The Antinomian Controversy that has preoccupied generations of early Americanists did not occur as a theological crisis in Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s. Instead, its status as a distinctive crisis in the history of early New England is an artifact of debates between apologists for the New England Way and Presbyterian heresiographers in the 1640s. Reading these texts of this debate in conjunction with John Winthrop's journal and the far more benign account John Clarke offers in Ill Newes from New England (1652) reveals that it is trans-Atlantic print exchanges between Presbyterians and Independents that impose the familiar structure of the Antinomian Controversy as a singular crisis with Anne Hutchinson at its center. Despite their ideological differences, Independent and Presbyterian polemicists colluded to produce a narrative of these events that exaggerated their exceptional nature. With few exceptions, the frame this religious debate imposed on the events of the 1630s has dictated the terms of subsequent historical debates of these events, from Cotton Mather to the present.