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THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
THE THREE WITNESSES 
 
 THE DISPUTED TEXT IN ST. JOHN : 
 
 CONSIDERATIONS NEW AND OLD. 
 
 REV. H. T. ARMFIELD, MA., F.S.A. 
 
 RECTOR OF COLNE ENGAINE, ESSEX; 
 
 AUTHOB OP "THE GBADUAL PSALMS," " THE LEGEND OP CHRISTIAN ABT," ETC. 
 AND ONE OF THE CONTBIBUTOBS TO SMITH'S " DICTIONABT 
 OP CHRISTIAN ANTIQUITIES." 
 
 Multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus una. 
 
 LONDON : 
 SAMUEL BAGSTER AND SONS, 
 
 15, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 /%93 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The issue of a Revised Version of the English 
 New Testament calls fresh attention to some 
 Scriptural controversies that had long been 
 slumbering. Perhaps the most conspicuous 
 and the most daring of the changes which the 
 Committee of Revisers has proposed is the 
 excision of the famous verse — "For there 
 are three that bear record in heaven, the 
 Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost : and 
 these three are One" (i John v. 7). They 
 offer not the slightest intimation, even in the 
 margin, that there ever was such a verse in 
 the Bible, the preceding verse being even 
 divided so as to fill the gap in the numbering 
 of the verses through the Chapter. 
 
 That excision is simply to decide an old 
 controversy in a new way, without any sub- 
 stantial addition to the old evidence. What 
 the minority in the Committee thought upon 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 the question, or whether there was a minority, 
 is a detail that is not before the public. Pre- 
 sumably there was a minority who would 
 have voted against the proposal that carried 
 the day; or at least there must have been 
 those who could only acquiesce in it with mis- 
 giving and sincere regret. Certainly, when 
 that proposal is submitted to the larger world 
 of English readers for final acceptance in the 
 Bible of this nation, there will be vast num- 
 bers who will regard it with dismay, and who 
 will want to know the counter- considerations 
 which in old time led to the retention of the 
 verse, and which, unless evaporated by the 
 discovery of new facts, might fairly so lead 
 now. There are, indeed, no new facts of any 
 moment. Perhaps, however, there are some 
 new ways of looking at the old facts ; and it 
 may fairly be doubted whether the true effect 
 of one or two of the leading facts has not 
 been sometimes obscured by the sheer mass 
 of evidence with which the advocates of the 
 disputed verse sought to fortify its claim. 
 
 When, however, the old controversy is 
 fairly revived, if there be no new facts, there 
 may at least be a new temper. Those who 
 
PREFACE. Vli 
 
 take the trouble to acquaint themselves with 
 the past literature of the controversy will no 
 doubt be struck with the asperity of feeling 
 by which it is disfigured. The sneer of 
 Gibbon, the insolence of tone in Porson, the 
 personality in Forster s book, which he even 
 goes out of his way to justify by a maxim of 
 Dr. Johnson's ; all these will be felt by the 
 impartial reader of to-day to be simply irrele- 
 vancies in the strife. It is a question that is 
 purely literary, antiquarian and scholastic ; 
 and as such it must be decided. It is no 
 occasion for treating an opponent, on which- 
 ever side he be, as if his view placed him be- 
 yond the circle of rational men. All the 
 arguments are by no means upon the same 
 side here. Let that be frankly admitted; 
 and if the recollection of it leads the modern 
 disputants to a calmness of demeanour, which 
 some of their elders so conspicuously lacked ; if 
 it generates a modesty of phrase and a 
 courtesy of deference to the rights of an op- 
 ponent which never were seen in the old 
 controversy before, not only shall we be in a 
 fairer way of arriving at truth, but when our 
 championship is compared with that of the 
 
Till PREFACE. 
 
 past, it will.be felt that, if we have shown no 
 improvement in knowledge, we have at least 
 effected some improvement in manners. 
 
 The main points of the question must be 
 kept steadily in view. The disputed verse is 
 found in no one of the principal manuscripts 
 of the New Testament; but, on the other 
 hand, it was recognized by the African Church 
 before any one of them was written. No pro- 
 test was ever raised that the African Church 
 had corrupted the Scriptures. In the case of 
 a text of such high importance upon the Trini- 
 tarian controversies of the day, it seems certain 
 that such protest would have been raised if 
 there had been room for it. Hence it is argued, 
 the unchallenged use of the African Church is 
 fair proof that there once upon a time existed 
 copies of St. John's Epistle which contained 
 the disputed verse, and which were older than 
 any of those manuscripts to which appeal can 
 now be made. 
 
 So at least the older scholars in this 
 country thought. Now, however, the fashion 
 is changed. The line adopted in most modern 
 books is due in no small degree to the great 
 work of Dr. Davidson, entitled, " Biblical 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 Criticism/' He has gone with a certain minute- 
 ness into the question, and gives his decision 
 in no hesitating terms. It may however be 
 questioned whether he has altogether done 
 justice to the considerations advanced by his 
 opponents. For instance, he rightly observes 
 that the authority of the Latin Fathers is 
 inferior to that of the Greek Fathers in 
 determining the original text (of the Scrip- 
 tures), because they commonly used a Latin 
 version current among them, whereas the 
 Greek Fathers used the Greek itself (vol. 
 ii. p. 411). But then he cites at length the 
 Latin Fathers alleged, and leaves altogether 
 unnoticed the Greek writings that are ad- 
 vanced, beyond saying (in that list of names 
 which now is copied from book to book), 
 that the Ancient Synopsis of Holy Scripture 
 ignores it. Let any one study what is said of 
 the Synopsis in the following pages, and then 
 let him say whether it ignores it. 
 
 Again, one of the greatest difficulties with 
 which Dr. Davidson has to struggle is the 
 presence of the disputed passage in the Com- 
 plutensian Polyglott. He says : " We believe 
 therefore that the editors (of the Polyglott) 
 
X PREFACE. 
 
 took the passage, not from Greek MSS., but 
 from the modern copies of the Vulgate, pseudo- 
 Jerome, and Thomas Aquinas" (ii. p. 421.) 
 That is, in plain English, they made it up. 
 The Vulgate, Jerome, and Aquinas are all 
 Latin works ; and to say that the Complu- 
 tensian editors took the Greek from them is 
 to' say that they made it up. This is a very 
 serious literary charge, and one which, if it 
 could be substantiated, would materially affect 
 the trustworthiness of their entire work. 
 
 But there is a mistake here. Dr. Davidson 
 makes a great deal out of a marginal note in 
 which the Complutensian editors are sup- 
 posed to apologize for the text. " The 
 editors/' he says, "have affixed a marginal 
 note to the Greek text — a circumstance very 
 unusual with them, as only three instances of 
 it occur in the whole edition. In this note, 
 the object of which was to secure themselves 
 from blame for printing the verse, we should 
 expect their best defence of it." This is a 
 mistake from beginning to end. The note 
 does not refer to the Greek text at all, but to 
 the Latin version which accompanies it ; nor 
 do the editors pretend to offer one word of 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 defence with regard to their acceptance of 
 the disputed verse in the Greek text. Let 
 the reader consult the note for himself. It is 
 given at large, together with some examination 
 of its purport, in an Appendix which follows 
 these chapters. 
 
 It is something like a forlorn hope to defend 
 the verse. The fact that it is absent from 
 all the Greek copies necessarily exposes it to 
 grave suspicion ; yet even some of those who 
 have felt this most strongly have also felt that 
 there is much to be said in its favour. 
 
 No competent modern advocate would fail 
 to insist upon the fact that Cassiodorus, a 
 waiter of the sixth century, quotes the dis- 
 puted verse (" Complexiones," ed. Florence, 
 172 1, p. 125) — a fact which materially affects 
 the idea that the early acceptance of the verse 
 was confined to Africa, inasmuch as Cassiodorus 
 5 belonged to the Italian, and not the African, 
 Church. It has often been alleged that the 
 disputed verse was originally a mere gloss, 
 which obtained currency in the African Church 
 owing to the immense influence of Augustine. 
 The quotation by Cassiodorus completely dis- 
 poses of such a suggestion. It is inconceivable 
 
Xll PREFACE. 
 
 that within about a century the Eoman Church 
 should have adopted an interpolation whose 
 origin could at that time have been so easily 
 traced. 
 
 It is, in short, this accej^tance with which 
 the opponents of the verse have to deal ; and 
 until that is far more satisfactorily explained 
 than has yet been done, a complete case is 
 not made out against it. It is one thing to 
 say, as the scholars of old time said, that the 
 verse is open to grave suspicion ; but it is quite 
 another thing to wipe out all trace of it from 
 the English Bible. 
 
 Colxe Engaine, Essex, 
 February, 1883. 
 
I. JOHN V. 
 
 Authorized Version. 
 
 4> For whatsoever is born 
 of God overcometh the world : 
 and this is the victory that 
 •overcometh the world, even 
 our faith. 
 
 5 "Who is he that over- 
 cometh the world, but he that 
 believeth that Jesus is the 
 Son of God ? 
 
 6 This is he that came by- 
 water and blood, even Jesus 
 Christ ; not by water only, 
 but by water and blood. And 
 it is the Spirit that beareth 
 witness, because the Spirit is 
 truth. 
 
 7 For there are three that 
 l>ear record in heaven, the 
 Father, the Word, and the 
 Holy Ghost : and these three 
 are one. 
 
 8 And there are three that 
 bear witness in earth, the 
 spirit, and the water, and 
 the blood : and these three 
 agree in one. 
 
 9 If we receive the witness 
 of men, the witness of God is 
 greater : for this is the wit- 
 ness of God which he hath 
 testified of his Son. 
 
 Revised Version. 
 
 4 For whatsoever is begot- 
 ten of God overcometh the 
 world: and this is the vic- 
 tory that hath overcome the 
 world, even our faith. 
 
 5 And who is he that over- 
 cometh the world, but he that 
 believeth that Jesus is the 
 Son of God ? 
 
 6 This is he that came by 
 water and blood, even Jesus 
 Christ ; not with the water 
 only, but with the water and 
 with the blood. 
 
 7 And it is the Spirit that 
 beareth witness, because the 
 Spirit is the truth. 
 
 8 For there are three who 
 bear witness, the Spirit, and 
 the water, and the blood : and 
 the three agrree in one. 
 
 It will be 
 
 9 If we receive the witness 
 of men, the witness of God is 
 greater : for the witness of 
 God is this, that he hath 
 borne witness concerning his 
 Son. 
 
 observed that the Revised 
 
XIV 
 
 Version entirely omits the seventh verse 
 of the Authorized Version, and makes up- 
 the required number of verses by splitting 
 the sixth verse of the Authorized Version 
 into two. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface v 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Rise and Growth of the Question . . 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Balance of Authority — Ancient versus 
 Modern 8 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Leading Difficulties — Silence of Greek 
 Writers 10 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Leading Difficulties — True Controver- 
 sial Value of the Verse .... 20 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Counter-Difficulties 38 
 
xvi CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Alleged References to the Disputed 
 Verse in Greek Writers .... 43 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 A Parallel in the Old Testament . . 59 
 
 APPENDIX I. 
 On the Right Use of the Famous Note in 
 the Complutensian Polyglott (jQ 
 
 APPENDIX II. 
 
 Does St. Cyprian quote the Disputed 
 
 Verse? GO 
 
 APPENDIX III. 
 
 Various Considerations 199 
 
 Addendum £08 
 
 Index 215 
 
t* 
 
 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 RISE AND GROWTH OF THE QUESTION. 
 
 It is not a little singular that throughout all 
 the early centuries of the Christian Era, 
 there are no traces of what can properly be 
 called a controversy about the disputed verse 
 in St. John's First Epistle. The actual prac- 
 tice, indeed, of Christendom was by no means 
 uniform upon the question ; some Churches 
 received the verse into their Scriptures, while 
 others did not. Yet the question was never 
 debated. The interests that presented them- 
 selves for discussion in ancient Christian 
 
 B 
 
2 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 literature are both numerous and diversified; 
 but the whole field is searched in vain for any 
 light upon the question which, since the Re- 
 formation, has been so frequently, so eagerly, 
 and sometimes so fiercely discussed. Here 
 and there, indeed, a remark is to be found in 
 the works of some ancient champion of the 
 Faith, to the effect that the copies of the 
 Scripture were understood to differ at this 
 point ; but no single writer dwells upon the 
 question either on this side or on that. 
 Such allusions are just enough to show that 
 the writer was not unaware of the possibility 
 of an argument ; but they do not prohibit 
 us from feeling that the ancients were con- 
 tent almost to ignore a question which the 
 moderns have invested with quite a literature 
 of its own. 
 
 It was not, in fact, till the early days of 
 printing that there arose what may be fairly 
 
EISE AND GROWTH OF THE QUESTION. 3 
 
 called the controversy upon the subject. The 
 passage first appeared in print in that famous 
 monument of early Biblical typography, the 
 Complutensian Polyglott. It was at once 
 challenged by a scholar of the first rank, 
 Erasmus, who had not inserted the passage 
 in his own edition of the New Testament. 
 Erasmus, however, was so far influenced by 
 the replies which he received from the Complu- 
 tensian editors, that in a later edition of his 
 work he himself inserted the disputed passage. 
 From that day to the present the question 
 has never been at rest. The fact that the 
 disputed verse has a place in what has become 
 known as the " received text," obviously 
 carries little or no weight. The question is, 
 what right had the verse to be there. It is, 
 in legal phrase, altogether a question of Title. 
 True, the verse has been in possession all 
 these years ; but, on the other hand, it has 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 not been in undisputed possession. So long, 
 indeed, as it was a mere question of literary 
 speculation, the unlearned world might well 
 take no very keen interest in the matter ; 
 but when it is formally proposed to take the 
 necessary steps for ousting the passage from 
 its ancient tenancy, many of those who were 
 unconcerned spectators before, will feel called 
 upon to acquaint themselves in some degree 
 with the merits of the question in debate. 
 
 Without entering into unnecessary details, 
 it will be enough here to state the leading 
 grounds'* upon which the two sides in the 
 dispute have respectively grounded their 
 opinions. Those, then, who believe the verse 
 to be spurious, rely chiefly on the fact that it 
 is not to be found in any one single manuscript 
 
 * Internal considerations, drawn from the structure of 
 St. John's argument in this part of the Epistle, are here 
 designedly omitted. 
 
RISE AND GROWTH OF THE QUESTION. 5 
 
 of undoubtedly high antiquity ; and, further, 
 on the alleged fact that the verse is not noticed 
 by any one of the Greek ecclesiastical writers.* 
 The champions of the verse, on the contrary, 
 while admitting in whole or in part the weight 
 of these considerations, rely on the fact that 
 the verse is found in the most ancient Latin 
 version of the Scriptures which was current 
 in the African Church — a version which is of 
 far earlier date than any of the jpanuscripts, 
 and than the bulk of the Greek writers. It 
 is found there ; and its right to be there was 
 in antiquity never challenged, though the 
 atmosphere was overcharged with controver- 
 sies of that particular class of which the verse 
 in question has been held to be decisive. 
 Here is a fact, say the advocates of the verse, 
 which cannot be got over ; and any verdict 
 
 * For the arguments deducible from this fact, see 
 Chapter IV. 
 
6 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 which leaves that fact unexplained, not by 
 ingenious conjecture, but by historic evidence, 
 is a verdict which does not do justice to all 
 the phenomena of the case, and therefore is 
 not in accordance with true scientific method. 
 It has been said that the advocates of the 
 disputed verse admit in whole or in part the 
 weight of the plea that it is unnoticed by any 
 of the early Greek ecclesiastical writers. It 
 may, however, be fairly questioned if full 
 justice has been done under this head. Amid 
 a bewildering mass of other arguments, there 
 have been just two passages'* alleged from 
 Greek writings which show that the plea is 
 not altogether sound. If, in short, these two 
 passages be admitted in evidence, then it 
 simply is not true that Greek literature knew 
 nothing of the disputed verse. Too often, 
 indeed, the due effect of those passages has 
 
 See Chapter VI. 
 
RISE AND GROWTH OF THE QUESTION. 7 
 
 been obscured by discussions about their own 
 authorship, as to whether they are from the 
 pen of Athanasius or not. It does not really 
 matter, for the present cause, whether they 
 belong to Athanasius or to some one else. It 
 is enough that they are admitted on all hands 
 to come from an early Greek writer. That is 
 of itself enough to disarm the suspicion that 
 St. John's verse was only a local peculiarity 
 of the Latin-speaking Churches, and enough 
 to warrant us in the attempt to disengage the 
 two passages which cite it from the mass of 
 precarious and questionable matter with which 
 they have too commonly been overlaid. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 BALANCE OF AUTHORITY — ANCIENT VERSUS 
 MODERN. 
 
 Before we allow the decision of eminent 
 scholars in our own day to reverse the verdict 
 of the past, we must compare them with the 
 no less eminent scholars of the past. 
 What qualifications have they which the 
 scholars of the past had not ? What fresh 
 branches of knowledge are in their grasp, 
 which were not yet within the reach of 
 the scholars of the past ? How are they 
 in a better position than the men of 
 old time for guiding the world to a right- 
 decision upon the question that is at 
 issue ? 
 
BALANCE OF AUTHORITY. 9 
 
 The answer to these questions is of the 
 most meagre kind. We have one more great 
 manuscript of the Bible than our forefathers 
 had ; and that is all. With that single 
 exception, everything that is known to us 
 about the claims of the disputed verse w^as 
 equally known to them. And, with the whole 
 of the evidence of to-day before them — the 
 Sinaitic manuscript alone excepted — they 
 decided, as a rule, in favour of the verse. 
 Beveridge, for example, who was one of the 
 most learned men in ecclesiastical research 
 that ever graced the English bench of bishops, 
 indicates the ground of his favourable decision 
 in very few words : — 
 
 " Though this place of Scripture (i John, 
 v. 7) be not extant in many ancient manu- 
 scripts, nor indeed in many ancient transla- 
 tions, yet in the days of Arius, the grand 
 oppugner of this truth, about three hundred 
 
IO THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 and thirty years after Christ, it was never so 
 much as questioned, and many of the ancient 
 fathers quote it. Which plainly shows that 
 it was then received as canonical Scripture, 
 and therefore not to be questioned by us 
 now."* 
 
 Mill, again, the editor of the famous folio edi- 
 tion of the Greek Testament, to whom all sub- 
 sequent scholars have been so largely indebted, 
 sifted the question with an exhaustiveness 
 w T hich has left little for others to add. He 
 knew all the great manuscripts, except the 
 recently discovered Sinaitic, that men know 
 now ; he knew all the disadvantages under 
 which the disputed text labours ; he knew 
 the passages of the Fathers where it might 
 have been expected to be quoted, but still 
 does not appear ; he even formulates the 
 
 * " The Doctrine of the Church of England consonant to 
 Scripture, Reason, and Fathers." Oxf. 1840. Vol. i. p. 86. 
 
BALANCE OF AUTHORITY. I [ 
 
 evidence for and against the verse with a 
 calm impartiality which would do credit to 
 the summing-up of a law lord in the High 
 Court of Justice ; and, when all considera- 
 tions have been brought to a focus upon the 
 point in debate, he decides in favour of the 
 verse — that it was in the original autograph 
 of St. John's Epistle,* and, therefore, notwith- 
 standing its vicissitudes of fortune, that it is 
 properly entitled to the place which it holds 
 in the English Bible. 
 
 The truth of the matter, it must be ad- 
 mitted, is not to be reached by a mere array 
 of names, however eminent, upon one side or 
 the other. But there is a fashion in opinion 
 as in things of lesser moment. And just now 
 
 * Mill's theory is that the disputed verse was contained 
 in the original autograph and the early copies of the 
 Epistle, but that it dropped out by the negligence of 
 transcribers, owing to the similarity of the words in the 
 adjoining verse. 
 
12 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 it has become the fashion to speak as if it 
 were not possible for those who would lay 
 claim to any intellectual rank to have a doubt 
 about the spuriousness of the disputed verse. 
 Chance phrases dropped in a Review, speak 
 in a tone almost of disdain about the claims 
 of the verse being such as no scholar would 
 any longer think of maintaining.*" It there- 
 fore becomes of consequence to show that the 
 fashion once was different ; that the scholars 
 of a former day, with opportunities of judging 
 in no material respect inferior to our own, 
 thought otherwise ; and therefore that these 
 who would reluctantly consent to the erasure 
 of the verse from the Scripture are after all 
 not in such bad intellectual company as these 
 contemptuous phrases seem to imply. An 
 earlier writer upon the subject obviously felt 
 the force of this consideration, and accordingly 
 
 Sec, for example, Edinburgh Review for April, 18S1. 
 
BALANCE OF AUTHORITY. 13 
 
 introduced his work with a dedication in this 
 form : "To the illustrious memories -of Arch- 
 bishops Wake and Seeker ; of Bishops Bull 
 and Pearson, Beveridge and Atterbury, 
 Barlow and Huet, Gastrell and Horsley, 
 Burgess and Middleton ; and of Mill, Bengel 
 and Knittel."* All of these are names of 
 high intellectual rank, and some of them are 
 names of men who were experts in criticism 
 and whose special department was the inves- 
 tigation of literary claims. It is no slight 
 testimony to the disputed verse that it com- 
 manded the support of such names as these ; 
 and it is no disparagement to the distinguished 
 scholars who have pronounced against the 
 verse, to say that it can enumerate among 
 its adherents the names of men who were no 
 less distinguished and no less competent than 
 them selves. 
 
 * Forster on " The Three Heavenly Witnesses." 
 
14 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 It appears then that, with substantially 
 the same materials before them, the scholars 
 of old time and the scholars of to-day have 
 arrived at two opposite conclusions upon the 
 question that is before us. How, it may be 
 asked, is this to be explained ? The main 
 cause of this divergence of judgment it is 
 probably not difficult to detect. The deter- 
 mination of the New Testament Text depends, 
 it will be remembered, both upon the direct 
 evidence of the ancient manuscript copies 
 that have survived to us, and upon certain 
 other collateral facts, such as the acceptance 
 of this or that reading in the Christian 
 Churches; the citations that are made or are 
 not made; and others of the same class. It 
 is upon the relative importance that a man 
 attaches to these two classes of evidence 
 respectively — the direct and the collateral — 
 that his judgment upon the question of St. 
 
BALANCE OF AUTHORITY. 1 5 
 
 John's disputed text in great measure depends. 
 The disposition of the present day is to attach 
 less weight to the collateral considerations than 
 was attached to them in former days, and it 
 is probably to this change of attitude that 
 the change of judgment is to be traced. 
 
 This fact it is which may properly make us 
 cautious in accepting the proposed erasure. 
 If there had been an advance of knowledge, 
 the case would be entirely changed. If 
 some facts had come to light which were 
 unknown to our forefathers, we could not do 
 otherwise than accept the reversal of the 
 decision at which they arrived. There are, 
 however, no such facts. For all practical 
 purposes there is nothing new. A few more 
 manuscripts have been collated, and that is 
 all. There is no branch of the argument 
 that was not before Mill, and Beveridge, and 
 Bengel equally with ourselves. A further 
 
1 6 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 change of an intellectual fashion would suffice 
 to bring their opinion once again into favour. 
 The opposite decision has about it elements 
 that are too obviously ephemeral to be safely 
 trusted as final, and those who are disposed 
 to combat it may feel that they are well kept 
 in countenance by the fact of being on the 
 side of the scholars of the past, if they are 
 are at issue with many of the present. 
 
