaneous report of Americans adopting the slogan came from an angry British appointee in Pennsylvania in 1765, during the Stamp Act protests. In 1775 the provincials were still proclaiming their loyalty to George III, so a “no king” reply on Lexington Common would have undercut their own cause (Boston 1775 ↗).
What the eyewitnesses actually recorded
In Jonas Clark’s narrative, as transcribed by Fake History ↗, a British officer shouts “ye villains, ye Rebels, disperse; Damn you, disperse!” and the firing follows quickly. Clark records no demand made “in the name of George the Sovereign King of England” and no reply about God or Jesus.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1735–1826 · Founding Father & second U.S. president
John Adams was a leader of the American Revolution, the first vice president (1789–1797) and the second president of the United States (1797–1801). He was a dedicated diarist and letter-writer. He wasn’t present at Lexington on 19 April 1775, and none of his own writings is the source of this line.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest telling found
Earliest telling found: Charles A. Jennings, “No King But King Jesus,” Truth in History (website), archived April 22, 2001, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20010422194315/www.truthinhistory.org/NoKing.htm. The line is credited there to “Rev. Jonas Clarke or one of his company,” not to John Adams.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We recognize no sovereign but God, and no king but Jesus!’?” Last verified 2 Nov 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-recognize-no-sovereign-but-god-and-no-king-but-jesus/