In the First Epistle of John, chap. v., verse 7, most but not all copies of the Latin Bible, called the Vulgate, read as follows:
For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three are one.
In the first printed edition of the New Testament, called the Complutensian, prepared at Alcala in Spain in 1514 by Cardinal Francis Ximenes, the words here italicised were included, having been translated from the Latin text into Greek; for the Greek MSS. used did not contain them. They are only found in two Greek MSS., one of the fifteenth, the other of the sixteenth century. About 400 other Greek codices from the fourth century down to the fourteenth ignore them. All MSS. Of the Old Latin version anterior to Jerome lack them, and in the oldest copies even of Jerome's recension of the Latin text, called the Vulgate, they are conspicuously absent. The first Church writer to cite the verse in such a text was Priscillian, a Spaniard, who was also the first heretic to be burned alive by the Church in the year 385. After him Vigilius, Bishop of Thapsus, cites it about 484. It is probable that the later Latin Fathers mistook what was only a comment of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (died 258) for a citation of the text. In any case, it filtered from them into the Vulgate text, from which, as we have seen, it was translated into Greek and inserted in two or three very late manuscripts. [Gibbon, in a note on chap. xxxvii. of his Decline and Fall, says that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the Bibles were corrected by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicolas, Cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church, secundum orthodoxam fidem. (Wetstein, Prolegom., pp. 84, 85.)]
Erasmus's first edition of the Greek Testament, in 1516, omitted the verse, as also did the second; but in 1522 he issued a third edition containing it. Robert Stephens also inserted it in his edition of 1546, which formed the basis of all subsequent editions of the Greek Testament until recently, and is known as the Received Text, or Textus Receptus.
In 1670 Sandius, an Arian, assailed the verse, as also did Simon, a learned Roman Catholic priest, in his Histoire Critique du Nouveau Testament, part i., chap. 18, about twenty years later. He was followed by Sir Isaac Newton, who, in a learned dissertation published after his death in 1754, strengthened Simon's arguments. Oddly enough, a Huguenot pastor, David Martin (1639–1721), of whom better things might have been expected, took up the cudgels in defence of the text. “It were to be wished,” he wrote, “that this strange opinion had never quitted the Arians and Socinians; but we have the grief to see it pass from them to some Christians, who, though content to retain the doctrine of the Trinity, abandon this fine passage where that holy doctrine is so clearly taught.” With the same tolerance of fraud, so long as it makes for orthodoxy, an Anglican bishop added a footnote in his catechism to the effect that the authenticity of this text, although by many disputed, must be strenuously upheld because it is so valuable a witness to the truth of Trinitarian doctrine. Gibbon, in his thirty-seventh chapter, sarcastically wrote:
The memorable text which asserts the unity of the Three who bear witness in Heaven is condemned by the universal silence of the orthodox fathers, ancient versions, and authentic manuscripts. . . . After the invention of printing, the editors of the Greek Testament yielded to their own prejudices, or those of the times; and the pious fraud, which was embraced with equal zeal at Rome and Geneva, has been infinitely multiplied in every country and every language of modern Europe.
This passage provoked an attack on Gibbon from a certain English Archdeacon, Travis, who rushed into the arena to defend the text which Kettner, answering Simon nearly a century earlier, had extravagantly hailed as “the most precious of Biblical pearls, the fairest flower of the New Testament, the compendium by way of analogy of faith in the Trinity.” It was high time that forgers should receive a rebuke, and Porson, the greatest of English Greek scholars and critics, resolved to administer it to them. In a series of Letters to Travis he detailed with merciless irony and infinite learning the history of this supposititious text. Travis answered that Porson was a Thersites, and that he despised his railings. He accused him of defending Gibbon, who, as an infidel, was no less Porson's enemy than his own. Porson's answer reveals the nobility of his character. “Why,” he replies, “for that very reason I would defend him”—a retort worthy of Dr. Johnson.
Scarcely anything in the English language is so well worth reading as these letters of Porson, and I venture to quote from his preface a single passage about Bengel (died 1752), whose commentary on the New Testament called the Gnomon was, for its day, a model of learning and acumen:
Bengel [writes Porson] allowed that the verse was in no genuine MS., that the Complutensian editors interpolated it from the Latin version, that the Codex Britannicus is good for nothing, that no ancient Greek writer cites it and many Latins omit, and that it was neither erased by the Arians nor absorbed by the homoeoteleuton. Surely, then, the verse is spurious. No; this learned man finds out a way of escape. The passage was of so sublime and mysterious a nature that the secret discipline of the Church withdrew it from the public books, till it was gradually lost. Under what a want of evidence must a critic labour who resorts to such an argument.
Porson made himself unpopular by writing these letters. The publisher of them lost money over the venture, and an old lady, Mrs. Turner, of Norwich, who had meant to leave him a fortune, cut down her bequest to thirty pounds, because her clergyman told her that Porson had assailed the Christian religion.
The revised English version of this passage omits, of course, the fictitious words, and gives no hint of the text which was once so popular. Archdeacon Travis is discreetly forgotten in the Anglican Church; but the truth has far from triumphed in the Roman, and Pope Leo XIII., in an encyclical of the year 1897, solemnly decreed that the fraudulent addition is part of authentic scripture. He was surrounded by reactionaries who imagined that, if they could wrest such a pronouncement from the infallible Pontiff, they would have made an end for ever of criticism in the Catholic Church. The abbot of Monte Casino, the home of the Benedictines, was, it is said, on the point of publishing a treatise in which he traced this forgery to its sources, when the Pope's decree was issued. He thrust back his treatise into his pigeon-holes, where it remains. The aged Pope, however, who was a stranger to such questions, soon realized that he had been imposed upon. Henceforth he refused to descend to particulars, or to condemn the many scholars delated to him as modernist heretics. Of these the Abbé Loisy was the chief, and the outcry against him finally decided Leo to establish in 1902 a commission for the progress of study of holy scripture. For the first time a few specialists were called in by the head of the Catholic Church to guide his judgment in such matters, and Leo XIII. directed them to begin by studying the question of the text, I John v., 8. They presently sent him their report. As this was to the effect that the text was not authentic, it was pigeon-holed. But the aged prelate's mind was ill at ease; and during his last illness, both in his lucid moments and in delirium, he could talk of nothing else. [I derive these statements from the Abbé Albert Houtin, La Question Biblique au XX Siècle. Paris, 1906, p. 94.] He has been succeeded by one who has no qualms, but condemns learning wherever and whenever he meets with it. To be learned in that communion is in our age to be suspect.
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