 The treatment that has been accorded to 
 the last twelve verses of the Gospel according 
 to St. Mark may well show the English people 
 how backward they ought fairly to be in 
 accepting the erasure of a passage in the Bible. 
 In thus instituting a comparison between the 
 disputed passage at the end of the Gospel and 
 the disputed verse in the Epistle it is not 
 meant that the details of the evidence are 
 precisely the same in the two cases. Far from 
 it. But the parallel consists in this, that both 
 
BALANCE OF AUTHORITY. I J 
 
 of them fell under suspicion owing to a defi- 
 ciency of direct manuscript support. For 
 years past the chances of survival seemed to 
 be growing less in the case of the passage in 
 the Gospel. Ever since the rise of that 
 deepened, and, as some think it, that exag- 
 gerated regard for a few famous manuscripts, 
 the current of opinion amongst scholars had 
 been steadily setting against the admission of 
 the passage to its place in a revised Bible ; and 
 it is probably not too much to say that but for 
 the timely publication of Dr. Burgon's masterly 
 work upon the subject it would hardly have 
 retained its place in the version that has been 
 issued by the Committee of Revisers. The 
 retention of the passage is the best compliment 
 that could have been paid to a work, which 
 is one of the most scholarly and most per- 
 manent contributions that modern English 
 Theology has received. But the influence of 
 
 c 
 
I 8 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the work reaches beyond its immediate sphere ; 
 for it shows how the appearance of even a 
 single volume may change the opinions that 
 are in fashion upon the claims of a disputed 
 passage of the Bible. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 LEADING DIFFICULTIES — SILENCE OF GREEK 
 WRITERS. 
 
 The really formidable task that lies upon the 
 counsel for the defence is to offer some kind of 
 an explanation of the almost fatal silence 
 of the ancient Greek writers. In the first 
 centuries of Christian history they were en- 
 gaged in incessant controversies with those 
 who impugned the Catholic doctrine of the 
 Trinity. If the disputed verse in St. John's 
 Epistle at that time formed a part of the 
 Greek Scriptures, here, it is felt, was a verse 
 which exactly suited their argument, and 
 which they might triumphantly have cited to 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the summary confusion of their opponents.* 
 Yet, it is alleged, they one and all never cite 
 it ; and the fact that they uniformly do not 
 cite it, when it would have so admirably 
 suited their purpose, must be accepted as 
 proof positive that they did not acknow- 
 ledge it. 
 
 This uniform silence — if indeed it be uni- 
 form — is perhaps the most ugly fact with 
 which the defence has to deal. It is even 
 more overwhelming than the general absence 
 of the verse from the few manuscript copies 
 of the New Testament that have survived to 
 our time. The question is, Can anything be 
 urged in explanation of it ? Can any con- 
 siderations be advanced which may fairly 
 
 * Mill in his folio edition of the Greek Testament 
 quotes ail the passages of both Greek and Latin writers, 
 where the disputed verse, though it would have been most 
 opportune, still does not appear. He nevertheless is a 
 defender of the verse. 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. 2 1 
 
 relieve the pressure of it ? Can any reasons 
 be imagined which, in days when religious 
 controversy was even more heated and more 
 truculent than anything known to modern 
 experience, might have led the Catholic party 
 with a common instinct to avoid the verse \ 
 
 Either the verse was contained in their 
 copies of the New Testament or it was not. 
 Mill, after a judicial consideration of all the 
 phenomena of the question, comes to the con- 
 clusion that it was not. He thinks that it 
 was in the original autograph of the Epistle, 
 and the early copies of it, but that, through 
 an accident of a kind familiar to all who have 
 considered the transcription of manuscript, it 
 dropped out by the negligence of transcribers, 
 owing to the similarity of the words in imme- 
 diate juxtaposition with it. If that be so, 
 the troublesome question before us is at an 
 end. The Greek doctors did not quote the 
 
2 2 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 verse as Scriptural proof of their position, 
 because, owing to an accident, which for their 
 argument may seem to be little short of fatal, 
 the verse was simply not known to them as 
 Scripture. 
 
 If, however, the verse was contained in 
 their copies of the Scripture, why did they 
 not quote it ? 
 
 First of all, by way of extenuation, a fact 
 may be pleaded which does not seem to have 
 been sufficiently regarded in previous discus- 
 sions of the question before us — the fact, I 
 mean, that comparatively slight notice seems 
 to have been taken by the Greek Fathers, of 
 the seven Catholic Epistles of St. James, St. 
 Peter, St. John, and St. Jude. As to why 
 this was so, various reasons will probably 
 occur to those who are professionally 
 acquainted with the subject ; but the fact 
 remains that, on a general survey of early 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. 23 
 
 Greek Christian literature, the quotations 
 from these Catholic Epistles are, even in pro- 
 portion to their length, very much more rare 
 than quotations from, say, the Epistles of St. 
 Paul and certain other books of Holy Scrip- 
 ture. The copious indexes of Scriptural 
 quotations, which generally accompany the 
 large editions of Greek Fathers, furnish us 
 with a ready means of arriving at something 
 like an arithmetical estimate of this proportion. 
 Jn St. Gregory of Nazianzum, for example, 
 who might from the nature of his argument 
 have been eminently expected to cite the dis- 
 puted verse, and who actually does once cite 
 the verse next to it, there are in the Cologne 
 edition no less than seven folio pages of 
 references to Scripture in his works ; yet, out 
 of all this mass, there are but seven references 
 to the whole of the Catholic Epistles. 
 
 As;ain, in the Benedictine edition of the 
 
24 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 works of St. Basil the Great, published at 
 Paris in 1730, out of a mass of Scripture 
 references, covering fifteen and a half folio 
 pages, in vol. i. there are but four citations 
 from the 1st Epistle of St. John ; out of 
 sixteen folio pages in vol. ii. there are but 
 two such citations ; and out of four folio 
 pages in vol. iii. there is but one solitary 
 passage cited from the whole of the Catholic 
 Epistles — viz., 1 John iii. 24 : — " Hereby we 
 know that He abideth in us by the Spirit, 
 which He hath given us." 
 
 In the Benedictine edition of St. Chrysostom, 
 published at Paris in 1 738, out of no less than 
 fifty- seven folio pages of references, there are 
 but four citations. 
 
 In the Benedictine edition of Irenseus (Paris, 
 1 7 1 o) out of thirteen pages of references there 
 are but three citations. 
 
 In the Cologne edition of St. Athanasius, 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. 25 
 
 out of thirty-four folio pages covered with 
 reference to Scripture, there are but thirty 
 citations from the whole of the Catholic 
 Epistles. 
 
 In the Benedictine edition of St. Cyril of 
 Jerusalem, published at Paris in 1720, there 
 are but fifteen citations out of eleven and a 
 half folio pages covered with citations. 
 
 In the Paris edition of Justin Martyr (1 742) 
 there is but one solitary citation in seven folio 
 pages devoted to the subject. 
 
 When the inquiry had advanced thus far, it 
 seemed unnecessary to proceed in computing 
 further in the works of individual Greek 
 Fathers ; so by way of conclusion the writer 
 turned to a volume ortwo of Gallandiu's famous 
 Bibliotheca Patrum, and found the same im- 
 pression confirmed. In volume i. out of four- 
 teen folio pages of Scripture references, there 
 is but one citation of our Epistle ; and in 
 
2 6 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 volume ii. out of fourteen folio pages of such 
 references, there is not a single one. 
 
 Quite consistent with this paucity of citation 
 is the fact that the Greek theologians do not 
 seem either to have preached or written so 
 freely upon the group of the Catholic Epistles 
 as they did upon some other parts of Holy 
 Scripture. St. Chrysostom, for example, 
 while he has his Homilies upon all the other 
 Epistles of the New Testament, has none upon 
 these ; and Theodoret, while he has a Com- 
 mentary occupying a whole folio volume upon 
 the other epistles, yet takes no notice whatever 
 of these. 
 
 The use then which early Greek writers 
 made of the group of Catholic Epistles is, it 
 appears, comparatively slender. There were, 
 no doubt, some causes at work to generate 
 this uniform neglect on the part of writers so 
 widely separated by time, by locality, by 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. 2 J 
 
 circumstance, by personal temperament, by 
 almost everything in short except the accident 
 of language and the impulse of a common 
 faith. What those causes may have been is 
 fair matter of inference or of conjecture. But 
 it is at least curious to observe that the com- 
 parative silence of the early Greek writers is 
 not altogether without a parallel in modern 
 Theology. Every student of Scripture knows 
 that monographs upon any one of the Catholic 
 Epistles are far more rare than those which 
 are printed upon most other parts of the New 
 Testament. There will be twenty writers in 
 English or in German upon an Epistle of St. 
 Paul's where there is not one upon, say, the 
 Epistle of St. James. The scantiness, there- 
 fore, of the notice which seems in ancient days 
 to have been bestowed upon the Catholic 
 Epistles while it may be curious, cannot at least 
 surprise us. But as a mere question of mathe- 
 
2 8 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 matical probability, the chances of any parti- 
 cular verse in those Epistles being quoted 
 are enormously diminished by the fact of that 
 general scantiness of reference — a fact, we 
 plead, which ought to be remembered in ex- 
 tenuation, though not of course in solution, of 
 the difficulty created by the non-citation of 
 the disputed text in the course of discussions 
 where it might so naturally have been expected 
 to appear. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 LEADING DIFFICULTIES — TRUE CONTROVERSIAL 
 VALUE OF THE VERSE. 
 
 But there is another plea to be advanced of 
 an entirely different character. The difficulty, 
 let it be remembered, is that the Greek Fathers 
 do not quote the disputed verse in their 
 arguments about the Trinity, when, it is 
 alleged, it would have gone a long way 
 towards settling the question at issue 
 between the Catholic party and their oppo- 
 nents. There are, however, some considera- 
 tions about the verse which would have made 
 it in some respects an eminently undesirable 
 verse to quote in answer to those particular 
 opponents whom they had to combat. It is 
 
30 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 not difficult to see that it might easily have 
 embarrassed their argument. A sagacious 
 advocate will always avoid the suggestion of 
 a point which in one of its aspects is indeed 
 in his own favour, but which, by a little 
 adroitness on the part of his opponent, might 
 easily be turned against himself. This is 
 precisely the case with the disputed verse 
 when viewed in connection with the verse 
 that follows it. The particular point of 
 doctrine at issue between the Catholic and 
 the heretical party was whether the Three 
 Persons in the Trinity were of the same 
 nature or no. The Catholic said they were, 
 the Arian said they were not. He would 
 allow that they were of a similar nature, but 
 he denied the sameness. If now a Catholic 
 Doctor had adduced St. John's disputed text 
 in support of his position ; if he had pleaded 
 that the Three Persons in the Trinity were 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. 3 1 
 
 of one and the same nature, because the 
 Scripture said, " There are three that bear 
 witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, 
 and the Holy Ghost, and these three are 
 one," what would have been the immediate 
 result? Yes, the Arian would have cried, 
 but please to continue the quotation : "And 
 there are three that bear witness in earth, 
 the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, and 
 these three agree in one." The parallelism, 
 he would have urged, told altogether in his 
 favour. The sacred writer adduces two 
 groups of three, and as the three mentioned 
 in the second group — the Spirit, the Water, 
 and the Blood — are unquestionably not of 
 one and the same nature, so by all the laws 
 of thought he was entitled to the benefit of the 
 contention that the Three mentioned in the 
 first group were regarded by the sacred writer 
 as being severally of a different nature likewise. 
 
32 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 The Catholic doctors seem to have been 
 quite alive to the possibility of this unfavour- 
 able turn being given to the argument. The 
 passage of St. Gregory of Nazianzum, which 
 has been so often quoted adversely to the 
 disputed verse, betrays the consciousness of 
 this. He cites the eighth verse of St. John's 
 chapter, but takes no notice of the seventh, 
 which is in dispute. Barely stated, his 
 omission constitutes one of the most formid- 
 able considerations against the verse, but any 
 one who takes the trouble to read a page or 
 two in this part of St. Gregory's Oration will 
 see that the disputed verse would have been 
 entirely foreign to the point which at the 
 moment St. Gregory was enforcing. His 
 adversary, somewhat unfortunately for him- 
 self, had alleged that the usages of language 
 did not admit of things being counted 
 together, unless there was some community 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. 33 
 
 of nature among them. What about St. 
 John? replies the Orator. "When he says 
 in the Catholic Epistles that there are three 
 who bear witness — the Spirit, the water, the 
 blood — does he appear to you to be trifling ? 
 First indeed because he has ventured to reckon 
 together things which are not of the same 
 nature — a process which you allow only in 
 the case of things that are of the same 
 nature ?"* 
 
 Is not this a clue to the kind of use which 
 St. Gregory knew would have been made of 
 the disputed verse if he had drawn it into the 
 controversy at all ? The Catholic position, 
 which he could quite well substantiate from 
 other parts of Scripture, would have been im- 
 peded, embarrassed, and obscured by a sub- 
 sidiary discussion as to whether the Three 
 Witnesses classed by St. John in the same 
 
 * Greg. JNaz. Orat. 37 p. 603, ed. Colon. 1680. 
 
 D 
 
34 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 category, were meant to be regarded as of the 
 same nature or of different natures ; whether in 
 short, the parallel between the group of 
 heavenly witnesses and the group of earthly 
 witnesses was to be allowed as including a 
 diversity of their several natures or not. 
 
 In point of fact it comes to this — that the 
 disputed verse, if it could be divorced from 
 its context, would have been the strongest 
 possible argument for the Catholic doctrine of 
 the Trinity ; but that if it be read in connec- 
 tion with the verse that follows, it is capable 
 oi being turned very seriously to the dis- 
 advantage of that doctrine. It is indeed 
 affirmed by Aquinas that full advantage was 
 taken of this consideration on the part of the 
 Arian heretics ; that they attempted to im- 
 prove the parallel which the sacred writer had 
 instituted between the two groups of heavenly 
 and earthly witnesses ; and that with this 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. 35 
 
 view they intruded into the Latin text the 
 second clause, corresponding to our " These 
 three agree in One," which did not exist in 
 the best copies. ' ' Their obj ect, " says Aquinas, 
 " was to prove that, in the view of Scripture, 
 the agreement between the Father, Word, and 
 Holy Ghost was the same as the agreement 
 between Spirit, Water, and Blood — an agree- 
 ment, that is to say, not of nature or essence, 
 but only of love and consent. - "* 
 
 A writer, whose name carries great in- 
 fluence, in speaking of the disputed text 
 being only found in Latin manuscripts, 
 
 * See the famous note in the margin of the Compluten- 
 sian Polyglott. On the principle of verifying all quotations, 
 I took the trouble to compare Hartwell Home's tran- 
 scription of it. Passing over a few inaccuracies of ortho- 
 graphy and punctuation, he has transcribed it quite 
 correctly, save only that he has mistaken for ut the abbre- 
 viation which represents the modern viz., and thereby 
 spoiled his Latin. 
 
36 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 recently says, that " this cannot possibly be 
 set against the fact that in the Arian con- 
 troversy none of the Greek Fathers quote a 
 passage so very apposite.'"" Why, it was the 
 opinion of Grotius that, so far from being 
 apposite to the argument of the Greek 
 Fathers, the text was introduced by the 
 Arians, so that from the analogy of the 
 adjoining verse they might argue that Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost were one only in con- 
 sent and not in essence, t 
 
 When, therefore, the defence is asked, why, 
 if the disputed verse be genuine, it was never 
 quoted by the Greek Fathers in their 
 arguments on the Trinity, we now have 
 materials for a reply. We say that the verse 
 
 * " The Bearing of the New Revision on the Teaching 
 of the Church." By the Rev. M. F. Sadler. 
 
 ■f The Note of Grotius is printed at length in Appen- 
 dix III. 
 
LEADING DIFFICULTIES. $7 
 
 is anything but one which would well have 
 served their purpose ; that, owing to the 
 consort with which it is yoked, it would have 
 been on the contrary most mischievous to the 
 kind of argument which they had to sustain ; 
 that it is a weapon which would have been 
 most easily wrested from their grasp and. 
 brandished against themselves ; and that to 
 have arrayed the verse in the lines of their 
 defence would have been simply a blunder 
 in advocacy, which happily they were too 
 sagacious to commit. 
 
CHAPTER Y. 
 
 COUNTER-DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 In the foregoing chapters it has been frankly 
 admitted that there are certain difficulties 
 with which the defence has to deal, and 
 which must in fact be fatal to its prospect of 
 success, unless they can to some extent at 
 least be accounted for and explained. But it 
 has been too much left out of sight that 
 there are also difficulties of the same kind 
 that attend upon the indictment of the dis- 
 puted verse. 
 
 The first of such difficulties is this — How 
 did it get into Greek ? It is commonly traced 
 by its opponents to a Latin source in Africa. 
 
COUNTER-DIFFICULTIES. 39 
 
 " The seventli verse, 5 ' says one, # " originated 
 in a Latin gloss upon the eighth verse. " " The 
 Editors of the Complutensian Polyglott," 
 says another, f " inserted it upon the authority 
 of the Latin Vulgate version." This is all 
 very well. But how did the verse get into 
 Greek ? Who put it into Greek ? Where 
 was it put into Greek ? \ Where does it 
 make its first appearance in Greek ? We are 
 bound to have some answers to questions of 
 this kind. We actually have such answers in 
 other similar cases. There are other spurious 
 clauses and expressions current in our printed 
 
 * Bp. Marsh. 
 
 f Hartwell Home. Introd. Pt. II. ch. iv. s. 5. 
 
 \ Dr. Davidson, indeed, says ("Bib. Crit.," ii. 423), 
 11 The entire verse appeared for the first time in Greek in 
 a Greek version of the Latin Acts of the Lateran Council 
 held in 12 15." Yes; but a portion of it, at least, appeared 
 earlier than that in the Greek Dispute against Arias. 
 Would he have us suppose that the editors of the Lateran 
 Council forged the Greek ? 
 
40 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Testaments of which we are plainly told that 
 they were translated from the Latin into 
 Greek by Erasmus !* Why then have we 
 nothing of the kind here ? 
 
 A second point which must be faced in the 
 case for the prosecution of the verse is this. 
 The theory adopted by the prosecution, it will 
 be remembered, is that the verse was foisted 
 upon the Latin copies of the Scriptures used 
 in Africa. But then how was it that no 
 single writer of the early centuries over the 
 whole face of Christendom protests against 
 the intrusion ? It was not that the African 
 Scriptures were unknown to the rest of the 
 world. On the contrary, they were the very 
 focus of attention for all Latin-speaking 
 Christians. The ear]y Latin translation of 
 the Scriptures was made, it is well known, 
 
 * See the article New Testament in Smith's "Dictionary 
 of the Bible," p. 522. 
 
COUNTER-DIFFICULTIES. 4 1 
 
 not for Italians, but for residents in Africa. 
 It was the newly-discovered inaccuracy of 
 these African Scriptures that was the very 
 source and spring of all St. Jeromes great 
 labours upon the text and the translation of 
 the Bible. It was these African Scriptures 
 which led him to use those phrases in favour 
 of a revision which have been, often so un- 
 suspectingly, revived in our own time — that 
 the Church, in her existing version, was not 
 presenting the Word of God so faithfully as 
 she might. If, therefore, no notice was taken 
 in early Christendom of an alleged irregu- 
 larity in the African Scriptures, it was not 
 that these Scriptures escaped notice by virtue 
 of any relative insignificance ; it was not that 
 any general indifference was felt as to what 
 the Church in Africa might think or use. 
 And if it were true, as the theory of the pro- 
 secution demands, that, in reliance upon even 
 
42 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the greatest names amongst her doctors, the 
 African Church had gradually admitted into 
 her copies of the Scriptures a very important 
 verse which was not really Scripture at all, it 
 is little less than incredible that the mistake 
 should have been allowed to pass without one 
 single phrase of indignant protest on the part 
 of all the rest of Christendom.* 
 
 See Appendix II. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE ALLEGED REFERENCES TO THE DISPUTED 
 VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 
 
 The real strength of the case for the impeach- 
 ment of the disputed verse lies not alone in 
 the very grave fact of its general absence 
 from the older Greek manuscripts, but in the 
 alleged fact that it is never referred to by any 
 of the old Greek writers, the Latin portions 
 of early Christendom seeming to be alone 
 conscious of its existence. It seems almost 
 impossible to argue in the teeth of such alle- 
 gations as these. If, however, it could be 
 shown by reasonable inference that the verse 
 was known in its Greek dress to even one 
 solitary Greek writer of early days, then it is 
 
44 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 obvious that the prospects of the argument 
 will be entirely changed. Then the defence, 
 instead of standing abashed and confuted by 
 the silence of all the rest of such writers upon 
 the subject, would be entitled to plead that 
 that silence may have been due to other causes 
 besides the non-existence of the verse. Then, 
 too, it is not entirely a forlorn hope to face its 
 absence from the Manuscripts. They are after 
 all but very few in number, but the scanty 
 survivals of a vast multitude of sacred copies, 
 possibly far more accurate and more highly 
 finished than any of themselves. Under 
 what influences they were made, we know 
 not. Where they were made we know 
 not. That every one of them is corrupt in 
 some point or other, we know. If the pre- 
 ponderance of their evidence were paramount, 
 then such a narrative as the Agony in the 
 Garden would have to be erased from the 
 
DISPUTED VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 45 
 
 pages of the Bible. Supposing, then, that 
 our verse should prove to have been known 
 to even one early Greek writer, the presump- 
 tion would be about these few surviving 
 manuscripts, that just as in the passage of the 
 Agony, they are all at fault but one, so in 
 the disputed verse before us we have a case 
 in which even that one has joined the error of 
 the rest. 
 
 Now, there are just two passages in old 
 Greek literature which seem to betray an 
 acquaintance with the disputed verse of St. 
 John's Epistle. They are the very keystone 
 of the argument for confuting the position that 
 the verse is due to Latin sources. It is well, 
 therefore, to separate them from the mass of 
 other quotations amid which they sometimes 
 have been buried, to the great detriment of the 
 conclusions that naturally arise out of them. 
 
 The first passage consists in a few words 
 
46 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 in the Greek Synopsis of Holy Scripture, 
 which is printed in the folio editions of several 
 of the Greek Fathers. The author of the 
 Synopsis gives a summary of the contents, 
 though not in their strict order, of every book 
 in the Bible, each book having a separate 
 section to itself. Towards the close of the 
 section on the First Epistle of St. John he 
 says that John declares — 
 
 " That he who loveth not his neighbour is 
 not worthy of his calling, and cannot be called 
 Christ's ; and he shows the oneness of the 
 Son with the Father, and that he who denies 
 the Son neither has the Father." 
 
 It is this remarkable phrase of oneness as 
 applied to the Persons of the Trinity that is 
 found in the disputed verse, and if that be 
 expunged, is found nowhere else in the 
 Epistle. 
 
 A Cambridge man, with one of the most 
 
DISPUTED VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 47 
 
 eminent degrees of our day, recently wrote 
 to inquire of the present writer whether the 
 author of the Synopsis could have meant that 
 St. John's general teaching showed the one- 
 ness, or whether he showed this specifically 
 in his Epistle. In the latter case, this cor- 
 respondent observed, the passage from the 
 Synopsis is most important in its bearing on 
 the genuineness of the disputed text. Un- 
 doubtedly it is most important. And that 
 there may be no mistake in the minds of the 
 reader, a translation of the whole of the 
 section relating to St. John's First Epistle 
 is here presented. Experience shows that 
 there are comparatively few who will take 
 the trouble to unearth it in the folios of a 
 library. 
 
48 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 FROM THE GREEK SYNOPSIS. 
 
 Fourth* of John. 
 Thus, also, this is called ; since also John 
 the Evangelist writes also his Epistle, putting 
 in mind those who had already believed 
 in the Lord. And first, indeed, as in the 
 Gospel so also in this Epistle, he speaks as a 
 theologian about the Word, showing that He 
 is always in God, and teaching that the 
 Father is Light, in order that we may even 
 thus know that the Word is a radiance from 
 Him. But, speaking as a theologian, he 
 declares that the mystery with us is not new, 
 but even from the beginning it ever exists, 
 but now has been manifested in the Lord, 
 who is Life Eternal and very God. And, 
 moreover, he assigns the cause of the coming 
 of the Word and of His appearing, saying 
 that it is to destroy the works of the devil, 
 
 * Fourth, sc. in the group of the Seven Catholic Epistles. 
 
