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September 8 - October 20, 2023
Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity must be inferred from a range of passages combined to show that Christ is God, as is the Spirit and the Father, and that there is, nonetheless, only one God.
More than anything else, it was this that outraged the theologians of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity and to devalue its corollary, the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ.
Erasmus—possibly in an unguarded moment—agreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a Greek manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough).
And so a Greek manuscript was produced.
The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth-century production, made to order.
Despite his misgivings, Erasmus was true to his word and included the Johannine Comma in his next edition, and in all his subsequent editions.
These editions provided the form of the text that the translators of the King James Bible eventually used. And so familiar passages to readers of the English Bible—from the King James in 1611 onward, up until modern editions of the twentieth century—include the woman taken in adultery, the last twelve verses of Mark, and the Johannine Comma, even though none of these passages can be found in the oldest and superior manuscripts of the Greek New Testament.
The various Greek editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so much alike that eventually printers could claim that they were the text that was universally accepted by all scholars and readers of the Greek New Testament—as indeed they were, since there were no competitors!
The phrasing of this line, especially the words “text that is received by all,” provides us with the common phrase Textus Receptus (abbreviated T.R.), a term used by textual critics to refer to that form of the Greek text that is based, not on the oldest and best manuscripts, but on the form of text originally published by Erasmus and handed down to printers for more than three hundred years, until textual scholars began insisting that the Greek New Testament should be established on scientific principles based on our oldest and best manuscripts, not simply reprinted according to custom.
was the inferior textual form of the Textus Receptus that stood at the base of the earliest English translations, including the King James Bible, and other editions until near the end of the nineteenth century.
almost no one recognized the enormity of the problem of textual variation until the ground-breaking publication in 1707 of one of the classics in the field of New Testament textual criticism, a book that had a cataclysmic effect on the study of the transmission of the Greek New Testament, opening the floodgates that compelled scholars to take the textual situation of our New Testament manuscripts seriously.
This was an edition of the Greek New Testament by John Mill, fellow of Queens College, Oxford. Mill had invested thirty years of hard work amassing the materials for his edition. The text that he printed was simply the 1550 edition of Stephanus;
On the basis of this intense thirty-year effort to accumulate materials, Mill published his text with apparatus, in which he indicated places of variation among all the surviving materials available to him. To
Mill’s apparatus isolated some thirty thousand places of variation among the surviving witnesses, thirty thousand places where different manuscripts, Patristic (= church father) citations, and versions had different readings for passages of the New Testament.
He did not cite everything he discovered, leaving out variations such as those involving changes of word order.
Now the status of the original text was thrown wide open to dispute. If one did not know which words were original to the Greek New Testament, how could one use these words in deciding correct Christian doctrine and teaching?
The most scathing attack came three years later in a learned volume by a controversialist named Daniel Whitby, who in 1710 published a set of notes on the interpretation of the New Testament, to which he added an appendix of one hundred pages examining, in great detail, the variants cited by Mill in his apparatus.
And so he laments, “I GRIEVE therefore and am vexed that I have found so much in Mill’s Prolegomena which seems quite plainly to render the standard of faith insecure, or at best to give others too good a handle for doubting.”
Whitby goes on to suggest that Roman Catholic scholars—whom he calls “the Papists”—would be all too happy to be able to show, on the basis of the insecure foundations of the Greek text of the New Testament, that scripture was not a sufficient authority for the faith—
Whitby proceeds to argue that, in fact, the text of the New Testament is secure, since scarcely any variant cited by Mill involves an article of faith or question of conduct, and the vast majority of Mill’s variants have no claim to authenticity.
Whitby’s defense might well have settled the issue had it not been taken up by those who used Mill’s thirty thousand places of variation precisely to the end that Whitby feared, to argue that the text of scripture could not be trusted because it was in itself so insecure. Chief among those who argued the point was the English deist Anthony Collins, a friend and follower of John Locke, who in 1713 wrote a pamphlet called Discourse on Free Thinking.
it urged the primacy of logic and evidence over revelation (e.g., in the Bible) and claims of the miraculous. In section 2 of the work, which deals with “Religious Questions,” Collins notes, in the midst of a myriad of other things, that even the Christian clergy (i.e., Mill) have been “owning and labouring to prove the Text of the Scripture to be precarious,” making reference then to Mill’s thirty thousand variants.
In a reply to both Whitby and Collins, written under the pseudonym Phileleutherus Lipsiensis (which means something like “the lover of freedom from Leipzig”—an obvious allusion to Collins’s urging of “free thinking”), Bentley made the obvious point that the variant readings that Mill had accumulated could not render the foundation of the Protestant faith insecure, since the readings existed even before Mill had noticed them. He didn’t invent them; he only pointed them out!
Bentley, an expert in the textual traditions of the classics, goes on to point out that one would expect to find a multitude of textual variants whenever one uncovers a large number of manuscripts.