DISPUTED VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 49 
 
 and to free us from death, and that we might 
 know the Father and the Son Himself, Jesus 
 Christ, our Lord. He writes accordingly to 
 every age, to children, to young men, to old 
 men, that God has become known, while the 
 power of the devil has been conquered in the 
 overthrow of death. Further, for the rest, 
 through the whole Epistle he teaches con- 
 cerning love ; wishing that we should love 
 one another, since even Christ loved us. He 
 discourses then of the difference between fear 
 and love, and between the children of God 
 and the children of the devil, and of a sin 
 unto death and a sin not unto death, and of 
 the difference between spirits. And, finally, 
 he distinguishes what sort of a spirit is of 
 God, and what is of error ; and when we 
 become known as the children of God and 
 when of the devil ; and for what sort of a sin 
 we ought to pray ; and that he who lovetli 
 
 E 
 
50 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 not his neighbour is not worthy of his calling 
 and cannot be called Christ's. And the One- 
 ness, moreover, of the Son with the Father 
 he shows ; and that he who denies the Son 
 neither has the Father. But he decides in 
 this Epistle, saying that there is a peculiarity 
 of Antichrist, and that it is this — the saying, 
 that Jesus Himself is not the Christ, so that, 
 as He is not, the liar says that he is himself 
 Christ. But, through the whole Epistle, he 
 exhorts believers not to despond, if they are 
 hated in the world ; but rather to rejoice, 
 because the hatred of the world shows that 
 the believers have removed from this world, 
 and afterwards belong to the heavenly 
 citizenship. And in the end of the Epistle, 
 moreover, again he puts them in mind, saying 
 that the Son of God is Eternal Life and very 
 God, both in order that we may serve Him 
 and keep ourselves from idols. 
 
DISPUTED VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 5 1 
 
 Person, in his opposition to the disputed 
 verse, seems rightly to have felt that the 
 alleged allusion to it in the Synopsis, if indeed 
 it were an allusion, would be fatal to the view 
 which he advocated. He accordingly denied 
 the allusion. He was, however, bound to find 
 some passage in St. John's Epistle to which 
 the Synoptist's statement could be referred. 
 That statement, it must be remembered, is 
 specifically this : — 
 
 " The One-ness moreover of the Son with 
 the Father he (sc. the writer of the Epistle) 
 shows." 
 
 Porson affirmed that this referred to chap- 
 ter ii. verse 2 3 of the Epistle, which, in the 
 Authorized English Version, stands thus : — 
 
 "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same 
 hath not the Father ; but he that acknow- 
 ledged the Son hath the Father also." 
 
 This, however, seems totally inadequate as 
 
 E 2 
 
52 THE THEEE WITNESSES. 
 
 an explanation of the allusion which is before 
 us. To begin with, there is no explicit men- 
 tion of the " One-ness " in this verse. And,. 
 it might be argued, St. John does anything 
 but " show the One-ness," by his statement 
 in this verse. There are actually ways of 
 taking these statements which are quite com- 
 patible with a denial of the One-ness. An 
 Arian, who denied the One-ness, certainly had 
 his own way of " acknowledging " the Son, 
 and would have argued that St. John was 
 very far from having asserted the " One-ness " 
 in the verse which Porson cites. 
 
 With all deference, therefore, for one of the 
 greatest names of modern Greek scholarship, 
 we seem fairly entitled to urge that the verse 
 which Porson cites as an explanation of the 
 Synoptist's allusion is inadequate, and that 
 there is no verse in St. John's Epistle which 
 explicitly affirms the One-ness of the Son with 
 
DISPUTED VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 53 
 
 the Father, except the verse which it is now 
 proposed to expunge. 
 
 Porson, indeed, himself felt that there was 
 Toom for questioning the adequacy of his 
 reference. If you object, he says, that St. 
 ■John ii. 23 does not teach the Unity of the 
 Son with the Father, you must prove — 
 
 (1) That the author of the "Synopsis" 
 means unity of essence, not of consent. 
 
 (2) That no ancient writer would or could 
 interpret it in that manner. — (Letters, p. 213.) 
 
 This lends colour to a consideration which 
 is advanced in another page.* If the edge 
 of the disputed text can be so easily turned 
 as (1) implies, is not that of itself a suffi- 
 cient reason why the Fathers refrained from 
 quoting it in their argument against Arians \ 
 
 As* the Synopsis of Holy Scripture holds so 
 prominent a place in the considerations which 
 
 See Chapter IV 
 
54 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 are here advanced, it may be convenient to 
 record a few particulars of what has been 
 thought and said of its origin. 
 
 Sometimes it has been printed amongst the 
 undoubted works of the great Athanasiua 
 (fourth century). This is the case with the 
 German edition of his works printed in folio 
 at Cologne. 
 
 The French (Benedictine) editors, after 
 citing their reasons, place the Synopsis not 
 amongst the "spurious," but amongst the 
 "doubtful" works of Athanasius, obviously 
 not considering the position established which 
 is afterwards taken up by Porson. 
 
 Porson affirms that the Synopsis is generally 
 allowed to be "spurious," and adds that it is. 
 variously ascribed to Euthalius (fifth century),. 
 Sophronius (fifth century), and a second Atha- 
 nasius, not the Alexandrian prelate, but a 
 contemporary of Euthalius. 
 
DISPUTED VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 5 5 
 
 In any case, it will be observed, the Synop- 
 sis is allowed to be the production of a very 
 ancient Greek writer, and this is all that is 
 required by our argument. 
 
 It is rightly added by Porson that the 
 Synopsis " May be found in GEcumenius, with- 
 out any author's name." That, however, is 
 no disparagement of the work. Porson does, 
 not seem to have been aware that it was a 
 practice of editors to prefix the section of the 
 Synopsis to commentaries by the Fathers on 
 the Epistle, together, indeed, with another 
 Greek abstract of contents. They are both 
 given, for example, "without any author's, 
 name," in the Venice folio edition of Theo- 
 phylact. 
 
 II. The other passage of a Greek writer, 
 which betrays an acquaintance with the dis- 
 puted text, is found in the so-called " Dispu- 
 tation with Arius," which is usually classed 
 
56 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 amongst the works of Athanasius. It stands 
 thus : — 
 
 '"'But the absolving and quickening and 
 sanctifying laver, without which no one shall 
 see the kingdom of heaven — is it not given to 
 the faithful in the Thrice-Blessed Name ? 
 And in addition to all these things, John 
 says, 'And the Three are One." : 
 
 Here again it is really immaterial to the 
 present argument whether this work be ac- 
 cepted as a genuine work of St. Athanasius 
 or not. It is enough that it is the work of 
 an early Greek writer, for then it disposes of 
 the idea that the disputed text was known 
 only to the Latins. 
 
 Upon the question of the actual authorship 
 of the work from which our citation is made, 
 there have been divergent opinions expressed ; 
 but no one has ever thought of denying its 
 antiquity. Some of the editors indeed accept 
 
DISPUTED VERSE IN GREEK WRITERS. 57 
 
 it as a bond fide work of the great Athanasius. 
 The Benedictine editors think it a colloquy 
 not with Arius, but with one of the followers 
 of Arius ; and the worst that even Porson can 
 say, of it is that, " In general, I believe, it is 
 attributed to Maxirnus, who lived in the 
 seventh century."* A loose statement of 
 this kind is really all that is possible as to 
 the authorship of the work in question. 
 There are no grounds, except more or less 
 precarious considerations of style and contents, 
 upon which to base a decision. But while 
 the actual authorship may always remain a 
 doubtful question, the antiquity of the work 
 cannot be disputed ; and there seems to be no 
 way of evading the conclusion at which Mill 
 arrives,! when he says that in the very early 
 
 * " Letters to Travis," p. 215. 
 t Mill, "N. Test." p. 742. Ed. Oxf. 1707. 
 
58 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 days of this author there must have been 
 copies of Scripture which contained the dis- 
 puted text. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 On the theory that the work under notice is by an 
 imitator of the great Athanasius, a curious question arises 
 ■which may not be without influence upon our ideas as to- 
 why St. John's text has not been much quoted — How is 
 it that while genuine Fathers avoided quoting the disputed 
 text, an imitator did not shrink ? 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 A PARALLEL IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 The argument for the disputed verse in St. 
 John's Epistle must necessarily stand upon 
 its own merits. But it is at least curious to 
 observe that the question has a parallel, which 
 does not seem hitherto to have been noticed, 
 in the printed text of the Old Testament. 
 It lies in one of the byways of the Hebrew 
 Scriptures little trodden by ordinary readers. 
 Hence it will come as a surprise to many to 
 learn that in our English Bible, and indeed in 
 many other Bibles, there are actually two 
 verses which have no equivalent in our printed 
 Hebrew Bibles. They are found in the account 
 
60 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 of the cities which were given to the Levites 
 in Joshua xxi. 36, $j : — 
 
 " And out of the tribe of Reuben, Bezer 
 with her suburbs, and Jahazah with her 
 suburbs, 
 
 " Kedemoth with her suburbs, and Me- 
 phaath with her suburbs ; four cities." 
 
 These verses are so far unlike the disputed 
 passage in St. John's Epistle as that they are 
 not verses of any exceptional interest for the 
 statements conveyed in them, or of any con- 
 troversial value. But the parallel consists in 
 this, that while the evidence from surviving 
 manuscripts is overwhelmingly against them, 
 yet on other grounds many eminent scholars 
 have concluded that once upon a time there 
 must have been manuscripts in existence which 
 contained the verses. 
 
 The Massorah is commonly, and indeed 
 justly, appealed to as having protected the 
 
A PARALLEL IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 6 I 
 
 integrity of the text of the Old Testament,. 
 and so given us fewer variations of reading 
 than we have to contend with in the New 
 Testament. The Massorah, however, is in 
 the present case entirely against the two 
 verses which are under notice. This testi- 
 mony it bears in a singular way. There is 
 a certain Hebrew particle, which cannot be 
 translated into English, occurring with the 
 names of the several cities that are enumerated 
 in this chapter of Joshua. The Massorah,. 
 after its usual fashion, has counted them, and 
 it more than once affirms that this particle 
 occurs twenty-eight times throughout the 
 passage. The statement is quite correct, as 
 the passage stands in the printed Hebrew 
 Bibles; but the particle occurs more than 
 twenty-eight times, if the two verses, which 
 the English Bible has adopted from Chronicles^ 
 be admitted. 
 
62 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 On the one hand then the textual evidence 
 is against the verses, but on the other hand 
 the chapter itself affirms that twelve cities were 
 allotted to the sons of Merari, and the number 
 cannot be made up without the cities named 
 in the disputed verses. Most of the English 
 commentators seem to have considered this 
 fact conclusive in their favour. An attempt, 
 indeed, to meet this particular difficulty 
 appears in the answer which was long ao/o 
 made by Haya, the famous head of the 
 Babylonian school of Biblical research. He 
 was asked about the question, and he replied 
 simply that, " Though the four cities required 
 to make up the number were not men- 
 tioned here, yet they were given in the 
 Chronicles. " # 
 
 * The answer may be seen in the original Chaldaized 
 Hebrew in the Commentary of Radak, which is printed in 
 .most of the Rabbinic Bibles. 
 
A PARALLEL IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 63 
 
 The position is well summarized in the 
 Hebrew note of Radak, which it may be 
 •convenient to translate here : " There are 
 copies in which these two disputed verses 
 are found, but I never saw them in any- 
 old and correct copy ; however, in some 
 of them the amendment is made." The 
 " old and correct" copies referred to by the 
 Hebrew writer are probably to be under- 
 stood as being relatively old; old in the 
 same sense as our most famous copies of the 
 New Testament are old ; older, that is to 
 say, than anything else that had survived, 
 but still leaving a vast interval between 
 themselves and the very earliest autograph 
 copies of the Sacred Books. The lapse of 
 time had been sufficient for the intrusion of 
 error into the text, and when Raclak speaks 
 of " correct" copies, he probably means copies 
 that had been correctly made according to 
 
64 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the directions laid down by the sages of the 
 Massorah. We are therefore landed in this 
 dilemma : Follow the direct evidence of the 
 Hebrew copies, and the two disputed verses 
 must be left out ; but, on the other hand, 
 leave them out, and the sacred text is made 
 inconsistent with itself, for the number 
 of the cities that are assigned cannot be 
 made up. 
 
 Here then is a case where an amount of 
 direct external evidence that is perfectly 
 overwhelming is nevertheless in the Eng- 
 lish Bible set aside owing to other con- 
 siderations. The argument, it will have 
 been seen, is immensely strong against 
 the claims of the two verses so long as 
 we confine our attention to surviving manu- 
 scripts of the Hebrew original; but it is 
 set aside on the authority of the Greek and 
 other versions of the Old Testament, them- 
 
A PARALLEL IN THE OLD TESTAMENT. 65 
 
 selves older than any surviving manuscripts, 
 and therefore admitted as conclusive wit- 
 nesses that once upon a time the disputed 
 verses were contained in the original text of 
 Scripture. 
 
APPENDIX I. 
 
 ON THE EIGHT USE OF THE FAMOUS NOTE IK 
 THE COMPLUTENSIAN POLYGLOTT. 
 
 Sir Isaac Newton seems to understand that 
 the famous Note was inserted in the margin 
 of the Complutensian Polyglott by the editors,, 
 as some sort of explanation of the irregularity 
 which they were conscious of introducing into 
 the Greek text, when they introduced the 
 disputed verse.* It may, however, be ques- 
 tioned whether the Note was intended to 
 have anything to do either with this Greek 
 text or with the claims of the disputed verse. 
 It seems rather intended as a justification of 
 
 * See Chapter I. 
 
THE COMPLUTENSIAN POLYGLOTT. 67 
 
 their version of the Latin text. The ordinary- 
 Latin text had not only a clause — " These 
 Three are One" (hi tres unum sunt) — with 
 the heavenly witnesses, but also a second 
 clause — " These Three agree in One" (hi tres 
 unum sunt) — with the earthly witnesses. 
 This second clause the Complutensian editors 
 thought not genuine, and accordingly omitted 
 it. The Note is their defence of this step 
 and is not, as Sir Isaac Newton, and Dr. 
 Davidson after him, seem to have thought, 
 any indication that they felt their Greek text 
 in this part of the Epistle to need apology. 
 The Note may be translated as follows : — 
 
 " St. Thomas, in his exposition of the second 
 decretal upon the Supreme Trinity and the 
 Catholic Faith, in treating the following pas- 
 sage ao-ainst Abbot Joachim — viz., "There are 
 Three who bear witness in heaven, Father, 
 Word, and Holy Ghost," says as follows : 
 
 f 2 
 
68 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 11 And in order to teach the Unity of the 
 Three Persons, there is subjoined, ' And 
 these Three are One' " — which indeed is said 
 on account of their unity of essence. But 
 Joachim, minded to take this perversely, tried 
 to fasten its authority upon a unity of love 
 and consent. For there is added in the same 
 passage : " And there are three that bear 
 witness on earth — Spirit, Water, and Blood." 
 And in some books there is added : " And 
 these Three are One." This, however, is not 
 contained in the true copies ; but it is said to 
 have been added by the Arian heretics, in 
 order to pervert the true understanding of 
 the foregoing authority about the unity in 
 essence of the Three Persons. Thus far St. 
 Thomas in the place cited above." 
 
APPENDIX II. 
 
 DOES ST. CYPRIAN QUOTE THE DISPUTED 
 VERSE ? 
 
 In the front rank of the counter-difficulties 
 noticed in Chapter V. is the alleged quota- 
 tion of the disputed verse by St. Cyprian. 
 The following account of this part of the 
 subject is from the pen of an eminent digni- 
 tary of the Church, who is a well-known 
 Biblical scholar, and has devoted much atten- 
 tion to this branch of the discussion. It is 
 addressed exclusively, it will be observed, to 
 the question, Does St. Cyprian quote the dis- 
 puted text \ 
 
 The controversy respecting the authenti- 
 city of i John v. 7, took its rise, as is well 
 known, in the omission of the verse in the 
 
70 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 first and second editions of Erasmus' Greek 
 Testament (1516 and 1519), on the ground 
 of its absence from all the Greek MSS. which 
 he had collated. Pressed on the other side 
 by the alleged authority of Jerome, who, in 
 the "Prologue" to the Catholic Epistles, which 
 bore his name, had declared that, in inserting 
 this verse in his edition, he was following the 
 Greek original from which certain Latin in- 
 terpreters had departed, Erasmus revived the 
 attack of which that "Prologue" so bitterly 
 complained, and spoke of Jerome's violence, 
 unscrupulousness, and frequent inconsistency, 
 as the probable origin of this supposed in- 
 terpolation in the Sacred text. # 
 
 From this charge the memory of that much 
 calumniated Father, to whose indefatigable 
 labours the Christian Church stands so deeply 
 
 * Sc-cinus greedily caught up the suggestion. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 7 1 
 
 indebted, was vindicated by several writers, 
 especially of our own country ; appealing in 
 his defence to the quotation of the latter part 
 of the verse by the earlier Latin writers, St. 
 Cyprian and Tertullian. The first to be 
 mentioned of these writers is Dr. Hammond ; 
 who, in his note on this passage in his Para- 
 phrase (published 1653), observes that, "as in 
 -St. Cyprian, who wrote before Arms was born, 
 and consequently before the time in which 
 there could be any motive to have made this 
 insertion, the words are distinctly found" (Lib. 
 de Unit. Eccles.) " Dicit Dominus, Ego et 
 Pater unum sumus, Et iterum de Patre et 
 Filio et Spiritu Sancto scriptum est, Et hi tres 
 unum sunt" and in like manner Tertulliaix, 
 (c. Prax.), " Qui tres unum sunt," — so it is con- 
 fessed of S. Hierome, that he asserted the 
 truth of our reading from the Greek copies 
 which he had, and defended it against all. 
 
72 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 In the same year Seidell, in his treatise 
 "De Synedriis" (lib. c. ii. p. 137), after quoting 
 the " Prologue," says, " Ut ut se res ea 
 habuerit, diu ante Hieronyrnum, reliquosque 
 supra memoratos Patres Grsecos Latin osq. 
 citatur (quod cum primis Mc advertendum) ut 
 indubitatce lectionis comma illud Cypriano, qui 
 floruit sub annum 250 (seu 140, aut circiter, 
 ante Hieronyrnum) ' Et iterum, inquit, de 
 Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto script um est, 
 Et hi tres unum sunt. 5 Quod lectionem ibi 
 ejusmodi ut illi receptam plane designat." 
 
 Still more fully Bishop Barlow (1653-1660) 
 in a tract on the subject of this verse, gives 
 his judgment of the importance of this testi- 
 mony of Cyprian in its bearings on the general 
 question. 
 
 "You know," says the Bishop, "that the 
 Socinians tell us that it was put in by the 
 Anti-Arians ; but this is a manifest calumny. 
 
THE DISPUTED VEIISE. 73. 
 
 That it was in the text before Arms' time,, 
 appears by Cyprian (who flourished in the 
 middle of the third century, about three-score 
 years before Arius was taken notice of) ;■ for 
 we find the express words of this verse in 
 Cyprian's book, De Unit. Eccles. I take it then 
 for an evident truth, that this seventh verse 
 of the fifth chapter of the First of John was 
 anciently a received part of the sacred text, 
 even before Cyprian's time (for otherwise he 
 would not have quoted it as such) ; and ergo, 
 I make no doubt it was originally there and 
 (de jure) should be so still. As for those 
 copies that want it, whether Syriac, Greek, or 
 Latin, printed or MS., I do (and shall do so 
 still, till I see better reason to the contrary) 
 conceive that they are defective, and want 
 some of that integrity which the most ancient 
 copies before Cyprian's time had ; for it is not 
 irrational to believe that other copies agreed 
 
74 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 with those that Cyprian made use of ; and 
 therefore seeing that it teas certainly in his, 
 I shall believe it was in the rest." 
 
 This important testimony to the authen- 
 ticity of the verse being thus brought promi- 
 nently forward, the great object of the Arian 
 party was to get rid of it, on the ground of 
 the corrupted state of the text of St. Cyprian's 
 works. " In the year 1670, Sandius made," 
 as Porson observes, "a formidable attack 
 upon the verse," and with it upon Cyprian's 
 testimony. He asserts broadly that the verse is 
 not quoted by any of the Ante-nicene Fathers, 
 with the sole exception of Cyprian, who seems 
 to have cited it once in the "De Unitate 
 Ecclesire." " But Possevinus," says Sandius, 
 " having collated four MSS. with the printed 
 copies, had found, in the course of four leaves 
 only, 288 alterations, or additions, or omis- 
 sions, or variations ; almost more," as he 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 75 
 
 remarks, " than there are words in the whole 
 treatise." Following Perkins and James, 
 Hivetus, he tells us, says that this trea- 
 tise has been corrupted by the insertion of 
 many forged sentences, which disfigure the 
 true meaning of the author. " How easily, 
 therefore," he argues, " might this passage 
 also have been inserted by those who did not 
 shrink from corrupting the Sacred writings 
 through fear of heretics.* 
 
 In answer to this, Dr. Sylvester Grabe, the 
 father of the well-known Dr. John Ernest 
 Grabe, printed at Koenigsburg, between the 
 years 1675 and 1677, three a Programmata' ' 
 in defence of the canonical authority of this 
 verse. He shows that the manifold corrup- 
 tions of which Dr. James, Perkins, and Rivetus 
 had complained, were in passages which re- 
 ferred to the primacy of St. Peter, and bore 
 
 Interpret. Paradoxal," p. 380—1. 
 
J6 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 on the supremacy of the See of Eome ; and 
 that the variations which Possevinus had 
 discovered " only strengthened the argument 
 in proof of the genuiness of this passage, 
 inasmuch as it was read without variation 
 in all." 
 
 But the proof of the genuineness of this 
 passage in St. Cyprian was put beyond all 
 doubt by Bishop Fell's edition, published in 
 1682. In that edition, in a note upon the 
 passage in question, the Bishop points out the 
 reference to the verse in St. John, as affording 
 ample proof of the falsehood of the charge 
 brought against St. Jerome. He remarks 
 at the same time that, whether by neglect 
 or design he would not venture to decide, 
 Jerome's prologue had disappeared from the 
 editions of the Yulgate which had lately ap- 
 peared ; for which reason he would give it a 
 place in his note on that passage. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 77 
 
 Bishop Bull, also, in his "Defensio Fidei 
 Nicense" (published by Bishop Fell in 1685), 
 treating of St. Cyprian, and defending him 
 from the misrepresentations of Sandius, having 
 cited the passage from the Epistle " Ad Ju- 
 baianum," took occasion to point out the 
 reference to the verse in St. John ; observing 
 at the same time that in the treatise " De 
 Unit ate Ecclesiae" the verse is avowedly cited. 
 He refers also to the passage in Tertullian as 
 a "manifest allusion" to the same verse: re- 
 commending it as supplying an answer to 
 those who suspected that these words were 
 inserted in the text by the Catholics after the 
 Arian controversy. 
 
 The reference to Cyprian in Bishop Fells 
 edition marks a new era in the history of the 
 controversy. Simon, in his " Histoire Cri- 
 tique" (published in 1689), after vindicating, 
 against Bishop Fell's remarks, the omission of 
 
7 8 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Jerome's " Prologue" in recent editions of the 
 "Vulgate," and arguing against its genuine- 
 ness, maintains that the earliest writer who 
 appears to have cited the passage is Victor 
 Vitensis, who lived a century after Jerome, 
 and who, in the second book of his history 
 of the Vandal persecution, thus refers to it : 
 "Et ut adhuc luce clarius unius Divinitatis 
 esse cum Patre et Filio Spirit um Sanctum 
 doceamus, Joannis Evangelists testimonio 
 comprobatur. Ait namque, Tres sunt qui 
 testimonium perhibent in ccelo, Pater, Verbum, 
 et Spirit us Sanctus : et hi tres unum sunt.'"* 
 Eulgentius, he remarks, was the next to quote 
 it about the same time. Simon then proceeds 
 to the citation in St. Cyprian, which had been 
 brought forward by Bishop Fell, and by father 
 Amelote of the Oratoire. He argues in the 
 first place that, if St. Cyprian had read the 
 verse in his copy of the New Testament, it 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 79 
 
 was incredible that St. Augustine should not 
 have employed it against the Arians in his 
 time. He then endeavours to show that St. 
 Cyprian does but apply to the Three Persons 
 of the Blessed Trinity the words which we 
 read in the eighth verse concerning the testi- 
 mony of " the spirit and the water and the 
 blood." In proof of this he refers to "the 
 learned Facundus," who was, he says, of the 
 same church of Africa, and who explains the 
 words at length, proving by them, after St. 
 Cyprian's example, the mystery of the Trinity. 
 His whole discourse, Simon remarks, pre- 
 supposes that he read only the words, " Tres 
 sunt qui testificantur in terra, spiritus, aqua, 
 et sanguis/' which, however, he explained, 
 mystically, of the Father, the Son, and the 
 Holy Ghost. "De Pat re, Filio, et Spiritu 
 Sancto dicit, Tres sunt qui testimonium dant 
 in terra, &c. &c. . . . et hi tres unum sunt ; in 
 
So THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 spiritu significans Patrem, in aqua, Spiritum 
 Sanctum; in sanguine vero Filium significans." 
 And, in support of this interpretation, Fa- 
 cundus appealed to St. Cyprian as having 
 given the same sense to the passage in St. 
 John: "Quod Joannis Apostoli testimonium 
 B. Cyprianus Carthaginiensis antistes et 
 martyr, in Epistola sive Libro quern de Triiii- 
 tate scripsit, de Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto 
 dictum intelligit." Had the Bishop of Oxford, 
 Simon goes on to say, compared these words 
 of Facundus with those of St. Cyprian, he 
 would not have brought against Erasmus and 
 Socinus such feeble proofs in defence of St. 
 Jerome ; who had no need of defenders, inas- 
 much as he was not the author of the " Pro- 
 logue to the Canonical Epistles," nor of the 
 interpolation which had been made in the 
 Epistle of St. John. Of Victor, whom Simon 
 had already mentioned as the first who ap- 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 8 I 
 
 peared to have quoted the passage, he remarks 
 that, by his less guarded quotation, he con- 
 veyed the idea that the record of the Three 
 in Heaven actually existed in St. John ; 
 whereas St. Cyprian and Facundus had only 
 referred to it as an explanation of the witness 
 of the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood. 
 
 But why is no reference made to the 
 passage in Fulgentius, whose name had been 
 mentioned together with that of Victor, as 
 having quoted the verse about the same time ? 
 The passage itself will perhaps explain the 
 omission. The words of Fulgentius are these : 
 "In Patre ergo et Filio et Spiritu Sancto 
 unitatem substantias accipimus, personas con- 
 fundere non audemus. Beatus enim Joannes 
 apostolus testatur, dicens, Tres sunt qui testi- 
 monium perhibent in ccelo, Pater, Verbum, et 
 Spiritus ; et tres unum. sunt. Quod etiam bea- 
 tissimus martyr Cyprianus in epistola ' De 
 
 G 
 
82 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Unitate Ecclesise' conjltetur, dicens, ' Qui pacem 
 Christi, etc. . . . Atque ut imam ecclesiam unius 
 Dei esse monstraret, hasc confestim testimonia 
 de Scripturis inseruit : Dicit Dominus, Ego et 
 Pater unum sumus ; et iterum de Patre, Filio, 
 et Spiritu Sancto scriptum est : £ et hi tres 
 unum sunt.' Non ergo ex tribns partibus 
 unum colimus Deum, sed, apostolicre fidei 
 regulam retinentes, perfectum consempiternum 
 Filium, de perfecto et sempiterno Patre sine 
 initio genitum, et potestate non imparem, 
 et natura fatemur sequalem ; Sanctum quoque 
 Spiritum non aliud fatemur esse quam Deum ; 
 nee a Filio, nee a Patre diversum, nee in 
 Filio nee in Patre confiisum."* This passage 
 seems to prove very clearly two points : first, 
 that Fulgentius had the disputed verse in his 
 copy, and secondly, that he considered the 
 
 * Fulgent, c. Arian. Max. Bibl. Patr. t. ix. p. 41. Ed. 
 Lugd. 1677. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 8$ 
 
 passage in St. Cyprian as a direct quotation. 
 He says, " Haec confestim testimonia de Scrip- 
 turis inseruit." On the other side is uro-ed 
 the passage of Facundus, which seems to 
 imply that in his copy the verse was wanting, 
 and that he understood St. Cyprian to have 
 been merely interpreting, not quoting it. If 
 the former supposition, indeed, be correct, 
 the latter would follow, of course ; for he 
 had no other way of explaining the passage 
 in St. Cyprian ; and what he says is of the 
 less value in forming our judgment of the 
 passage as it stands in St. Cyprian. But 
 if the question be between the positive 
 evidence of Fulgentius and the negative evi- 
 dence of Facundus, we can scarcely doubt 
 which to prefer. Independently, however, of 
 this consideration, there cannot be a doubt, 
 putting the testimonies side by side, which 
 ought to preponderate. For, in the first 
 
 G 2 
 
84 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 place, Fulgentius lived some thirty or forty 
 years earlier than Facundus. In the next 
 place, he was of Carthaginian origin. Thirdly, 
 he spent his whole life in Africa and the 
 West ; while Facundus, though bishop of an 
 African See, resided chiefly at Constantinople, 
 administering the affairs of the African Church 
 at the Court of the Emperor. Still further, 
 Fulgentius quotes the text in immediate con- 
 troversy with the Arians, at whose hands he 
 suffered persecution. He w r as, moreover, a 
 man of singular learning, both in Latin and 
 Greek. It may perhaps be worth remarking 
 that his reference to St. Cyprian is more 
 definite and precise than that of Facundus ; 
 the one quoting St. Cyprian's actual words, 
 the other only referring generally to his argu- 
 ment. The very mode of speaking of St. 
 Cyprian as " beatissimus martyr Cyprianus," 
 compared with that of Facundus, "beatissi- 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 85 
 
 mus CyprJanus Carthaginiensis antistes et 
 martyr/' — not to mention the inaccuracy of 
 Facundus in referring to the " de Unit ate Ec- 
 clesiae" as "Epistola sive Liber quern de Trini- 
 tate scripsit ;" and indeed the very expression, 
 '" quern de Trinitate scripsit," compared with 
 Fulgentius' "Epistola de Unitate Ecclesiae," 
 gives to his testimony the greater weight 
 which is due to one who, it would seem, was so 
 familiar with the name and writings of St. 
 Cyprian. These manifold proofs of vagueness 
 and inaccuracy have even given occasion to 
 the idea that Facundus had probably never 
 seen the treatise of Cyprian to which he thus 
 refers. " He seems," said Travis, " to have 
 been utterly at a loss how to describe or class 
 it ; for he calls it an Epistle or a book. And 
 he has indubitably given to it a title which is 
 not its own Either of these circum- 
 stances singly taken raises a suspicion. Com- 
 
86 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 bined, they amount nearly to proof, that 
 Facundus had not read the book which he 
 thus ventured to quote." May not his mis- 
 take about the title of the Epistle have 
 arisen from its having been referred to as the 
 "EpistolaDe Unitate?" And, having been 
 quoted especially in reference to the Catholic 
 doctrine of the Trinity in Unity, it might be 
 supposed, by those who were not acquainted 
 with it, to have this doctrine for its subject. 
 Still, further, it should be borne in mind, if 
 we would give its due weight to the testimony 
 of Fulgentius, that, twenty years before his 
 time, the exact words which he quotes were 
 as distinctly quoted, against the Arians, in 
 a formal Confession of Faith, presented 
 by upwards of 460 African bishops, assem- 
 bled under Eugenius, bishop of Carthage. 
 It is this Confession which Simon has. 
 spoken of as though it were a carelessly 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 8/ 
 
 worded reference to the passage in St. John, 
 or to Cyprian's exposition of it, occurring in 
 one of Victor's writings.* 
 
 It was in the year 484, between fifty and 
 sixty years before the date of Facundus, that 
 "Hunneric, king of the Vandals, a fierce 
 persecutor of the Catholics, and a strenuous 
 favourer of the Arians, commanded all the 
 Catholic bishops within his dominions to meet 
 and confirm their doctrine by Holy Scripture. 
 Accordingly, they assembled to the number of 
 more than 460, with Eugenius, Bishop of 
 Carthage, at their head. The bishops drew 
 up and presented to their sovereign a Confes- 
 sion of Faith, which is recorded by Victor 
 Vitensis ;" and it is in this Confession that 
 the passage occurs which has already been 
 oiven from Simon: " Efc ut adhuc luce 
 chmus unius Divinitatis esse cum Patre et 
 
 * Victor is simply the historian who records it. 
 
88 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Filio Spiritum Sanctum docearous. Joannis 
 Evangelists testimonio comprobatur. Ait 
 namque, Tres sunt qui testimonium perhibent 
 in coelo, Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus Sanctus ; 
 et hi tres unum sunt." When we find these 
 words agreeing exactly (with the single ex- 
 ception of the insertion of the "hi"*) with the 
 citation of Fulgentius, we can scarcely doubt 
 what was the received reading: in the 
 church of Carthage, in the latter part of 
 the fifth century ; not much more than half 
 a century (instead of a century, as Simon 
 represents) after the death of Jerome. Fa- 
 cundus, on the other hand, makes use of a 
 different rendering : " Tres sunt qui testimo- 
 nium dant in terra ;" and how many versions 
 were current in the Latin Church — especially, 
 it would seem, in the African branch of it — 
 
 * And this is the reading of i( Codd. Voss." 3, Lambeth, 
 and Ebor. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 8(> 
 
 we have the testimony both of Jerome and 
 of Augustine. Even in the version, however, 
 which Facundus makes use of, the words, " in 
 terra," which we read, seem to be vestiges of 
 the seventh verse, and the " in ccelo" to which 
 they correspond. The exact correspondence 
 between the citation in Fulgentius and the 
 Confession of Faith of the African bishops is 
 the more remarkable in that, in another place 
 where Fulgentius is quoting from St. John, 
 with a less solemn appeal to his testimony, he 
 gives the words: "qui testimonium dicunt" 
 instead of " perhibent." The passage occurs 
 in his treatise " De Trin. " c. iii. He is quoting 
 the two texts which St. Cyprian combines : 
 "Ego et Pater unum sumus . . . . Similiter 
 et illud : ' Tres sunt,' inquit, ' qui testimo- 
 nium dant in ccelo, Pater, Verbum, et 
 Spiritus Sanctus,' et hi tres unum sunt." In 
 the other passage he had referred to the testi- 
 
90 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 mony of St. John in a way which would lead 
 us to expect the strictest accuracy of quota- 
 tion : " Beatus Joannes Apostolus testatur 
 dicens, ' Tres sunt/ etc." 
 
 With regard to the question which Simon 
 raised and which, according to Person's state- 
 ment, has continued " ever since his time,, 
 whether Cyprian quotes our present seventh 
 verse, or only applies the eighth by a mystical 
 interpretation to the Trinity," the question 
 ought, one would think, to have been set at 
 rest by the arguments with which Mill, in 
 his " long-expected edition of the New Testa- 
 ment" (published in 1 707),"'' brought the result 
 of thirty years' unwearied reading and thought 
 to the defence of the position in which the 
 controversy had been left by Bishop Fell,, 
 
 * " At last," says Porson, " Mill's long-expected edition, 
 of the New Testament was published." 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 9 1 
 
 under whose auspices Dr. Mill Had begun and,. 
 for more than ten years, prosecuted his task. 
 Upon the two passages in St. Cyprian, Dr. Mill 
 observes : (i) that the words of St. John could 
 not have been more distinctly and explicitly 
 quoted ; (2) that the testimony of Fulgentius 
 is clear that the passage in the " De Unitate " 
 of St. Cyprian was a reference to this text ; 
 (3) that the argument drawn from Facundus 
 was of no weight in the matter. In support 
 of this position he asks how Facundus, living 
 300 years later than Cyprian, should know 
 Cyprian's mind better than Fulgentius, who 
 lived somewhat nearer to his time. Still 
 further, he asks, how it could be established 
 that, in the age of St. Cyprian, any one 
 adopted that mystical sense of the eighth 
 verse. For, he observes, as that explanation 
 does not occur anywhere among the Greeks, 
 who did not read the seventh verse, so no one 
 
92 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 of the Latins, he believes, for more than ioo 
 years after St. Cyprian mentions this inter- 
 pretation. It seems, as he goes on to say, to 
 have been first introduced by St. Augustine 
 ("Contra Maxim.," iii. c. 22); and, according to 
 the testimony of St. Eucherius, it was adopted 
 by many. For not reading the seventh verse 
 in their MSS., and at the same time learning 
 from Tertullian, Cyprian, and others, perhaps, 
 whose writings have perished, that the words 
 " hi tres unum sunt " were said in Holy 
 Scripture of the Father, the Son, and the 
 Holy Ghost, they immediately concluded that 
 it was this eighth verse to which those Fathers 
 referred (the words not occurring elsewhere) ; 
 and therefore that by the water, the spirit, and 
 the blood, were mystically signified the Father, 
 the Son, and the Holy Ghost. What wonder, 
 then, if Facundus, having in his hands a copy 
 wanting this verse, unhesitatingly affirmed 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 9$ 
 
 (according to the opinion of others, doubtless,, 
 as well as his own) that the testimony of St. 
 John in the eighth verse of this chapter was 
 said by St. Cyprian to refer to the three Divine 
 Persons. Dr. Mill then goes on to express 
 the judgment which he had formed, after a 
 careful consideration of the matter — viz., that 
 the allegorical interpretation in question was 
 so uncertain and precarious — the writers who 
 employ it not being even agreed among them- 
 selves ; some by " the water" understanding 
 the Father, and by "the spirit," the Holy 
 Ghost, others, on the contrary, by " the spirit,' ' 
 the Father, and by " the water," the Holy 
 Ghost — and not only that, but withal so futile 
 and trifling, so strained, and unnatural; such 
 indeed as, except it had arisen out of circum- 
 stances such as those supposed in this case, we 
 should scarcely have found in Augustine or any 
 the Latins — that it does not seem in any way 
 
<)4 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 to be attributable to St. Cyprian. On the con- 
 trary, when one finds a writer of remarkably 
 chaste imagination, who is very little given to 
 indulge in lax and mystical interpretations, and 
 who in his citations scrupulously adheres to the 
 letter of Scripture, so expressly saying, that of 
 the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, it 
 is written "hi tres unum sunt," one cannot 
 but come to the conclusion that he referred to 
 the seventh verse. Dr. Mill then proceeds to 
 give his explanation of the case. He observes 
 that, as the African church, the offspring of 
 the Roman, had received from the earliest days 
 of Christianity the sacred books of the Italic 
 version, that is, at least, the Gospels and St. 
 Paul's Epistles, so it is most certain that the 
 Catholic Epistles also, of which the copies 
 were more scarce, inasmuch as they were for 
 the most part of less authority in the Church 
 than those which had been written to particu- 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 95 
 
 lar churches, had come into the hands of the 
 teachers of that Church. These copies, shortly 
 after the planting of the faith in Africa, were 
 used by Tertullian and Cyprian ; and out of 
 the Greek MSS. which they had in their hands 
 they supplied the verse in St. John which 
 (according to Dr. Mill's suspicion) was from 
 the beginning wanting in the Latin copies. 
 His judgment, in conclusion, as to the value 
 of the quotations of the verse by these writers 
 shall be given in his own words : Ci Ego 
 equidem de tota hac re ita censeo : Sufficere 
 abunde in avdwrlav commatis, quod a Ter- 
 tulliano et Cyprian o citetur, licet nullo modo, 
 ne per conjecturam, assequi possemus, unde 
 factum ut apud Joannem legerint ipsi quod 
 nemo quisquam Grsecorum viderit ; imo licet 
 in nullis omnino ab illo tempore in hunc usque 
 diem exemplaribus comparuerit." This pas- 
 sage may serve to throw some light upon the 
 
96 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 mystery which so much perplexed Mr. Porson,, 
 liow " Mill, after fairly summing up the evi- 
 dence on both sides, just as we should expect 
 him to declare the verse spurious, is unac- 
 countably, " he says, " transformed into a 
 defender." 
 
 While Mill was engaged in this work, 
 Dr. Grabe was publishing his edition of the 
 " Defensio," and other Latin works of Bishop 
 Bull, which came out with Grabe's annota- 
 tions in 1703. In his note on the passage 
 in which Bull had referred to the testimony 
 of St. Cyprian, Grabe meets the objection 
 drawn from Facundus by the counter- evi- 
 dence of Fulgentius, whom he describes as a 
 writer somewhat earlier, and not less learned ; 
 noticing at the same time his greater accuracy 
 in the reference to Cyprian, and arguing that 
 Cyprian, in the opinion of Fulgentius, certainly 
 referred to the seventh verse, and that Ful- 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 97 
 
 gentius most clearly proved that he read that 
 verse in the African copies. He then goes on 
 to argue from internal evidence in behalf of 
 the authenticity of the verse ; answering the 
 objection arising from the state of the MSS., 
 and the absence of the verse from so great a 
 number of them. 
 
 While thus the authenticity of the verse 
 was defended in this country, abroad Simon 
 found antagonists in Ittigius, Martianay, 
 Maius, and Kettner; but into the contro- 
 versy, as carried on there, it is unnecessary 
 for us to enter. 
 
 In 1 71 5 the controversy was revived in 
 England by the publication of "A Full 
 Inquiry into the Original Authority of that 
 Text, 1 John v. 7 ; containing an account of 
 Dr. Mill's Evidences from antiquity for and 
 against its being genuine. With an Examina- 
 tion of his judgment thereupon. Humbly 
 
98 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 addressed to both Houses of Convocation."* 
 The writer, Enilyn, was a Presbyterian 
 minister of Dublin, and was engaged in 
 the controversy, it appears, by Clarke and 
 Whiston, who did not themselves choose to 
 appear openly. Emlyn wrote anonymously 
 at first, but in 1 7 1 9 published his name. 
 
 In his account of " the evidence offered in 
 support of the text" (Chapter II.), he mentions 
 
 * Whiston tells us that Dr. Clarke had " recommended" 
 liirn l( to write against the genuineness of that famous text 
 
 in the 1st Ep. of St. John which," he says, " he 
 
 knew I believed to be an interpolation. But as we both 
 knew that Sir I. Newton had written such a Dissertation 
 already, and I was then engaged in other pursuits, I ex- 
 cused myself at that time ; and we both agreed to recom- 
 mend that matter to Mr. Emlyn, which work he undertook 
 and performed with great impartiality and accuracy." 
 ("Memoirs of Dr. Clarke," p. 77.) In the first edition of 
 his "Scripture Doctrine" (publ. 1712), Dr. Clarke had 
 quoted the verse among his testimonies, adding — " though 
 it ought not to be concealed that this passage, though it 
 does not certainly appear to have been found in the text 
 of any Greek MS., should not have too much stress laid 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 99 
 
 the Latin Fathers whom Mill had produced, 
 " and which are indeed," he says, "his main 
 strength and confidence." From Cyprian, 
 " on whose authority," he says, " the cause 
 has chiefly rested hitherto" (" Full Inquiry," 
 p. 164), he quotes the words, "It is written of 
 the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, These three 
 are one, &c." . . . And near 300 years "after," 
 
 upon it in any controversy" (p. 238). In his 2nd ed. 
 (publ. 1719J, he inserts the words, " nor was cited by any 
 of the numerous writers in the whole Arian controversy;" 
 observing in a note, that " it is not quoted by any of the 
 
 Latins before S. Jerome the passage out of 
 
 Cyprian being only a mystical interpretation of the 8 th 
 verse, as is more than probable, as well from the express 
 testimonies of Eucherius and Facundus, referred to by Dr. 
 Mill, as from the texts being wanting in all, even the Latin 
 copies, both before and after St. Cyprian's time." He 
 refers to his " Commentary on Forty Select Texts in 
 answer to Mr. Nelson," p. 206 ; his " Letter to Dr. Wells,'* 
 p. 43 ; Dr. Mill's Dissertation upon the place, compared with 
 Proleg. p. 117, and " an anonymous book entitled, 'A Full 
 Inquiry into that Text, 1 John v. 7 ; wherein this whole 
 matter is learnedly and fully discussed' " (pp. 206-7). 
 
 H 2 
 
IOO THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 he says, "comes Fulgentius, a bishop of 
 Africa, and says that Cyprian in the former 
 words had respect to St. Johns testimony" 
 (p. 129). Upon this statement we may remark 
 the omission of the former part of Cyprian's 
 sentence, which contributes so essentially to 
 the proof that he is directly quoting Scrip- 
 ture : " Dicit Dominus, Ego et Pater unum 
 sumus. Et iterum scriptum est, et tres unum 
 sunt." Fulgentius. moreover, flourished not 
 much more than 250 years after St. Cyprian, 
 not "near 300." 
 
 In his proof of " the insufficiency of the 
 arguments brought in support of the text" 
 (Chapter III.), Emlyn repeats Simon's argu- 
 ment of the " mystical interpretation," and his 
 reference to Facundus ; and then asks, in 
 answer to Mill, why St. Cyprian might not 
 begin this mystical interpretation as well as 
 St. Augustine. He endeavours to set aside 
 
THE DISPUTED VEESE. 101 
 
 the argument from Fulgentius by the assertion 
 that, " Facundus is as good an evidence as he, 
 and more particular ;" and further that, "even 
 this does not contradict Facundus. For 
 Fulgentius and he both say the same thing, 
 viz., that Cyprian confessed St. John's testi- 
 mony .... only Facundus tells us that he 
 took this testimony from the eighth verse, 
 which he so interpreted, and Fulgentius does 
 not say it was otherwise ; and therefore there 
 
 is no reason to oppose him to Facundus n 
 
 In further proof of this position, he argues : 
 (i) That " Fulgentius speaks of it as a re- 
 markable concession in St. Cyprian : ' Quod 
 etiam Beatus Cyprianus confitetur. 3 " Confesses 
 what ?" he asks. " Not that St. John had 
 those words" (in the seventh verse), but the 
 mystical interpretation of the eighth. This 
 indeed, he says, " was somewhat far-fetched, 
 and not so clear a point, but St. Cyprian's 
 
102 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 confessing it might give it some credit ; but 
 it could give none to an undoubted text of 
 St. John to say Cyprian acknowledged it to 
 be true." (2) He tells us, " Cyprian's words 
 are not the exact words pretended to be found 
 in St. John ; for Cyprian says, ' Father, Son 
 (not the Word), and Spirit.' . . . And there- 
 fore, if our printed text be right, Cyprian had 
 no such copy, or else he did not keep strictly 
 to it; and if he did not cite the words exactly, 
 only the sense of them as an interpreter ; then, 
 in such a loose way of speaking, it might well 
 be, as Facundus says it w r as — viz., his sense 
 of the eighth verse. . . . Besides, Cyj)rian 
 does not say that the words Father, Son, and 
 Spirit were written ; all that Cyprian says 
 was written is, c Hi tres unum sunt ;' that this 
 was said of Father, Son, and Spirit, is only 
 Cyprian's interpretation. Let the interpreta- 
 tion be never so forced, that is nothing : so 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. IO3 
 
 it was ; and there are enough as strange inter- 
 pretations of texts in the Fathers, and in St. 
 Cyprian himself . . . (see Dr. Whitby's ' Dis- 
 sertation'). Nor was it unusual with Cyprian 
 to cite Scripture more by his sense of it than 
 by the strict letter of the text Thus, instead 
 of c Lead us not into temptation/ he cites it, 
 4 Surfer us not to be led,' &c. Again, he cites 
 Revelation xix. 10. 'Worship thou the Lord 
 Jesus,' instead of ' Worship thou God.' Will 
 any say upon this that he found a particular 
 copy which had these readings ? No, surely ; 
 but rather that it was Cyprian's exposition 
 of the true reading in all the copies. Even 
 so," says Emlyn, "I doubt not, his words, 'the 
 Father,' &c, was his sense of the 8th verse 
 of St. John's fifth chapter." " I shall conclude 
 this," he adds, "with Mr. Du Pin's judgment 
 upon the case; ' 'Tis not, then,' says he, 
 ' c absolutely certain that Cyprian hath quoted 
 
104 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the seventh verse/ . ... and Father Simon's, 
 who says, ' 'tis out of doubt that he hath 
 not.' Though 'tis probable this mistake of 
 Cyprian's words led some following African 
 writers into the opinion that St. John had 
 said them expressly." 
 
 The argument as to the " mystical interpre- 
 tation," and that drawn from the reference in 
 Facundus had already been met by Mill. 
 The question why St. Cyprian might not 
 begin this mystical interpretation, as well as 
 St. Augustine, Mill had already answered, by 
 suggesting that it was this very passage of 
 St. Cyprian which gave rise to that interpre- 
 tation. He had also shown that Facundus is 
 not as good an evidence as Fulgentius : and 
 that he is " more particular " is simply untrue. 
 As to Fulgentius not opposing Facundus, let 
 us see how the argument stands. Fulgentius, 
 it would seem, wished to recommend a mysti- 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. IO5, 
 
 cal interpretation of the eighth verse, which 
 was somewhat far-fetched ; but St. Cyprian's 
 confessing it might give it some credit. He, 
 therefore, observes that St. Cyprian confesses 
 the mystical interpretation of the eighth verse. 
 On this hypothesis we should have expected 
 to find in Fulgentius what we find in Fa- 
 cundus ; the eighth verse quoted and explained 
 mystically, and then this interpretation sup- 
 ported by St. Cyprian's authority in some 
 such way as Facundus appeals to it : " Quod 
 Joannis Apostoli testimonium!! eatus Cyprianus 
 . . . . de Patre, Filio, et Spiritu Sancto intel- 
 ligit." But, instead of this, we find Fulgentius 
 distinctly quoting the seventh verse, and adding 
 — " quodetiam beatissimus Martyr Cyprianus 
 confitetur, dicens," etc. Confesses what ? we 
 may well ask in our turn : — the truth (so we 
 are to believe) of a certain mystical interpre- 
 tation which he has not given or alluded to,. 
 
106 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 of a verse which he has not quoted ! Besides, 
 what need had he of this far-fetched interpre- 
 tation, which was to be supported by the aid 
 of a " confession" of St. Cyprian ? He had, 
 or supposed he had, the express words of St. 
 John, which he had just quoted, and which 
 more fully answered his end. St. Cyprian's 
 confession, of which Fulgentius speaks, was 
 clearly neither "that St. John had those 
 words" in the seventh verse, nor that the sup- 
 posed mystical interpretation of the eighth 
 verse was true. His " confession" was of the 
 great doctrine which Fulgentius was employed 
 in defending. The argument stands thus : 
 " In the Father, therefore, and the Son, and 
 the Holy Ghost, we acknowledge (accipimus) 
 a unity of substance ; we dare not confound 
 the persons. For the blessed John the Apostle 
 testifieth, ' There are three that bear witness, 
 &c, and these three are one. Which also (quod 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. IO7 
 
 etiam) the most blessed Martyr Cyprian in his 
 Epistle of the Unity of the Church confesseth 
 (confitetur) saying, ' Whoso breaketh the peace 
 of Christ, and concord, acteth against Christ : 
 whoso gathereth elsewhere beside the Church, 
 scattereth.' And that he might show that 
 the Church of the One God is one (ut imam 
 ecclesiam unius Dei esse monstraret), he imme- 
 diately inserted these testimonies from the 
 Scriptures : ' The Lord said, I and the Father 
 are One' And again of the Father, and the 
 Son, and the Holy Ghost it is written, ' And 
 these three are One' We, therefore, do not 
 worship one God [consisting] of a threefold 
 division ; but, retaining the rule of apostolic 
 faith, we confess (fatemur) that the perfect 
 co-eternal Son is begotten, without beginning, 
 of the perfect and eternal Father, .... and 
 we also confess {fatemur) that the Holy Spirit 
 is none other than God, neither different from 
 
IOS THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the Father and the Son, nor confounded in the 
 Son or in the Father." This it was — this 
 doctrine — which was the subject of Cyprian's. 
 Confession. 
 
 As to Emlyn's second argument, that 
 Cyprian does not quote the text in St. John 
 exactly, it may be remarked that he does 
 quote exactly all that he professes to quote. 
 He does not say, " Tres sunt," &c, writing 
 " Filius" instead of "Verbum." He quotes 
 only the words, " Et tres unum sunt," saying 
 of them in his own words : " de Patre et Filio 
 et Spiritu Sancto scriptum est." Reasons, 
 in fact, have been assigned why he should so 
 cite them ; but it is enough for our present 
 purpose to remark, that he does keep strictly 
 in his quotation to the words of the Apostle 
 as we u ow read them. But even if he had not, 
 it were absurd to argue that therefore he cited 
 only the sense of them as an interpreter ; and 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 109 
 
 "that then, in such a loose way of speaking, it 
 might well be, as Facundus says it was, his 
 sense of the eighth verse that he was giving. 
 Such an argument requires some evidence, or 
 at least some probability to be brought for- 
 ward in proof of the several distinct degrees 
 of license which are involved in such an 
 interpretation as that which is thus attributed 
 to St. Cyprian. 
 
 But, next, St. Cyprian is charged generally 
 with being equally careless in the quotation, 
 and lax in the interpretation of Scripture. 
 Both these assertions Mill had expressly con- 
 tradicted. With regard to the latter point, 
 we are referred to Dr. Whitby for proof, that 
 " there are enough as strange interpretations 
 of texts in the Fathers and in St. Cyprian 
 himself." But no instances are cited; and in 
 Whitby very few passages at all will be 
 found quoted from St. Cyprian; certainly 
 
IIO THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 none in any way parallel to the case in hand. 
 "With regard to Cyprian's supposed manner of 
 citing his own expositions of Scripture, instead 
 of the strict letter of the text, Dr. Grabe had 
 already endeavoured to show, in reference to 
 this very question (in his notes on the passage 
 in Bull), that St. Cyprian probably had a 
 copy before him, in which he found his 
 peculiar readings. Dr. Grabe had even 
 defended these readings, as supplying what, 
 in his opinion, was probably the genuine text 
 of Scripture. 
 
 Emlyn's " Full Inquiry" involved him im- 
 mediately in close controversy with David 
 Martin, pastor of the French congregation at 
 Utrecht. Martin published, in 171 7, "A 
 Critical Dissertation on 1 John v. 7, wherein 
 the authentickness of this text is fully proved, 
 against the objections of M. Simon and the 
 modern Arians.' , (This was translated into 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I I I 
 
 English in 1719.) It called forth, in 17 18, 
 an immediate " Answer" from Emlyn ; and 
 "An Examination" of Emlyn's " Answer" by 
 Martin, republished also in English, in 17 19, 
 To this Emlyn made a " Reply," in 1720; 
 and, finally, Martin published, in 1721 (re- 
 published in English in the following year), 
 " The Genuineness of 1 John v. 7, demon- 
 strated." Of the result of this controversy, 
 Porson observes, that " Emlyn, it must be 
 owned, left Martin in possession of the field ;" 
 though, as Bishop Burgess remarks, he " sur- 
 vived Martin's last tract two-and -twenty 
 years" (" Vindic." p. 2) ; " and yet, I know not 
 how," says Porson, the " opinion of Emlyn 
 made many converts. And Bishop Small- 
 brooke seems not to have been satisfied with 
 Martin's defence ; for he says that little has 
 been said against Mr. Emlyn, except what 
 has been offered by the ingenious M. Martin." 
 
I I 2 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 It is strange that Porson should have given 
 such a representation of Bishop Smallbrooke's 
 opinion. What the Bishop says is in a letter 
 to Dr. Bentley, printed in 1722, entitled "An 
 Enquiry into the Authority of the Primitive 
 Complutensian Edition of the New Testament, 
 as principally founded on the most Ancient 
 Vatican MS., together with some Research 
 after that MS., in order to decide the dispute 
 about 1 John v. 7." Upon the general con- 
 troversy it was no part of the Bishop's plan 
 to enter, observing that " These matters have 
 been so expatiated upon by our late writers, 
 who on one side have copied chiefly after M. 
 Simon, that, instead of repeating what is so 
 well known," he rather chooses, he says, 
 " to lay before the public another part of this 
 argument, that had not been so thoroughly 
 discussed as it deserved." He shows, how- 
 ever, sufficiently in passing, his judgment of 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. II3 
 
 the general question, and his satisfaction with 
 the argument which Martin had conducted. 
 He only wondered, considering the import- 
 ance of the controversy, that others had not 
 come forward in the same cause. "Certainly, 
 it is high time, "he says, "that this celebrated 
 passage should be examined with the greatest 
 accuracy ; that either its authority may be 
 satisfactorily vindicated, or be fairly given up 
 for an interpolation, if it is not capable of 
 beino* defended. The Church has been of 
 late so rudely insulted for retaining it in the 
 English translation of St. John's First Epistle; 
 and the memory of your ancient friend, the 
 late faithful and learned reviser [Dr. Mill] of 
 the New Testament, has been reflected on 
 so severely for deciding in favour of it, that 
 it may seem surprising to some that little 
 more has on that occasion been wrote in 
 vindication of it, than what has been offered 
 
 I 
 
114 T1IE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 by the ingenious Mr. Martin, in his contro- 
 versy with Mr. Emlyn." " It ought to be 
 added," Bp. Smallbrooke remarks in a note, 
 "that a copious vindication of this text has 
 been very lately published in Four Sermons, 
 by Dr. E. Calamy." 
 
 "It is not indeed easy/' the Bishop pro- 
 ceeds, " to add anything considerable to what 
 has already been laid before the public about 
 the quotation of this passage by St. Cyprian, 
 or the supposed allusion to it by Tertullian, 
 together with the methods that have been made 
 use of to elude those authorities ; and therefore 
 I shall not here enter into an inquiry whether 
 St. Cyprian directly quoted this passage, as 
 Fulgentius seems to affirm, or whether he 
 mentioned it only as a mystical interpretation 
 of the eighth verse, as Facundus tells us ; 
 though Facundus lived too remotely from the 
 age of St. Cyprian to know with certainty 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I I 5 
 
 that what St. Cyprian seems to quote literally 
 out of Scripture, was designed by him merely 
 for a mystical interpretation of another pas- 
 sage." Certainly, however "many converts" 
 the opinion of Emlyn may have made, Bishop 
 Smallbrooke was not one of them : and Martin, 
 in the Preface to his " Examination of Emlyn's 
 Answer" (Lond. 17 19), tells us that, if he 
 may be allowed to say it, his adversary had 
 seen the approbation of the public was on his 
 side. Above all, Emlyn had failed in what, 
 as Martin remarks in the same Preface, was 
 the main object of his publication. "The 
 anonymous English tract upon this subject/* 
 he says, " which came abroad under the title 
 of 'A Full Enquiry/ &c, was particularly de- 
 signed to render its authentickness suspected ; 
 and to stir up the bishops and clergy of 
 England to decree in Convocation that for the 
 future these words of the seventh verse should 
 
 1 2 
 
I I 6 THE THHEE WITNESSES. 
 
 be no longer inserted into the editions of the 
 Epistle. The wisdom and piety of the bishops 
 and clergy were not moved with his loud 
 exclamations ; and the Convocation prudently 
 dropped the affair. The discourse proved 
 unsuccessful. 
 
 " Telumque imbelle sine ictu 
 Conjecit " 
 
 Meanwhile, though the chief controversy lay 
 between Emlyn and Martin, the publication 
 of Dr. Clarke's " Scripture Doctrine" (17 12) led 
 to some discussion of the verse in question in 
 our own Church. The " Scripture Doctrine" 
 received a reply (in 17 13). "The Scripture 
 Doctrine of the Most Holy and Undivided 
 Trinity, Vindicated from the Misrepresenta- 
 tions of Dr. Clarke, to which is prefixed a 
 Letter to the Rev. Dr. by Robert Nelson, Esq. ," 
 who was the editor of the volume, the author 
 being Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Knight, not then 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 11/ 
 
 in holv orders. In answer to Dr. Clarke's 
 remark, that it ought not to be concealed that 
 this passage does not certainly appear to have 
 been found in the text of any Greek MS., he 
 observes, " It ought also to be told, that it 
 appears to have been found in the old Latin 
 version that was used in the African church. 
 Else how could St. Cyprian have cited it hi 
 his Treatise " de Unitate Ecclesiae," and again 
 in the " Epistola ad Jubaianum" (pp. 137-8). 
 
 Dr. Clarke replied that Dr. Mill had shown 
 that the old Latin version had it not. 
 Knight, in his "Defence of the True Scrip- 
 ture Doctrine" (published 171 5), admits that 
 such was Dr. Mill's opinion ; but observes 
 that the same Dr. Mill, who thinks that the 
 Italic version had it not from the beginning', 
 is yet of opinion that Tertullian and Cyprian 
 corrected their copies by Greek originals, and 
 that some few transcripts of those corrected 
 
I I 8 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 copies were publicly used in that very age in 
 some of their churches. And in his Prologue 
 he tells us from St. Austin, that the African 
 church had several Latin versions besides the 
 Italic from the very beginning ; whereof some 
 were made from complete originals, and had 
 the testimony of the three Divine Persons" 
 (p. 296). 
 
 A volume entitled " The true Scripture 
 Doctrine of the Holy and Ever-blessed Trinity 
 stated and defended, in opposition to the 
 Arian, by Abraham Taylor," which was 
 published in 1727 and dedicated to Water- 
 land, gives a good summary of the state of 
 the question, at the conclusion of a controversy 
 which, as he observes, had " run out into a 
 great length." As opponents of the verse he 
 mentions Simon, Le Clerc, Dr. Clarke, and 
 Emlyn ; on the other side, Dr. Smith, in his 
 " Discussion against Simon ;" Dr. Grabe, in his. 
 
THE DISPUTED VEKSE. I I 9 
 
 " Notes on Bishop Bull ;" Dr. Mill, M. Van 
 Maestricht, M. Ketner, M. Bogier, Dr. Jenkyn, 
 M. Martin, Dr. Calamy, Dr. Knight, Mr. May, 
 Bishop Smallbrooke, and Mr. Wade. 
 
 With regard to the passages from St. 
 Cyprian, the author observes, in reply to 
 the supposed mystical interpretation, and the 
 argument from Facundus, that " the sense of 
 Cyprian is best to be understood from his own 
 words, which are as plain and easy as can be 
 desired ;" that " there is no shadow of his fol- 
 lowing that mystical interpretation which 
 some afterwards run into," probably, "not 
 having the seventh verse in their copies, and 
 yet finding the words ' these three are one/ 
 sometimes quoted concerning the Three Divine 
 Persons. Facundus," he says, " was one of 
 these .... but he might mistake Cyprian's 
 sense, as well as blunder, as he does in the 
 title of the book he quotes : and no reason 
 
120 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 can be given why he should better understand 
 Cyprian than Fulgentius, who has assured us 
 that he quoted the seventh verse. . . . What 
 else our adversaries object to Cyprian's testi- 
 mony is," he says, " so exceedingly weak that 
 mere pity may prevent a person's exposing it." 
 Bishop Smallbrooke's letter to Bentley was 
 occasioned by the publication (in 1720) of 
 Bentley 's "Proposals" for a new edition of the 
 Greek Testament. His main object was to 
 restore the Vulgate to the state in which it 
 was left by Jerome, and to apply it as the 
 criterion of the true state of the Greek text. 
 Wetstein, still earlier, and Hare, had pressed 
 him to undertake such an edition ; and in 1 7 1 6 
 he addressed a letter to Archbishop Wake 
 (dated April 6), stating his design and begging 
 his support. " It was plain to me," he says 
 in his letter to the Archbishop, " that when 
 that copy came from that great Father's hands, 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 121 
 
 it must agree exactly with the most au- 
 thentic Greek exemplars ; and if now it 
 could be retrieved, it would be the best 
 test and voucher for the true reading, out 
 of several pretending ones." In his letter 
 to Wetstein, he expresses himself with the 
 same deference to the most ancient copies 
 of the Latin Version: "Hujusmodi Latinos 
 veterrimos vel GraBcis ipsis prsetulerim." 
 
 In the December of this year (171 6) Dr. 
 Bentley " received a long letter from a layman, 
 whose name has not been preserved, written 
 in consequence of a report that the verse 
 would be omitted in his promised edition. 
 This correspondent argues earnestly for its 
 genuineness, upon the evidence of the context 
 of the whole passage, the sense of which he 
 •contends would be incomplete without it.* 
 To this letter Bentley replied in a letter dated 
 
 * Monk's "Life of Bentley," vol. ii. pp. 16, 17. 
 
122 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 January x, 17-ffj explaining the nature of his 
 proposed edition. "About a year ago," he 
 says, "reflecting upon some passages of St. 
 Hierome, that he had adjusted and castigated 
 the then Latin Vulgate to the best Greek 
 exemplars, and had kept the very order of the 
 words of the original, I formed a thought a 
 priori thatj if St. Jerome's Latin exemplar could 
 now be come at, it would be found to agree 
 exactly with the Greek text of the same age ;. 
 and so the old copies of each language would 
 give mutual proof, and even demonstration, 
 to each other. Whereupon, rejecting the 
 printed editions of each, and the several 
 manuscripts of seven centuries and under, I 
 make use of none but those of a thousand 
 years ago, or above ; of which sort I have 
 twenty now in my study, that one with another 
 make 20,000 years.' 1 ' I had the pleasure to 
 
 * Upon which passsage " Crito Cantabrigiensis" himself,. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 23 
 
 find that they agreed exactly like two tallies or 
 two indentures; and I am able from thence to 
 lead men out of the labyrinth of 60,000 various 
 lections (for St. Jerome's Latin has as many 
 varieties as the Greek) and to give the text as 
 it stood in the best copies in the time of the 
 Council of Nice, without the error of fifty 
 words. " " Now in this work I indulge nothing 
 to any conjecture, not even in a letter, but 
 proceed solely upon authority of copies and 
 Fathers of that age. And what will be the 
 event about that said verse of St. John, I 
 myself know not yet ; having not used all 
 the old copies that I have information of. 
 But by this you see, that in my proposed 
 
 in his " Vindication" of Porson, makes this note, "MSS. 
 that one with another make 20,000 years ! As genuine 
 nonsense as ever appeared in print. Surely our Master 
 must have under-rated his correspondent's intellect. I am 
 glad that he did not use this language when addressing 
 his Grace of Canterbury" (p. 226). 
 
124 T HE TI1KEE WITNESSES. 
 
 work, the fate of that verse will be a mere 
 question of fact. You endeavour to prove 
 (and that's all you aspire to) that it may have 
 been writ by the Apostle, being consonant to 
 his other doctrine. This I may concede to 
 you; and if the fourth century know that text, 
 let it come in, in God's name : but if that age 
 did not know it, then Arianism in its height 
 was beat down without the help of that verse ; 
 and, let the fact prove as it will, the doctrine 
 is unshaken. 
 
 " This correspondent rejoined with a further 
 expostulation, and afterwards published the 
 three letters with some additional remarks of 
 his own, which proved nothing but his dis- 
 qualification to discuss such a subject." Such 
 is the account of the correspondence given by 
 Bentley's biographer; it does not, however, 
 do justice to the letters of the layman. He 
 does not confine himself to the internal evi- 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 125 
 
 dence. He argues from the existence of the 
 reading " in St. Cyprian's time.'' " Cyprian's 
 version," he says, "is express, and cannot be 
 imagined to be a version of the eighth verse ; 
 if that had been intended by him, a literal 
 •version of irv^^ci, v^wp, and alfia would as well 
 have answered his argument for the Unity of 
 the Church ; and his supposed allegorical in- 
 terpretation will prove nothing for him, till he 
 had first explained and proved his explanation, 
 which he has never done." In his second 
 letter, dated January 3, 17 16, he repeats the 
 argument from St. Cyprian : "I persuade 
 myself," he says, "you will not be biassed by 
 the common evasion of St. Cyprian's testi- 
 mony. He could not use the eighth verse in 
 the words of the seventh till he had first 
 proved those words to be the meaning of the 
 eighth, which he has not attempted." The 
 conclusion of this letter might plead an apology,, 
 
126 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 which, however, the letters do not seem to 
 require. " I have not the honour," he says, 
 "to be of the Christian Ministry, but, having 
 met with disappointments in secular affairs, 
 am the more desirous to secure an eternal 
 interest ; and my thoughts of the influence of 
 this noble passage thereupon have created you 
 this and the former trouble." 
 
 Bentley, however, " finding how much the 
 question interested the public mind, and per- 
 ceiving that there was expected from the editor 
 of the New Testament a clear expression of 
 opinion on this point, applied himself in the 
 course of the four following months to examine 
 all the evidence on both sides. Having chosen 
 this as the subject of his Protection, in which, 
 according to the account given in the manu- 
 script journal of Atwood, the esquire beadle, 
 who was present, " he read away the text to 
 the utmost of his power," he gave a regular 
 
TPIE DISFUTED VERSE. I 27 
 
 history of the verse, and of the manner in 
 which the passage of St. John is quoted by 
 ancient writers ; and concluded with a decided 
 rejection of the verse; maintaining at the same 
 time the doctrine of the Trinity, in its orthodox 
 acceptation, and showing that it stood not in 
 any need of such dubious support."* This Pree- 
 lection was delivered before a crowded audience 
 on May i ; the day before his [self] election 
 to the Regius Professorship of Divinity. 
 
 The Arians looked with great interest to 
 the conclusion of Bentley's labours. Emlyn, 
 in his answer to Martin, dated January 24, 
 1 7 1 8, quotes, from the letter above mentioned, 
 " the decisive words of that transcendent criti- 
 cal genius of this age ;" omitting, however, the 
 passage in which he spoke of the result as not 
 yet clear. " Now if these twenty so ancient 
 copies," he says, " all agree in wanting that 
 
 * Monk's Life, sup. cit. pp. 17, 18. 
 
128 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 verse (as I am satisfied none supposes they 
 agree in having it), we may see what credit is 
 due to Mr. Martin's strongest imaginations. 
 Here is plain fact against his extravagant 
 fancies. And I doubt not, when the Doctor, 
 who alone appears to he par huicnegotio, shall 
 gratify the expecting world with his noble 
 performance, things will be set in a yet 
 clearer light-" 
 
 In 1720 the proposals for this edition were 
 published, and we trace its progress at inter- 
 vals for nine years later. " This great design 
 of the New Testament," says his biographer, 
 " for the execution of which he stood peculiarly 
 pledged, it is certain, notwithstanding the 
 universal notion of the contrary, .... that 
 lie had never for a moment abandoned."* " In 
 1 729," says Bishop Monk, " he appears to have 
 resumed the task of his New Testament, with 
 
 * Monk's Life, ii. 239. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 29 
 
 a resolution of discharging his debt to the 
 public, and at the same time supplying a 
 practical answer to those who accused him of 
 passing 'an irreligious life. ' His attention 
 was now directed to two particulars : the 
 evidence respecting the disputed verse of St. 
 John, and the collation of the Vatican MS." 
 
 " From the character of Bentley's in- 
 quiries," says Bishop Monk, "I apprehend 
 that it was his intention to introduce a dis- 
 cussion upon the controverted verse in the 
 Prolegomena of his edition. It appears from 
 the letter of his correspondent at Rome, dated 
 July 9, 1729, that Dr. Bentley had urged dis- 
 patch, and was in great haste to receive those 
 extracts from the Vatican. This urgency 
 and the fact that, in the copy from which he 
 designed to print his edition, both text and 
 notes were in as great forwardness as his 
 materials allowed, make it probable that he 
 
 K 
 
130 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 waited only for the completion of the colla- 
 tion of the Vatican MS. to send his book to 
 the press. After this time," Bishop Monk 
 goes on to say, " I discover no trace of his 
 being occupied upon his projected edition : 
 the contest which he waged with his prosecu- 
 tors allowed him but little intermission for 
 several years ; and in those short intervals 
 other literary objects were pressed upon him; 
 and when at length greater leisure arrived, it 
 found him disabled by age for the exertion 
 requisite to complete the work."* The same 
 suggestion is made by the more recent editor 
 of the " Bentleii Critica Sacra," in his publi- 
 cation of Bentley's "Manuscripts," preserved 
 in Trinity College Library. 
 
 This may, possibly, be the true solution of 
 the mystery ; but there was certainly some- 
 thing extraordinary in the sudden collapse of 
 
 Monk's Life, ii. pp. 286-9. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 131 
 
 the undertaking, when it seemed on the verge 
 of completion. Bentley, it appears, " had him- 
 self collated the Alexandrian Codex, and that 
 of Beza. Wetstein, meanwhile, furnished an 
 accurate collation of the Codex Ephraemi, for 
 which Bentley gave him fifty pounds. The sub- 
 scriptions already amounted to two thousand 
 guineas ; and the specimen appended to the 
 Proposals, containing the 22 nd chapter of the 
 Apocalypse, represented the progress which had 
 really been made on the whole work. Bentley 
 appears to have been waiting for the collation 
 of the Vatican Codex ; the results of which, 
 when it arrived, led him to alter his judgment in 
 very many passages. " As Mico," the Italian, 
 " was now dead, he engaged the Abbe BA- 
 dotti to complete the work ; and the sheets 
 which contained his collation were transmitted 
 to Bentley by Dr. Stosch, July 9, 1729. 
 <l After this date," says Mr. Ellis, "there is 
 
 K 2 
 
S3 2 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 no evidence to show that lie took any further 
 pains to publish his great work. Wetstein 
 asserts in his Prolegomena, that Bentley aban- 
 doned it in disgust, upon the refusal of the 
 Government to allow the paper for his edition 
 to be imported free of duty. But as this 
 occurred in 172 1, and as we find Bentley 
 actively prosecuting the work until 1729, we 
 cannot believe that he succumbed to this 
 disappointm ent. "* 
 
 It is difficult, I think, to resist the impres- 
 sion that the results of Bentley's collations 
 of MSS. were a disappointment to him ; and 
 it is clear now, that the anticipations which 
 he so confidently expressed when he first put 
 forth his programme could not be realized. 
 He certainly found himself unable to fulfil 
 what he had proposed, by abstaining from 
 
 * " Bentleii Critica Sacra," edited by the Rev. A. E. 
 Ellis, p. 86. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 33 
 
 conjectural emendations of the text. "It is 
 due, no doubt, to Bentley's memory," as his 
 careful editor observes, " to remind the reader 
 that he only designed to give them a place in 
 the Prolegomena to his edition, being resolved 
 to print nothing in the text for which he had 
 not MS. authority." Doubtless this was his 
 original intention, as declared in the "Pro- 
 posals for Printing ;" notwithstanding this the 
 conjectures made their way into the notes, 
 and in no small number. The last note, 
 meanwhile, on St. John's First Epistle ought 
 to be given here : — 
 
 " Verses 7, 8. lv tw ovpavto — lv r>J ypomittunt 
 Cod. A., omnes Wetstenii, Syr. Copt. iEth. 
 Cyprian. 109 : Et iterum de Patre et Filio et 
 Spiritu Sancto scriptum est, ' et hi tres unum 
 sunt.' Ubi plures MSS. et Eeg omitt. hi. 
 De hoc loco vide ' Bibliotheque Critique' (4 vols, 
 8vo.), vol. iii. p. 94, &c." 
 
134 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Winston, sometime before this, referring to 
 Dr. Bentley, spoke of him as having " read a 
 very learned lecture at Cambridge, to prove" 
 the verse in St. John "to be spurious. But," 
 he went on to report, "he dares not now 
 wholly to omit it in the text of his edition of 
 the New Testament, which he has promised, 
 but not yet performed." 
 
 The Arian party, having failed in their 
 attempt to get the verse condemned by the 
 Church of England, put forth in 1729 an 
 edition of the New Testament in Greek and 
 English, edited by Dr. Mace ; in which 
 various passages were altered in conformity 
 with the Arian creed. It claimed to give " the 
 original text, corrected from the authority of 
 the most authentic MSS., and a new version 
 agreeably to the illustrations of the most 
 learned commentators and critics, with notes 
 and various readings." "The Greek-English 
 
THE DISPUTED VEKSE. 1 35 
 
 •editor of the New Testament in 1729," says 
 Porson, "threw the verse out of his text, and 
 subjoined a long note to the place ; which, 
 though it is apparently written with great 
 labour, does not deserve the praises bestowed 
 upon it by Sosipater ( f Commentaries and Es- 
 says/ vol. i. p. 145)." It had been described as 
 *' A note of some extent, full of great learning 
 upon the subject, and all the information that 
 was then to be had ; and written in so agree- 
 able a way and with such distinction and 
 clearness of argument, that it deserves to be 
 drawn out of the place of a note, and printed 
 by itself for general use." Whatever may be 
 thought of the fairness exhibited in this 
 laborious note, it certainly showed wisdom 
 in omitting all reference to Tertullian and 
 Cyprian, as well as to St. Eucherius. " Twells 
 refuted this editor, after his manner," is P Or- 
 son's contemptuous notice of the learned 
 
136 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 and careful " Critical Examination of the late 
 New Text and Version of the Greek Testa- 
 ment," which appeared in 1 73 1 ; and which 
 fully exposed, as has been more justly said, 
 the arbitrary alterations and bold criticisms 
 of the Arian version. According to Porson's 
 statement, Dr. Twells " scarcely quits Martin, 
 except in giving up the spurious ' Prologue/ 
 and appealing to the new-found testimony of 
 Cassiodorus." As to the " Prologue," it had 
 been given up, as Twells remarks, by Mill and 
 other advocates for the genuineness of the' 
 verse ; and Martin, as the controversy then 
 stood, was the Annotator's only adversary on 
 this point. 
 
 Dr. Twells brings forward again the sup- 
 pressed passage from Cyprian, observing that 
 " This noble testimony invincibly proves that 
 the passage was in approved copies of the 
 third century. No endeavours, therefore," he 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I $7 
 
 says, " have been wanting among the enemies 
 of the text to wrest this argument out of our 
 hands. But in vain. For to say, as some 
 do, that it is a mystical interpretation of the 
 eighth verse, is to ascribe an interpretation to 
 the age of Cyprian which probably was first 
 invented by St. Augustine, 150 years after. 
 Besides granting this exposition to have been 
 as old as Cyprian, unless it should further 
 appear that he was wont to cite expositions 
 of Scripture, that were not in the copies of his 
 time, as Scripture, it cannot be deemed pro- 
 bable that he has done so in the passage cited. 
 But of all the Fathers, Greek or Latin, no one 
 is more remarkable for citing Scripture ver- 
 batim than St. Cyprian. It is therefore trifling- 
 in Le Clerc to conclude from Tertullian and 
 Optatus that no African writer can be de- 
 pended on in that respect. For it is not the 
 character of the age nor of the country that is 
 
138 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 to be attended to in such a dispute, but the 
 known practice of the particular writer in 
 question. And since, in a case on which so 
 much depends, our adversaries have not been 
 able to produce so much as a single instance 
 where St. Cyprian departs from the letter of 
 his copy in citing Scripture, we may insist 
 upon it that the words in dispute were in 
 some of the exemplars before the middle of 
 the third century." This publication of Dr. 
 T wells seems to brine: us to the close of the 
 second period of the controversy, which had 
 begun about sixty years before with the 
 attacks of Sandius and Simon, and which, 
 since the publication of Bishop Fell's "Cyprian" 
 in 1682, had turned mainly (as Emlyn re- 
 marked in his first publication) on the au- 
 thority of this Father. 
 
 In 1754 appeared "Two Letters from Sir 
 Isaac Newton to Mr. Le Clerc," one of them 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 39 
 
 containing a Dissertation on this text. It 
 was written, indeed, as Porson remarks, 
 *' soon after the appearance of Simon's book, 
 between the years 1690 and 1700 ;" but as it 
 was not published till the period in question, it 
 seems most proper to mention it here. In this 
 Dissertation, according to Person's statement, 
 Sir Isaac Newton " collected, arranged, and 
 strengthened Simon's argument, and gave a 
 clear, exact, and comprehensive view of the 
 whole question." 
 
 In enumerating the arguments alleged for 
 the verses, he mentions first the authority of 
 Cyprian. After quoting Cyprian's words in 
 the " De Unitate," he observes that, " the 
 Socinians here deal too injuriously with 
 Cyprian, while they would have this place 
 corrupted ; for Cyprian in another place 
 (Epist. c ad Jubaian.') repeats the same thing. 
 These places of Cyprian being," he says, " in 
 
I40 THE THKEE WITNESSES. 
 
 my opinion genuine, seem so apposite, that I 
 should never have suspected a mistake .... 
 could I but have reconciled it with the 
 ignorance I meet with of this reading in the 
 next age, among the Latins of both Africa and 
 Europe, as well as among the Greeks." Sir 
 Isaac therefore adopts the supposition of the 
 words, " tres unum sunt," being quoted from 
 the eighth verse ; referring to Eucherius, 
 Bishop of Lyons — contemporary, as he says, 
 with St. Austin — for proof that the seventh 
 verse w^as wanting in his time, and that many 
 then adopted the mystical interpretation of 
 the eighth verse ; and also to St. Austin 
 (" c. Maxim." lib. hi.) as " one of those many;" 
 adding that " even without this testimony, it 
 was obvious for Cyprian or any man else of 
 that opinion to say, ' de Patre, Filio, et 
 Spiritu Sancto scriptum, est,' &c." He then 
 refers to Facundus, who, he says, "tells us. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 141 
 
 expressly that Cyprian so understood the 
 text.'' " This at least" — he adds (as though he 
 felt some misgivings as to the certainty of his 
 conclusion), " this at least — may be gathered 
 from the passage of Facundus, that some in 
 those early ages interpreted Cyprian after 
 this manner." He then urges the argument 
 drawn from the occurrence of the word 
 ''Films," instead of " Verbum," in St. 
 Cyprian ; and meets the argument which 
 might be brought from the common reading 
 of the eighth verse being " hi tres in unum 
 sunt," by the remark that the Latins for the 
 most part read it as Cyprian quotes it. He 
 concludes therefore that, " the testimony of 
 Cyprian is of no force for proving the truth of 
 the seventh verse;" but "that, on the con- 
 trary, for disproving it we have the testimony 
 of Facundus, St. Austin, Eucherius, and those, 
 among others, whom Eucherius mentions." 
 
I42 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Sir Isaac Newton's only difficulty in regard 
 to Cyprian was the supposed ignorance of 
 this reading in the age next to Cyprian's ;. 
 " but for this, the places, he candidly owns/' 
 in opposition to the Socinians in what he 
 regards as their injurious treatment of 
 Cyprian, "seemed so apposite," that "he 
 should never have suspected a mistake." 
 
 But though Sir Isaac Newton adds so little 
 on this point to "strengthen" Simon's argu- 
 ment, it may be well to mention one or two 
 particulars in which he deals more fairly than 
 Simon with facts, and also to point out a fatal 
 objection to his general "view of the whole 
 question." 
 
 Instead, then, of Victor Vitensis, who, ac- 
 cording to Simon's statement, lived 100 years 
 after Jerome, and " is the first who seems to 
 have quoted the passage," Sir Isaac Newton 
 says that, " Eugenius, Bishop of Carthage, in 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 43 
 
 the seventh year of Hunneric, a.d. 484, in 
 the summary of his faith exhibited to the 
 king, cited it the first of any man, so far as 
 I can find." "I have no objection/' says 
 Travis, C( to this remark, save that the sum- 
 mary of faith, here spoken of, is described as 
 the creed of Eugenius alone ; and that he is 
 said to have been the first who cited this 
 text." 
 
 "With regard to " the history" which Newton 
 gives of this, the one, as he styles it, of " two 
 notable corruptions of Christianity" (the other 
 being the text (1 Tim. iii. 16) concerning the 
 great " mystery of godliness") ; and which 
 M history," or rather theory, is this — that, 
 " first, some of the Latins interpreted the 
 Spirit, Water, and Blood, of the Father, Son, 
 and Holy Ghost to prove them One ;" that, 
 " then Jerome, for the same end, inserted the 
 Trinity in express words in his Version;" 
 
144 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 that, " out of him the Africans began to 
 allege it against the Vandals, about sixty- 
 four years after his death," &c. &c, it may 
 be asked, independently of the question of 
 the mystical interpretation, and the date of 
 its introduction into the Church, and again 
 of the character of St. Jerome, how it happens 
 that, while the reading of the Vulgate is, 
 "tres sunt qui testimonium dant" the Africans, 
 if they took their citation out of the Vulgate, 
 should so constantly quote it under the form, 
 "tres sunt qui testimonium perhibent" It 
 certainly looks like a different version. 
 
 We may now pass on to Dr. Benson, whose 
 "Paraphrase on the Catholic Epistles" appeared 
 in 1756. In entering upon the discussion of 
 this verse, he says that he has read Dr. Mill, 
 Father Simon, Dr. Thomas Smith, Erasmus, 
 Casley, Clericus, the New Version of the New 
 Testament, with the remarks thereon of T wells 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 45 
 
 and others, and, above all, Martin, Calamy, 
 and Emlyn. He says of Enilyn that he had 
 " removed his scruples ;" and follows him in 
 quoting only the latter part of the sentence 
 from St. Cyprian ; the reference to the passage 
 in St. John's Gospel, " very material to the 
 argument," as has been truly said, "being 
 unfairly passed by and omitted." He brings 
 no new argument into the field. There is the 
 old query, " Whether Cyprian designed to 
 quote the seventh verse, or to give a mystical 
 interpretation of the eighth verse ;" the old 
 remark that " the loose manner in which the 
 Fathers sometimes quoted might create a, 
 suspicion;" but that " there is more in this 
 case than the general suspicion." Then fol- 
 lows the reference to Eucherius (" De Qusest. 
 Dimcil."), though, as Travis points out, " Dr. 
 Benson had read, before he began his critical 
 labours on this text, not only Mr. Martin's 
 
 L 
 
146 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 " Dissertation" (which contains the quotation 
 from the ' Formulae' of Eucherius, in which 
 the seventh verse occurs) , but also Mr. Emlyn's 
 notice of it, in his " Beply" to Martin ; in 
 which he confesses that, if that passage 
 were genuine, Mr. Martin had some reason 
 to say that it was decisive, as to the passage 
 having been read in the fifth century. Dr. 
 Benson confesses both, in the outset of his 
 own disquisitions." Next comes, in due order, 
 " Facundus, who flourished," we are told, " in 
 the fifth century" (it ought to have been, the 
 sixth), " and was of the same African church, 
 and who did not only himself interpret the 
 words of the eighth verse in that mystical 
 manner, but has acquainted us that Cyprian, 
 the Martyr, did so understand them." "Ful- 
 gentius," indeed, Dr. Benson admits, " who 
 was contemporary with Facundus — rather who 
 lived nearly half a century before him — has 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 47 
 
 been thought to represent Cyprian as quoting 
 the words from St. John." But then Ful- 
 gentius " says, ' So Cyprian confesses.' c Con- 
 fesses what V says Dr. Benson, implicitly 
 following Emlyn : " That these very words 
 were in the Epistle of St. John ? What a 
 mighty matter was that ; to confess what he 
 found in the writings of an Apostle ! But to 
 confess, or acknowledge, that by the Water, 
 the Blood, and the Spirit, were meant the 
 Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, was 
 a very remarkable confession; and what 
 those who hold the same opinion would be 
 glad to find so eminent a father and martyr 
 confessing! 7 He anticipates the objection, 
 " Yes (you will say), but interpreting is one 
 thing, and saying ' So it is written' is quite 
 a different thing." He meets it by repeating," 
 after Emlyn, that Cyprian has in other in- 
 stances quoted Scripture more by "his sense 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 of it than by repeating the words of the text." 
 The two instances which Emlyn has given 
 are duly copied, "which were not different 
 readings," Dr. Benson decides somewhat more 
 dogmatically than Emlyn, "but Cyprian's own 
 interpretations." Finally he asks, in equally 
 servile following of his master, " Why might 
 not he (Cyprian) give the sense in his own 
 words, and say ' De Patre.' &c. For my own 
 part, I make no doubt but that was the 
 fact." 
 
 We may now proceed to Wetstein s and 
 Griesbach's editions of the Greek Testament : 
 the former published, as above stated, in 
 1 7 5 1 ; the latter, in its complete form, in 
 1777, the Apostolical Epistles and the Apo- 
 calypse having been published two years 
 earlier. Wetstein's edition should, in strict 
 chronological order, as has been already said, 
 have stood at the head of this third period of 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 49 
 
 the controversy ; but, beside the prominent 
 part which the writers whom we have been 
 last considering have taken in the contro- 
 versy, their arguments were so closely con- 
 nected with those of the earlier writers, 
 Simon and Emlyn, that it seemed better to 
 discuss them first. Besides, to quote Porson's 
 Preface to his " Letters," though " Wetstein 
 and Griesbach have in their respective editions 
 given judicious abridgments of the authorities 
 and arguments on both sides," yet, " from the 
 necessary brevity of notes, some previous in- 
 formation is requisite, before they can be 
 perfectly understood. " 
 
 It certainly requires much previous infor- 
 mation to be able to gather from Wetstein's 
 list of Latin Fathers any idea of the real 
 merits of the question ; but with that previous 
 information, the " Abridgment of the authori- 
 ties and arguments" which he has given on 
 
150 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the one side of the question seems well en- 
 titled to the epithet " judicious/' but could 
 scarcely be called fair. Tertullian is cited, 
 and then Cyprian ; followed by Augustine. 
 Of Cyprian, Wet stein says, that without 
 doubt in writing thus he followed his master 
 Tertullian, quoting the eighth verse, and 
 added the rest as an interpretation : " Ita 
 sentit Facundus," he adds. Then comes 
 Phsebadius [a.d. 359], of whose reference to 
 the words, " tres unum sunt," Wetstein simply 
 remarks, " ex Tertulliano." Then follow in 
 chronological order Marcus Celedensis, Marius 
 Yictorinus Afer [a.d. 362"], Eucherius [a.d. 
 434], Yigilius of Tapsum [a.d. 484], and then 
 Fulgentius [a.d. 507]. In the passage from 
 Fulgentius he prints the word "confitetur" 
 in Italics, observing that, if Fulgentius had 
 read the names of the Three Divine Persons, 
 " totidem verbis," in St. John, he would not 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 5 I 
 
 have used the word " confitetur," which is 
 with greater propriety used of sense and in- 
 terpretation. These points have been already 
 sufficiently noticed. We may therefore pass 
 on to Griesbach's edition. 
 
 Griesbach again goes over the old line of 
 argument. He says, " Legisse vulgo creduntur 
 Tertullianus . . . . et Cyprianus, Tertulliani 
 admirator et imitator." With the passages 
 of Cyprian he bids us compare Facundus : 
 from whose citation, however, conscious of the 
 argument to be drawn from the occurrence of 
 the words, "in terra," he, without any evi- 
 dence (in a note) expunges those words as 
 probably inserted from the Vulgate by some 
 editor or copyist : " Conferri etiam potest," 
 he goes on, " de allegorica interpretatione 
 Eucherius, August. * c. Maxim.' c. 22. cf. ' De 
 Civ. Dei.' v. 11." He refers to Fulgentius as 
 a writer (as he represents him) of nearly the 
 
152 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 middle of the sixth century ("sa9culi sexti 
 fere medii scriptorem"), though it will be 
 remembered that he was bishop in 507, and 
 died in 533. Fulgentius, Griesbach admits, 
 read the seventh verse in his text, and there- 
 fore did not suppose that Cyprian interpreted 
 it mystically. But from this opinion of Ful- 
 gentius, resting as it does upon no testimony 
 or probable argument, he says, "no such in- 
 ference can in any wise be drawn as the 
 defenders of the sever th verse would desire." 
 Bengel, he remarks further, did not think 
 that the interpretation in question was in the 
 style of Cyprian : in reply to this he refers to 
 Cyprian's interpretation of the mystery of our 
 Lord's coat, and of the three hours of prayer. 
 The force of this argument — the only one 
 which Griesbach offers — will be estimated, if 
 we compare the manner in which St. Cyprian 
 draws out of those two passages of Scripture 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 53 
 
 the mystical meaning which he traces in them, 
 with the manner in which he refers to the 
 passage in St. John. 
 
 The passage in St. Cyprian stands thus : — 
 "The Lord saith, 'I and the Father are 
 One :' and again of the Father and the Son 
 and the Holy Ghost it is written, ' and these 
 three are One.' And does any one believe 
 that this unity, proceeding from the divine 
 immutability, cohering by heavenly mysteries 
 (sacramentis ccelestibus cohserentem), can be 
 rent in the Church, and separated by the 
 divorce of contending wills ? He who does 
 not hold this unity does not hold the law of 
 God, does not hold the faith of the Father 
 and the Son, does not hold life and salvation. 
 This mystery of unity, this bond of concord 
 inseparably cohering, is shown, when in the 
 Gospel the coat of our Lord Jesus Christ is 
 not divided in any wise nor rent, but is re- 
 
154 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 ceived as a whole vesture, an incorrupt and 
 undivided coat, by those who cast lots for the 
 vesture of Christ, who should put on Christ. 
 The divine Scripture speaketh and saith : 
 ' But of the coat, because it was not sewed 
 together from the upper part, but woven 
 throughout, they said among themselves, Let 
 us not rend it, but cast lots whose it shall be.' 
 It carried with it unity coming from the upper 
 part, that is, coming down from heaven and 
 from the Father, which could not in anywise 
 be rent by him who received and possessed it, 
 but obtained at once an entire and solid firm- 
 ness By the mystery (sacramento) 
 
 and sign of the coat he declared the unity of 
 the Church." 
 
 There is a manifest contrast, assuredly, here 
 between the simple quotation, apparently, of 
 the words of Scripture and the elaborate set- 
 ting forth of a mystical sense supposed 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 55 
 
 to lie hidden under the letter of the sacred 
 history. 
 
 In 1763, Bowyer published his edition of 
 the Greek Testament, " Ad fidem Grsecorum 
 solum MSS. nunc primum expressum, adsti- 
 pulante Jo. Jac. Wetstenio." In this edition 
 Wetstein's emendations were adopted. Bow- 
 yer says that St. Cyprian does not quote the 
 verse, totidem verbis, as the text is now read, 
 though Bishop Pearson, he tells us (meaning 
 Bishop Fell), rather too strongly asserts, 
 " Cyprianum citasse ante Hieronymi tem- 
 poral "The words of Cyprian," he says, 
 " are . . . 4 et hi tres in unum sunt,' and in 
 another place (' Epist. ad P. Julianum' [' Ad 
 Jubaianum'] p. 223, Ed. Pearson [Fell]) .... 
 'cum tres unum sint,' " and adds, "It is 
 certain St. Cyprian does not cite it in terms 
 from the text, nor yet in both places 
 agreeably to himself." Still further, that "he 
 
I56 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 does not say in either, Pater, Verbum, et 
 Spiritus Sanctus, but in the former . . . Filius 
 . . . and in the latter Creator, Christus, et 
 Spiritus Sanctus." Moreover, that the Mon- 
 tanists, soon after this time, generally inter- 
 preted the eighth verse mystically ; " and, if 
 so, it will be no hard thing to suppose Cyprian 
 to do the same." 
 
 Upon Bowyer's " Critical Conjectures/' it is 
 scarcely necessary to remark, with Travis, 
 that, in the correct text of the " De Unitate," 
 "Cyprian does quote the verse, totidem 
 verbis (as far as his words are meant to be 
 a quotation) ; and " that, therefore, Bishop 
 Fell's assertion is not too strong ;" the other 
 passage, in the Epistle "ad Jubaianum," being 
 " rather an allusion or a reference than a 
 direct quotation ;" that in the former instance 
 he meant to quote directly only the con- 
 cluding clause of the verse ; and that, as to 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 57 
 
 the Montanists (who began long before, not 
 after the time of Cyprian), it is of no conse- 
 quence how they interpreted the eighth verse, 
 unless it could be proved that the seventh 
 verse did not exist in their time. 
 
 The publication, in 1781, of the third volume 
 of Gibbon's History, with its reference to the 
 persecution by the Arian Vandals in Africa, 
 and an offensive passage and note on the text 
 concerning "The Heavenly Witnesses/' led to 
 a reopening of the controversy in regard to the 
 authenticity of the verse. It called forth, 
 within a few years, Mr. Travis's " Letters to 
 Gibbon" (1784), and, in reply, Porson's 
 "Letters to Travis" (1790). 
 
 As regards St. Cyprian's testimony, Porson 
 begins the discussion by reducing the two 
 passages in his writings to the one from the 
 "DeUnitate," observing that the other passage 
 " receives all its force from" this. He next 
 
150 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 allows that Cyprian, when he says, "De 
 Patre, etc., scriptum est" (where it is to be 
 observed that Porson follows Emlyn and 
 Benson in omitting the preceding reference 
 to St. John's Gospel), affirms the words which 
 follow, ' it is written/ to be extant in Scrip- 
 ture." " But," he observes, " it has been a 
 question ever since the time of Simon," 
 whether Cyprian quotes our present seventh 
 verse, or only mystically applies the eighth ; 
 "and the second supposition," he avers, "is 
 so strongly supported by the authority of 
 Facundus" that his opponent, he anticipates, 
 " will find some difficulty in setting aside his 
 testimony." He should rather have said, his 
 opinion ; for the utmost that Porson attempts 
 to prove is, first, that Facundus "himself 
 knew nothing of the seventh verse, and, 
 secondly, that Cyprian, in his opinion, knew 
 no more." .... "Why, then," he repeats 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 59 
 
 after Dr. Benson, " might not Cyprian give 
 the sense of i John v. 8, in his own words, 
 and say, ' Of the Father, Son, and Holy 
 Ghost it is written, these three are One V " 
 We need not go again over ground already 
 traversed by Emlyn and Benson ; Porson 
 only adding a larger measure of special per- 
 sonalities against his not very well armed 
 antagonist. 
 
 " Facundus," Porson goes on to say, " has 
 the following sentence : ' Joannes Apostolus 
 in Epistola sua de Pat re, et Filio, et Spirit u 
 
 Sancto sic dicit : Tres sunt, etc et hi 
 
 tres unum sunt.' If Facundus," he argues, 
 " had only quoted these words, and not been 
 imprudent enough to quote and explain at 
 length, he would have been, with you," says 
 Porson, " a positive evidence for the authen- 
 ticity of the seventh verse ; but at present, 
 unhappily, the blank is filled up with ' in terra 
 
l6o THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Spiritus, aqua, et sanguis.' I would observe," 
 Porson proceeds to say, " that Facundus uses 
 the word dicit, and is just as peremptory in 
 the application of the eighth verse as Cyprian 
 is in the application of his supposed seventh." 
 He tells us that, " a little after Facundus 
 says, ' Non ergo ait Joannes Apostolus 
 loquens de Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto, 
 Tres sunt personae,' " &c. Facundus, we see, 
 affirming that the Apostle speaks of the 
 Trinity, affirms it in terms equally forcible 
 with Cyprian's ' scriptum est ;' and yet we 
 are certain that Facundus applies only the 
 eighth verse ; we have, therefore, a right to 
 conclude that Cyprian does the same. If 
 Facundus had been as reserved as Cyprian, 
 and only quoted a part of the eighth verse, 
 as I have done," says Porson, "for him; if 
 then the testimony of a later writer should 
 be produced to this effect, ' Quod testimonium 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. l6l 
 
 Beatus Facundus de Patre, Filio, et Spiritu 
 Sancto dictum intelligit,' you would reject it 
 with as much contempt, and as little reason, 
 as you now reject the same testimony given 
 by Facundus concerning Cyprian." 
 
 It is really difficult, when one comes to 
 analyze such a piece of reasoning as this, to 
 comprehend how it can have ever claimed 
 the character of scholarly criticism. If Fa- 
 cundus had been as reserved as St. Cyprian, 
 and referred to the passage in the way which 
 Porson describes, doubtless he would have 
 appeared a positive evidence for the authen- 
 ticity of the seventh verse ; for, with the 
 citation of the words, " et hi tres unum sunt/' ' 
 and the assertion that St. John so spake of the 
 Three Persons of the Ever-blessed Trinity, it 
 would have been concluded that there was 
 something in the preceding context, or other- 
 wise, which proved that such was really the 
 
 M 
 
1 62 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 subject of the proposition. But Facundus, 
 it is said, "is just as peremptory in the ap- 
 plication of the eighth verse as St. Cyprian 
 is in the application of his supposed seventh." 
 " Just as peremptory in the application !" 
 — when he immediately goes on to explain 
 how it is that he can venture to apply the 
 eighth verse in this way; whereas Cyprian 
 makes no such elaborate " application" of it 
 in any sense, nor any defence of his inter- 
 pretation. On the other hand, Facundus, 
 explaining immediately how he applies the 
 eighth verse (" in Spiritu significans Patrem, 
 in aqua Spiritum Sanctum, in sanguine vero 
 Filium significans), " at last seems, " to use 
 Porson's own words, "so apprehensive that 
 his adversaries may possibly object to his 
 explanation," that, " therefore, he reserves as 
 his strongest argument the authority of 
 Cyprian: f Aut si forsitan ipsi Trinitatem, 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 63 
 
 quae unus Deus est, nolunt intelligi, secundum 
 ipsa verba quae posuit pro Apostolo Joanne, 
 respondeant — Quod tamen Joannis Apostoli 
 testimonium B. Cyprianus . . . . cle Patre, 
 et Filio, et Spiritu Sancto intelligi t ait 
 enim, &c.' "Such a thundering proof as 
 this," says Porson, "left no room for objec- 
 tion ; in the progress, therefore, of his 
 dispute, he refers to this place again, and 
 takes it for granted, that he has undeniably 
 proved his point." And yet, while Facundus 
 felt he had all this difficulty to contend 
 with, though he was only putting forth an 
 interpretation which (on the hypothesis) had 
 been current for some three centuries or more 
 in the Western Church, and which, besides 
 St. Cyprian, had been maintained by St. 
 Augustine, a century and a half before, by 
 Eucherius of Lyons, and many others, we are 
 
 to believe that St. Cyprian needed but to say 
 
 M 2 
 
164 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 " De Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto scriptum 
 est, ' Et tres unum sunt.' " 
 
 For, " in truth," we are told on the other 
 hand, " the allegorical interpretations of the 
 Scripture, given by the ancient writers are so 
 numerous that it would be endless to pursue 
 them." " We know that they employed it 
 without scruple in all points, whether of doc- 
 trine or morals." Then follows, as in Gries- 
 bach, the objection of Bengelius, that St. 
 Cyprian at least was not thus given to allegory ; 
 and, in disproof of his assertion, the two in- 
 stances, which Griesbach had quoted, of our 
 Lord's coat, and of the hours of prayer. The 
 fact which Porson remarks, that the former 
 passage follows the quotation from 1 John v. 
 is certainly no help to the cause, as it brings 
 into more striking contrast the manner of re- 
 ference in the two cases. Nor will Whitby, 
 to whom Porson refers, following again in the 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 65 
 
 train of Emlyn, supply any parallel instance. 
 But " Cyprian is elsewhere negligent in quot- 
 ing," says Porson. In proof of this we have 
 the citations which Emlyn and Benson had 
 referred to, from Matt. vi. 13, and Rev. xix. io, 
 to which is added 1 John ii. 17, in which 
 Cyprian five times adds the words, " As God 
 remains for ever." Travis, in answer to Benson, 
 had argued that in Matt. vi. 13, the reading 
 objected to was not the only, and might not 
 be the genuine, reading of the passage in 
 Cyprian, and that in Rev. xix. 10, Cyprian 
 had most probably a different reading ; so that 
 in all probability, " the version from whence 
 Cyprian drew his quotations was the old 
 Italic, and that it read the words now in ques- 
 tion as Cyprian has quoted them." Porson 
 considers the first of these citations, in which 
 he endeavours to show that the present text 
 of Cyprian is right, and that, in adopting the 
 
1 66 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 gloss, " ne nos patiaris induci in tentationein," 
 instead of the genuine reading, he was probably 
 deceived by an imperfect recollection of Ter- 
 tullian, his master ; in like manner, as in the 
 Council at Carthage, sec. 6, he had quoted St. 
 John iii. 6, with the spurious addition borrowed 
 from Tertullian de Carne Christi, sec. i8„ 
 But all this is nothing to the purpose. For 
 in the case before us there is no negligence 
 in quotation ; the words, " hi tres unum 
 sunt," it is admitted on all hands, are the 
 exact words of Scripture. In the two cases 
 of supposed quotation from Tertullian there 
 is the same verbal accuracy. 
 
 The testimony of Fulgentius remained to be 
 disposed of ; but here Porson deserts the line 
 which had been marked out for him by Emlyn 
 and Benson. He says he " shall grant that 
 Fulgentius quotes our seventh verse, and does 
 not adopt the mystical exposition of the 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 167 
 
 eighth from Cyprian, as Emlyn pretends. I 
 shall attack Fulgentius's testimony," he says, 
 " upon a new ground. I affirm that it is no 
 testimony at all, except to the genuineness of 
 the passage in Cyprian. Fulgentius fairly 
 confesses," says Porson, " that he became ac- 
 quainted with this verse solely by the means 
 of Cyprian, and that he had not seen it him- 
 self in the copies of the New Testament. 
 Else what does he mean to prove by his 
 appeal to Cyprian ? That this verse was 
 genuine ? But if it already existed in all the 
 copies, if it were acknowledged both by ortho- 
 dox and Arians, where was the use or sense 
 of strengthening this general consent by the 
 solitary evidence of Cyprian ? . . . . But Ful- 
 gentius," we are to suppose, " being aware of 
 an objection that the verse was not then extant 
 in St. John's Epistle, shields himself under 
 the authority of Cyprian, and quotes the pas- 
 
1 68 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 sage for genuine Scripture; upon this maxim 
 (which Facundus also adopts, though he applies 
 it in a different svay), that Cyprian was in- 
 fallible. Nor was he singular in this maxim/' 
 says Porson, " but agreed with the general 
 opinion that prevailed after Cyprian's martyr- 
 dom. For, as Mosheim well observes, 'Cyprian's 
 reputation was so enhanced by his fortitude 
 in suffering a violent death, that he became 
 the common master and oracle of the Church/ 
 .... It was, therefore, no wonder that Ful- 
 gentius should accept a reading which he 
 supposed to be Cyprian's reading of a passage 
 in Scripture ; or that Facundus should accept 
 an interpretation which he supposed to be 
 Cyprian's interpretation of Scripture." In 
 adopting this new, and, as Bishop Burgess 
 designated it, u most perverse interpretation," 
 Porson, as the Bishop remarks, applies strangely 
 enough the verb conjitetur not to Cyprian but 
 
THE DISPUTED VEKSE. 1 69 
 
 to Fulgentius. Travis had said that " Ful- 
 gentius directly and positively represents 
 Cyprian as quoting the seventh verse. Ful- 
 gentius' word," Porson replies, " is confitetur" 
 . ... " Fulgentius fairly confesses (or if you 
 will, shows, declares, professes), that he became 
 acquainted with this verse solely by the means 
 of Cyprian." But to pass this by. " What," 
 it is asked, " does he mean to prove by his 
 appeal to Cyprian ?" The idea of an appeal 
 to a martyr of the Catholic Church, in proof of 
 an article of Christian faith (the idea, as 
 has already been observed, which clearly 
 belongs to the word in this place), seems one 
 which minds such as those of Emlyn, Benson, 
 and Porson, could not by any possibility enter 
 into. They can think only of authority for a 
 reading, or for an interpretation. But if Ful- 
 gentius had been quoting a reading of Scrip- 
 ture, which was not then extant, and wished 
 
I70 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 to shield ^himself under Cyprian's authority, in 
 like manner as Facundus, wishing to recom- 
 mend an interpretation of Scripture, shelters 
 himself, as we have seen, under the same 
 authority, would he not have adopted a similar 
 mode of expression ; and, as Facundus says, 
 "quod Joannis Apostoli testimonium .... 
 beatus Cyprianus de Patre, etc., dictum in- 
 telligit," would not Fulgentius in like manner 
 have said, "quod Joannis Apostoli testimonium 
 . . . . Beatus Cyprianus .... scriptum 
 esse testatur T — or something to the like 
 effect ? Instead of this he says, " In Patre 
 
 ergo, &c unitatem substantias accipi- 
 
 mus, personas confundere non audemus. B. 
 enim Joannes Apostolus testatur dicens, Tres 
 
 sunt, &c Quod etiam beatissimus 
 
 Martyr Cyprianus .... confitetur, dicens, 
 &c." What is the force of " etiam " here ? 
 But further, the quotation which follows 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 171 
 
 from St. Cyprian does not prove the reading 
 which Fulgentius had appealed to. For 
 Cyprian supplies no proof of the authenticity 
 of the words, "Tres sunt qui testimonium 
 perhibent in ccelo, Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus ;. 
 et tres unum sunt :" he proves only the 
 existence of the words " et hi tres unum sunt," 
 which would not be disputed. And what is. 
 to be said to those passages in which Ful- 
 gentius appeals to the same text in St. John, 
 without any reference to St. Cyprian's con- 
 fession ? as in his book " de Trinitate," cap. iii., 
 a passage which Travis had cited, where, 
 exactly in St. Cyprian's manner, he says, 
 " Therefore saith He, ' I and my Father are 
 one,' teaching us to understand the word 
 ' unum' of nature, c sumus' of persons. So 
 also that passage, ' There are three,' saith he,. 
 * that bear witness,' " &c. The reference to the 
 same passage in the " Fragment a contra 
 
172 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Fabianum" (which Du Pin, as Travis had 
 observed, maintains to be the work of 
 Fulgentius) is worthy of notice ; both as it 
 shows that the text was commonly quoted in 
 controversy, without hesitation, or appeal to 
 any testimony in its support, and still further 
 as the mode of citation is precisely that which 
 Cyprian employs ; except that the " script um 
 est" of Cyprian is still more determinate than 
 the "dictum" of Fulgentius. "Beatus vero 
 Joannes Apostolus evidenter ait, 'Et tres 
 unum sunt ;' quod de Patre et Filio et Spiritu 
 Sancto dictum, sicut superius cum rationem 
 flagitares ostendimus." Surely it is quite 
 clear from the writings of Fulgentius, both 
 that he had himself seen the verse in the 
 copies of the New Testament ; and that those 
 with whom he argues had not the objection 
 to offer that the verse was not then extant in 
 St. John's Epistle. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 73 
 
 Having thus disposed of Fulgentius, Porson 
 proceeds to offer a theory to explain the quo- 
 tations in Cyprian. He says, " I think it most 
 probable that Cyprian followed, as he thought, 
 the authority of Tertullian. Finding the 
 phrase 'tres imum sunt' closely joined to 
 'quomodo dictum est, Ego et Pater unum 
 sumus,' he took the former part of the sen- 
 tence to be a quotation from Scripture as well 
 as the latter. ' But from what part of Scrip- 
 ture,' would Cyprian say, 'could my master 
 take it, except i John v. 8 V I perceive his 
 drift; he interprets the spirit, the water, 
 and the blood of the three Persons of the 
 Trinity, and to them applies the concluding 
 words, the three are one. If such an allegorical 
 interpretation once entered Cyprian's head, it 
 would recommend itself to his approbation 
 equally by its own intrinsic merit and the 
 authority of his master. I pay no compli- 
 
174 THE THKEB WITNESSES. 
 
 ment to De Missy, when I say that he had a 
 clearer and more critical head than Cyprian. 
 Yet he took Bengelius's words for a quotation 
 from Stephens." Then follows Griesbach's 
 instance of the hours of prayer. These last 
 two sentences may serve to show the tone in 
 which Person discusses the question. But to 
 any one who has not learnt to look upon all 
 the Fathers as men devoid of understanding 
 and common sense, it would hardly seem 
 probable that St. Cyprian would give, as the 
 result of such a ratiocination as Porson sup- 
 poses on Tertullian's words, a matter-of-fact 
 statement like that with which we are con- 
 cerned, alleging no authority for it. " Et 
 iterum de Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto 
 scriptum est, et hi tres unum sunt." 
 
 But another charge still remains behind. 
 The writers who were but just before charged 
 with inaccuracy in quotation are now accused 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 75 
 
 of servile copying. " The implicit faith with 
 which the Latin writers copy their prede- 
 cessors often diminishes/' we are told, "and 
 sometimes destroys, the value of their testi- 
 mony. Thus a gloss crept early into some 
 copies of John iii. 6 : ' Et quoniam Deus 
 Spiritus est, de Deo natus est.' I believe," 
 says Porson, " Tertullian to be the author of 
 this gloss, who sometimes blends the words 
 of Scripture with his own, so that it requires 
 much skill and pains to make the separation. 
 From him it quickly spread through all the 
 Latin churches." . . . . In like manner, it 
 seems, as the words of Tertullian [" cum tres 
 unum sunt"], which have been taken for a 
 quotation from Scripture, " were only a 
 deduction of his own from two texts, 
 John x. 30, xvi. 14," . . . . so " St. Cyprian, 
 finding two or three words which happen 
 to follow each other in the same order 
 
176 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 (1 John v. 8), immediately succeeded by a 
 formal quotation from Scripture, thought 
 these words also to be a quotation, and 
 employed them without remorse in the sense 
 which, as he imagined, his master had affixed 
 to them." In illustration of this supposition 
 Porson gives us the instance of the hours of 
 prayer over again. Then, "two or three 
 centuries afterwards both Facundus and 
 FuJgentius," it seems, "appealed to this 
 passage of Cyprian. Neither of them could 
 find a text of Scripture where it was expressly 
 said of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, 
 'these three are one/ Yet Cyprian seemed 
 to affirm it. Facundus, therefore, supposed 
 that Cyprian mixed his own interpretation 
 with the words of Scripture. Fulgentius, on 
 the other hand, being somewhat more san- 
 guine, supposed that he quoted literally the 
 words of Scripture. Finding, therefore, a 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. I 77 
 
 kind of counterpart to Cyprian's quotation 
 in i John v. 8, he would naturally conclude 
 that the three heavenly witnesses were dis- 
 tinctly mentioned in Cyprian's cppy, but had 
 afterwards vanished." 
 
 Such is Mr. Porson's theory. It may be 
 well just to exhibit together the phenomena 
 which it is set up to explain. Tertullian had 
 said, "Ita connexus Patris in Filio et Filii 
 in Paracleto tres efficit cohaerentes alterum 
 ex altero ; qui tres unum sunt, non unus, 
 quomodo dictum est, Ego et Pater unum 
 
 sumus." 
 
 Cyprian. — " Dicit Dominus, Ego et Pater 
 unum sumus . . . . Et iterum de Patre et 
 Filio et Spiritu Sancto scriptum est ; et hi 
 tres unum sunt." 
 
 Fulgentius. — "In Patre ergo et Filio 
 Spiritu Sancto unitatem substantia accipimus, 
 personas confundere non audemus. Beatus 
 
 N 
 
178 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 enim Joannes Apostolus testatur dicens, ' Tres 
 sunt, &c, et tres unum sunt. Quod etiam 
 Beatissimus Martyr Cyprianus confitetur 
 dicens : . . . Atque ut unam ecclesiam unius 
 Dei esse monstraret, haec confestim testimonia 
 de Scripturis inseruit, Dicit Dominus, &c, et 
 hi tres unum sunt" 
 
 Elsewhere. — " Ego, in quit, et Pater unum 
 sumus. Similiter et illud. Tres sunt/inquit. 
 . . . . et hi tres unum sunt. }> 
 
 Let us now compare with this the supposed 
 parallel case. " Tertullian," we are told, 
 " proves by some curious reasons that Daniel's 
 hours of prayer were the third, the sixth, and 
 the ninth. Cyprian lays his hands upon this 
 piece of news as a great prize, and turns it to 
 
 good account He not only asserts it 
 
 as a fact of Daniel, but adds his three com- 
 panions, and infers that it denoted the 
 mystery of the Trinity, which was to be 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 79 
 
 revealed in the last times." .... Ful- 
 Sfentius .... has borrowed this argument 
 from Cyprian, and I think," says Mr. Porson, 
 " but I may be partial," he adds sarcastically, 
 '" somewhat improved it." After his first 
 citation from Cyprian, he thus proceeds : " For 
 in his book on the Lord's Prayer, to show 
 that the Trinity is of one Deity, without 
 any difference of the Persons, he relates that 
 Daniel and the children were wont to pray 
 at intervals of three hours ; where, by the 
 revolution of three hours to the duty of one 
 prayer, he evidently shows that the Trinity 
 is one God." Now here we have nothing 
 like the case supposed. We have not a gloss 
 of Tertullian's, fastened on to Scripture and 
 quoted as Scripture by Cyprian, and then 
 Fulgentius ascribing it positively to a sacred 
 writer, and asserting that Cyprian took it out 
 of Scripture. "We have here an assertion by 
 
 N 2 
 
l8o THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Tertullian of a fact, or supposed fact, of 
 history ; Cyprian taking it as fact, adding to 
 it, and drawing out of it a mystical meaning ;. 
 Fulgentius, lastly, quoting Cyprian, and find- 
 ing further mysteries. More particularly, and 
 to quote Porson's own representation of the 
 case, Tertullian having proved, or attempted 
 to prove, an historical fact, "then comes 
 Cyprian, takes the fact for granted, asserts 
 the same of Daniel's three companions, and 
 hence elicits the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 Whoever could argue at this rate," says 
 Porson, " could with equal or greater ease 
 find the same doctrine in such an expression 
 as ' the three are one/ though the literal 
 sense seemed ever so foreign to his subject." 
 But this does not touch the question. The 
 question is not whether Cyprian would find 
 the doctrine in Tertullian's expression, " hi 
 tres unum sunt " (though this is what seems. 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. l8l 
 
 after all to be so offensive to Porson as to 
 perplex his views of the whole question), but 
 whether he would then fix it on to Scripture, 
 and, after quoting from Scripture the words 
 " Ego et Pater unum sunius," immediately 
 add, without a word of explanation, "Et 
 iterum de Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto 
 scriptum est, ' Et hi tres unum sunt.' " "If 
 you think, sir," says Porson to his adversary, 
 " that it derogates from the honour of Cyprian 
 or Fulgentius to insinuate that they could, in 
 matters of such importance, blindly follow 
 their leaders, you ought to recollect that I 
 pass no harsher censure upon them than I 
 have passed upon you with respect to Mr. 
 Martin — a censure whose justice you cannot 
 help feeling in your mind, whether you choose 
 to express it or no." 
 
 This is his manner of conducting the con- 
 troversy, and it produces its effects on his 
 
liS 2 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 readers. In the next letter, some seventy 
 pages onwards (p. 347), he comes to Fulgen- 
 tius in his chronological place. Of Fulgentius 
 he there says, " I have already spoken in 
 part. If yon object that, though he refers to 
 Cyprian in one place, which may seem to hint 
 that the state of MSS. made snch a reference 
 necessary, in another passage he quotes 
 1 John v. 7 without suspicion, I answer that 
 this will not prove Fulgentius had better 
 authority in one instance than in the other." 
 Here Mr. Porson has recourse to his usual 
 tactics. He says, "I remember that Mi\ 
 Jones, in his * Full Answer to an Essay on 
 Spirit,' quotes 1 John v. 7 without suspicion, 
 and from that and John x. 30 charges the 
 author whom he is answering with blasphemy. 
 Should we not think that for such a purpose 
 none but certain and acknowledged texts- 
 would be quoted ? Yet the same gentleman, 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 83. 
 
 in his ' Catholic Doctrine/ confesses that there 
 has been much dispute concerning this text, and 
 adds his own reasons for believing it genuine." 
 That is to say, Mr. Jones, himself believing 
 this passage to be genuine, omitted to refer 
 to the dispute concerning it, which in an- 
 other place he makes mention of. In both 
 places alike, he gives proof that he read it 
 in Ins Bible. In the case of Fulgentius there 
 is no such diversity between the two passages. 
 There is only, in the one case, Mr. Porson's 
 hypothesis, which in the other proves to be 
 inadmissible. In his final summing up, 
 Porson's statement is : " Fulgentius, indeed, 
 quotes Cyprian's authority for the modern 
 reading; but, from the manner of his appeal, 
 it appears that he could not quote the verse 
 upon the faith of copies of his own age, and 
 therefore relied on the faith as he supposed of 
 Cyprian's copy (p. 400)." The reader of these 
 
184 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 pages will be in a condition, it is hoped, to 
 form his own judgment on Porson's manage- 
 ment of the facts of the case. There have not 
 been wanting, since his time, those who have 
 declared some of the arguments which have 
 built up the general conclusion arrived at to 
 be, in their opinion, " arbitrary and unsatis- 
 factory hypotheses." 
 
 A brief reference must be made, before we 
 leave the subject, to the revival of the con- 
 troversy by Bishop Burgess. The Bishop, at 
 that time, of St. David's, afterwards of Salis- 
 bury, published, in 1821, " A Vindication of 
 St. John v. 7, from the Objections of M. Gries- 
 bach ;" the first of a series of publications put 
 forth by the Bishop with great earnestness to 
 the time of his death in 1837. In reference 
 to Fulgentius, the Bishop observes that " Mr. 
 Porson says, that Fulgentius fairly confesses 
 that he became acquainted with this verse 
 
THE DISPUTED VEESE. 1 85 
 
 solely by the means of Cyprian. I can find 
 in these words," says the Bishop, "no trace 
 of such confession, but the very reverse. And 
 so the words of Fulgentius were understood 
 by Griesbach, who says Fulgentius evidently 
 had the seventh verse in his copy;" and Ful- 
 gentius " asserts that Cyprian quoted it from 
 the Scriptures." The Bishop adds, " in another 
 passage, Mr. Porson says, ' Fulgentius, being 
 aware of an objection, that the verse was not 
 then extant in St. John's Epistle, shields 
 himself under the authority of Cyprian.' 
 This," says the Bishop, "is all a mistake un- 
 doubtedly. Fulgentius quotes St. John as 
 his authority for the doctrine, and Cyprian as 
 holding the same faith. Testatur Joannes — 
 confitetur Cyprianus. It is St. John that 
 testifies ; Cyprian only follows his testimony." 
 There appeared in 1827 a large reply to 
 Bishop Burgess in the form of "A Vindi- 
 
1 86 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 cation of the Literary Character of the late 
 Professor Porson from the Animadversions of " 
 Bishop Burgess "in various publications on 
 i John v. 7, by Crito Cantabrigiensis." The 
 writer under this nom de plume was Dr. 
 Thomas Turton, at that time Begius Professor 
 of Divinity, afterwards Bishop of Ely. On 
 the subject of Fulgentius, he remarks, " With 
 regard to the expression ' this is all a mistake 
 undoubtedly/ I shall consider it to have 
 originated in a strong conviction of being in 
 the right ; and must observe that, in general, 
 there wall be wisdom in not applying expres- 
 sions of this kind to Mr. Porson." He goes 
 on to express what he gives as the feeling of 
 his own mind. "When a point of faith is 
 delivered in the words of an Apostle, it is of 
 no consequence w 7 hether it is held by Cyprian 
 or not. In short, it is hardly possible to sup- 
 pose that Fulgentius should have introduced 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 8/ 
 
 Cyprian as the witness to the truth of the 
 doctrine of St. John ; but we can easily imagine 
 that, so far as he could, he would be glad to 
 avail himself of Cyprian as a witness to the ge- 
 nuineness of a dubious quotation" (pp. 276-7). 
 Only, it must be observed, Mr. Porson did con- 
 sider that Cyprian, the martyr, was regarded 
 as something like a sacred authority for doc- 
 trine, and bestowed his sarcasms accordingly. 
 And there remains the difficulty of Mr. Porson's 
 apparent interpretation of the word " con- 
 fitetur," as applied to Cyprian. It is, moreover, 
 to be observed that it is not primarily the 
 doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, but the unity 
 of the Church, as derived from and reflecting 
 the Unity of Persons in the Godhead, of which 
 St. Cyprian and Fulgentius after him were 
 speaking. 
 
 A second edition of Bishop Burgess's " In- 
 quiry" contained a reply to an able article in 
 
1 88 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the Quarterly Review (vol. xxvi. pp. 324-341) ; 
 in which, however, it had been stated, that 
 the passage in St.. Cyprian " presents by 
 far the strongest evidence that has been 
 adduced in favour of the verse." " The 
 expression, ' Scriptum est,' it w T as fully 
 admitted, certainly implies that the words 
 which follow, c Et hi tres unum sunt,' 
 were extant in Scripture ; and, connected 
 as they are with the mention of the three 
 Persons of the Trinity, the natural conclusion 
 seems to be, that reference is made to the 
 seventh verse of this chapter." In regard to 
 Fulgentius, the reviewer observes that " Mr. 
 Porson contends that Fulgentius by his own 
 confession became acquainted with the seventh 
 verse solely by the means of Cyprian ; but* 
 he adds, u we are far from being convinced by 
 the learned Professor's arguments on the subject 
 In our opinion, which may yet plausibly be 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 89 
 
 disputed, the legitimate inference from the 
 words of Fulgentius is, that he had the verse 
 in his copy of the Latin version." As regards 
 the questions which remain, as the reviewer 
 suggests, in regard to quotations from Scrip- 
 ture in the writings of the Fathers, Cyprian 
 " may have had the passage of Tertullian in 
 his mind," and " he may have confounded" 
 the two verses in St. John; but, as matter of 
 fact, he does not, it appears from his writings, 
 quote Scripture " from memory," but, on the 
 contrary, with all that " formal exactness which 
 we now require, and which would do credit 
 to a writer of our own days." 
 
 In 1829 Bishop Burgess returned to the con- 
 flict in " A Letter to the Beverend Thomas 
 Benyon, Archdeacon of Cardigan, in reply 
 to a Vindication of the Literary Character 
 of Professor Porson, by Crito Cantabrigiensis." 
 In regard to St. Cyprian and Fulgentius, and 
 
I90 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 Mr. Porson's assertion that Fulgentius "fairly 
 confesses that he became acquainted with 
 this verse solely by the means of Cyprian" 
 the Bishop observes that this is "an asser- 
 tion with which even Crito cannot bring 
 himself to be 'in exact agreement.' Ful- 
 gentius first, in his own name, quotes this 
 testimony of St. John for the unity of sub- 
 stance in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ; 
 and afterwards, in Cyprian's name, quotes the 
 same passage together with John x. 30, as 
 Cyprian's proof of the unity of the Church 
 from the unity of the Godhead; ( ut unam 
 Ecclesiam unius Dei esse monstraret.' Cyprian 
 quotes the words of St. John for one purpose, 
 and Fulgentius for another. Yet Mr. Porson 
 says that Fulgentius, c being aware of an 
 objection that the verse was not extant in 
 St. John's Epistle, shields himself under the 
 authority of Cyprian,' and confesses that he 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 191 
 
 had ' not seen the verse himself in the copies 
 of the New Testament.' But this is all 
 mistake undoubtedly, as I once said, and 
 must now repeat, though Crito should again 
 remind me that ' there will be wisdom in not 
 applying expressions of that kind to the 
 opinions of Mr. Porson.' Fulgentius cer- 
 tainly does not confess, nor intimate, that he 
 had not seen the verse in copies of the New 
 Testament, nor express the slightest suspicion 
 of the genuineness of the verse. But, if he 
 does not, ' what else (says Mr. Porson) does he 
 mean to prove by his appeal to Cyprian? 
 That the verse was genuine ? His appeal 
 is to St. John, and not to Cyprian, for the 
 unity of the Three Divine Persons. But 
 he alleges Cyprian's conformity to that doc- 
 trine, and quotes it as Cyprian's proof of the 
 unity of the Church. Fulgentius clearly had 
 the verse in his copy of St. John's Epistle, 
 
I92 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 and lie does not insinuate any doubt that- 
 Cyprian had it in his. But if it already 
 existed (says Mr. Porson) in all the copies, 
 where was the use and sense of strengthening* 
 this general consent by the solitary evidence 
 of Cyprian?' The general consent to the 
 genuineness of the verse needed no aid, nor 
 w T as the passage of Cyprian alleged for such 
 purpose. Even Griesbach concludes from the 
 words of Fulgentius that he had the verse in 
 his copy — in codice suo comma 7 reperisse — 
 and that on that account he was persuaded 
 that Cyprian had the verse in his 'per- 
 suasum fuisse a Cypriano jam lectum esse 
 comma.' 
 
 " That Cyprian's words are a quotation 
 of the seventh verse of St. John," Bishop 
 Burgess goes on to say, "no one ever 
 doubted, before Facundus, nor after him 
 (as far as we know), till his mystical notions 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 93 
 
 concerning the eighth verse were revived by 
 Simon; 'since whose time it has been made a 
 question (says Mr. Porson) whether Cyprian 
 quotes the seventh verse, or only applies the 
 eighth by a mystical interpretation to the 
 Trinity ;' an interpretation which has not the 
 slightest authority from the words of Cyprian, 
 and which, on every rational view of the 
 passage, must be considered, as Mill calls 
 it, coacta et detorta — incesta et lubrica—futilis 
 et nugatoria. Mr. Porson himself calls it 
 forced, indirect, and unnatural." 
 
 In reference to the remark which Bishop 
 Burgess had made as to Mr. Porson's being 
 " undoubtedly mistaken," and Crito's saying 
 there would "be wisdom in not applying 
 expressions of that kind to the opinions of 
 Mr. Porson," the Bishop observes that, " the 
 temerity of supposing Mr. Porson to be 
 mistaken in his opinions of a great theological 
 
 o 
 
194 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 question, intimately connected not only with 
 the external, but with the internal evidence 
 of Scripture, will be mitigated by Crito's 
 acknowledgment that, at the time of Mr. 
 Porson's writing his letters to Travis, he was 
 a young man, and not a theologian by pro- 
 fession." 
 
 In connection with the question concerning 
 St. Cyprian and other writers of the African 
 Church, reference should be made, before con- 
 cluding this brief historical sketch, to the 
 publication at Rome, in 1835, of "Two 
 Letters on some parts of the Controversy 
 concerning 1 John v. 7, containing also an 
 Inquiry into the origin of the First Latin 
 Version of Scripture, commonly called the 
 Itala, by Nicholas Wiseman, D.D." The 
 primary object of the writer was to call 
 attention to " two later manuscripts, of a date 
 anterior to any hitherto attributed to those 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 95 
 
 containing the verse by the opposers of its 
 genuineness ; which, however," would " be 
 shown to contain it." In regard to the 
 disputed verse, he remarks that "it has been 
 sufficiently observed by all writers upon the 
 controversy, that almost all the testimonies in 
 favour of the verse are African. St. Cyprian, 
 Marcus Celedensis, St. Fulgentius, Victor 
 Vitensis, the four hundred bishops assembled 
 under Hunneric at Carthage, were all 
 members of the African Church. Maximus 
 the Confessor learnt the passage from the 
 same country ; Eucherius was a Spaniard, 
 and his text is too uncertain to be quoted; 
 Phcebadius was a monk of Lerins ; both, there- 
 fore, probably in communication with the 
 African Church. But while so many authors 
 have observed this consent of writers belong- 
 ing to one Church, they have not placed their 
 testimony in its proper light. They have 
 
 o % 
 
196 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 spoken of them as so many African writers, 
 or even as the body of the African Church, 
 bearing witness to the existence of a passage, 
 but not as the representatives of the African 
 recension or text; as the voice of a great 
 critical family, whose antiquity and authority, 
 as compared with that of other texts, must be 
 critically examined." In the question, there- 
 fore, between two recensions, the African and 
 the Italian, which latter was used by St. 
 Augustine, if it should appear highly probable 
 or even certain that the Latin translation 
 was really made in Africa, and that conse- 
 quently the African text, preserved by the 
 writers of that Church, ascends to a higher 
 antiquity, not only than the Italian, but than 
 any Greek manuscript in existence, we gain an 
 argument much more compact, defined, and 
 solid, for the authenticity of the controverted 
 verses than by the rival balancing of quota- 
 
THE DISPUTED VERSE. 1 97 
 
 tions and texts." The learned writer proceeds 
 " to lay before biblical critics some specific 
 proofs, tending, in his opinion, to demon- 
 strate that Africa is the birthplace of the 
 Latin Version." He " finds a strong ground 
 of historical probability that the first Latin 
 Version was not made in Italy, but in Africa. " 
 " We have positive proof/' he says, " in the 
 quotations of African writers, that such a 
 version did exist in their country before the 
 fourth century." He proves it by what he 
 observes must be " the most satisfactory 
 method of determining the country of the 
 Vulgate," namely, "by an examination of its 
 words and phrases." 
 
 " The result" of a careful examination " is, 
 that Africa was the birthplace of the Vulgate, 
 and consequently the African recension repre- 
 sents its oldest type, and is far superior in 
 authority to the Italian. Thus it gives us 
 
198 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 the assurance that in the primary translation 
 the verse existed, and that, if the Italian 
 Fathers had it not, it was from its having 
 been lost in their recension. We are thus 
 led to conclude" — this is the result to which 
 he comes — " that the manuscripts used in 
 making this version possessed the verse ; and 
 these were necessarily manuscripts of far 
 greater antiquity than any we can now 
 inspect." 
 
APPENDIX III. 
 
 VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS. 
 
 Since the first announcement of the intended 
 publication of these pages, several suggestions 
 have been offered, one or two of which may 
 here be conveniently presented to the reader : — 
 i. Bishop Abraham writes : — I venture to 
 suggest (if it has not already occurred to you) 
 that no sufficient explanation, nor any indeed, 
 as far as my observation goes, has been given 
 of the article ™ with tv in the 8th verse. It 
 would naturally imply that the word ev had 
 just preceded. 
 
 2. The Eev. John James writes : — 
 "There is one point which has lately presen- 
 ted itself to me as heightening the probability 
 
200 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 of an early transcriber s inadvertent preter- 
 mission, and which (if it has not occurred to 
 you) you might be glad to have introduced. 
 
 " And it is this, that the Alexandrine MS. 
 exhibits two other instances of inadvertent 
 pretermission in the very same chapter, 
 which I will recite — 
 
 "i John v. 3. 
 
 " The first clause of this verse — viz. : avrri yap 
 
 lariv 7] aycnrt} tov Gtou, \va tclq IvtoXciq avrov TripwjJLtv, 
 
 is entirely pretermitted per incuriam in the 
 Alexandrine MS. : and why ? Because the 
 last-preceding words of the second verse are 
 identical with the concluding words of the 
 pretermitted clause, and that the transcriber's 
 eye, on recurring to the passage, alighted in- 
 advertently upon the second recurrence of the 
 words, and so resumed his transcript with 
 the next ensuing words ; koX al IvroXal avrov 
 
 fiapuai ouk daiv, 
 
VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS. 201 
 
 " i John v. 15. 
 "The first clause of this verse also — viz. : K a\ lav 
 o&afjLEv on aKovzi bfiuv is pretermitted in the 
 Alexandrine MS. ; evidently per incuriam : and 
 why ? Because the last words of verse fourteen 
 are identical with the concluding words of this 
 clause, and the transcriber's eye, on his re- 
 suming the transcript, caught sight, inadver- 
 tently, of the secondly recurrent words, and so 
 naturally continued with the words next en- 
 suing — viz. : 8 av alTWfxOa, k. r. A. Query. — Why 
 should not the same inadvertence account for 
 the pretermission of verse seven in the earlier 
 MSS. or MS. to which the Alexandrine, Vati- 
 can, and Sinaitic, as well as other uncial and 
 cursive MSS. owe their origin ? 
 
 u For the case is precisely the same. The 
 
 words, 6 TraTrjp, 6 Aoyoe, kcu to ayiov irvtvpa, kcu 
 
 ovtoi ot rpetc %v zlaiv, are (inadvertently) preter- 
 mitted : and why ? Because the words proxi- 
 
202 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 mately antecedent to them — viz. : T pus uaiv ol 
 /uapTvpovvTSQ, are identical with those which recur 
 immediately after them ; and the transcriber's 
 eye, on resuming his transcript, inadvertently 
 rested on the secondly recurrent words, and 
 proceeded naturally with the proximately 
 
 ensuing words, to wvzvfxa, ko.\ to vSwp, koX to 
 al/ua. 
 
 ["N.B. The omission of the words, Ivttj yfj, 
 might be accounted for by the transcriber not 
 seeing any occasion for them, having over- 
 looked lv Ttji ovpavy in the previously omitted 
 clause. This conjecture, however, implies 
 perhaps a charge of more than incuria. It is 
 perhaps significant, what Griesbach seems to 
 state — viz. : That " in terra" is found in some 
 Latin MSS. which omit verse seven — implying 
 the presence in some more ancient MS. of a 
 correlative " in ccelo," and of an entire corre- 
 lative sentence, as having originally existed. 
 
VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS. 203 
 
 But upon this point I should be very glad to 
 know your view.] 
 
 " Meanwhile, there are one or two other 
 points of which I am anxious to express the 
 great importance : — 
 
 " (1 ) It is surely a palmary proof— a T^ipiov 
 — of the original presence in the passage of 
 verse seven, that its presence is the only pos- 
 sible way of accounting for the use of the 
 
 three masculine words, Tpt7g elaiv 01 [xapTVpovvTtQy 
 
 before the three neuter substantives, ™ wvevfia, 
 
 teal to vStDp, /ecu to aifia. 
 
 " Had not verse seven pre-existed, and so 
 authorized their reiteration, they would neces- 
 sarily have been written, T p(a Iot\ to. /mapTvpovvTa, 
 would they not ? 
 
 " (2) Those who maintain the exclusion of 
 verse seven, are fond of saying that, ' in in- 
 quiries of this kind we must, to use Bentley s 
 words, indulge nothing to any conjecture/ 
 
204 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 " Nevertheless, they themselves conjecture 
 as follows : ' It is not improbable that, as a 
 security to the faith, the dogma of the great 
 Teacher was recorded in the margin of the 
 Latin MSS., and that it so may have glided 
 into the text/ 
 
 " Query. — Which is the most probable ? 
 This conjecture, which implies, if it does not 
 attribute, mala fides and conscious tampering 
 with the text to the interpolator ; or that 
 conjecture which simply attributes to the 
 transcriber a pardonable inadvertence and a 
 common form of incuria, of which two parallel 
 instances occur in the Alexandrine context of 
 the very same chapter ? 
 
 " I am well aware that those who have had 
 brought before them the anomalous use of the 
 masculine, as applied, without intervention of 
 verse seven, to three neuters, are ready to plead 
 
 that, to irviVfxa means to ayiov irvtv/uLa, who 
 
VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS. 205 
 
 being a person demands the masculine gender 
 for His adject ivals. But surely, T b Trvtvfxa, 
 in that place, as in the corresponding passages 
 of St. John's Gospel (xix. 30, 34, 35), means 
 the human spirit, ' ghost/ of our blessed Lord, 
 as given up in the way so remarkably described 
 by St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, even 
 as ' the water and the blood,' mean what came 
 forth from His side in the same hour of His 
 decease. 
 
 " It may not be amiss to add that, in spite 
 of the Authorized Version, and the Revised 
 Version, printing the word in 1 John v. 6-8 * 
 with a capital S, those verses are printed with 
 small ' s' in Bishop Turton's article on the 
 text (Quarterly Review, vol. xxxiii.), in which 
 he advocates the exclusion of the text. Also 
 
 * Verse seven showing the Godhead ; verse eight, the 
 Manhood ; and both being logically the outcome of the two- 
 fold argument of the apostle, as stated chap. iv. vss, 2 and 15. 
 
206 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 that ' Henry Vaughan, Silurist,' in his poem 
 
 or hymn for Trinity Sunday, so (correctly) 
 
 understood it : — 
 
 "*0 holy, blessed, glorious Three 
 Eternal witnesses that be, 
 In heaven, one God in Trinitie. 
 As here on earth, where men withstood, 
 The spirit, water, and the blood 
 Made my Lord's Incarnation good.'" 
 
 3. The Note of Grotius, referred to in 
 Chapter IV. is here subjoined : — 
 
 " Tantum dicam manuscriptum illud anti- 
 quissimum cujus auctoritate plurimum utor, 
 non aliud hie habere quam 6tl rpug uaiv ol 
 /maprvpovvTSQ — ko\ to aifia non adjecto illo quod 
 et Syrus et Arabs legere, K a\ ol rpac Zv am, 
 Ego hanc quam posui lectionem et quae a 
 multis confirmatur libris veteribus, veram 
 puto. Neque vero (supple puto ?) Arianis 
 ablatas voces quasdam sed potius additas, 
 unde colligerent Patrem et Filium et Spiritum 
 Sanctum non esse unum nisi consensu, quo- 
 
VARIOUS CONSIDERATIONS. 207 
 
 modo spiritus, aqua et sanguis in unum 
 testimonium consentiunt. Quod cumviderent 
 Catholici, abstulisse (puto) quidem eos ilJud 
 quod de Patre, Filio, et Spiritu Sancto in- 
 sertum fuerat, sed reliquisse illud " tres unum 
 esse," quia id ita posit um ipsis nocere non 
 poterat. Alios vero (puto) relicto illo loco 
 de Patre, Filio, et Spiritu Sancto, ibi quidem 
 posuisse " unum sunt ;" de Spiritu vero, 
 aqua, et sanguine, " in unum sunt" ut alius 
 modus unitatis significaretur. " 
 
ADDENDUM. 
 
 During the passage of these sheets through 
 the press, Dr. Farrar's new work on The Early 
 Days of Christianity has made its appearance. 
 It is a misfortune for those who incline to the 
 view advocated in the present work, that so 
 popular a writer gives the weight of his 
 authority upon the other side. Speaking of 
 the disputed verse, he says, " It was unknown 
 to any of the Greek Fathers before the 
 thirteenth century" (vol. ii. p. 458). But is 
 this so ? There is no doubt about its occur- 
 ring in the Greek Disputation against Arius* 
 That Disputation may or may not be the 
 genuine work of Athanasius, of whose col- 
 
 See Chapter VI. of the present work. 
 
ADDENDUM. 209 
 
 lected works it forms a part : its precise 
 authorship we are not concerned to argue for 
 the purpose of the present question : but it is 
 rather too much to ask us to believe that it is 
 a work of the thirteenth century.* 
 
 Again, he says of the verse that " in the 
 East it was never once used in the Arian 
 Controversy." One part of the argument in 
 the foregoing pages has been directed to this 
 point, f It is surely conceivable that the 
 Catholic party refrained from putting the 
 verse forward, because (as Aquinas saw) it 
 might so easily from the nature of its context 
 have been turned against them. 
 
 Further, Dr. Farrar affirms of our verse, 
 that "it is omitted in all Greek Manuscripts 
 before the sixteenth century." But if we 
 turn ten pages back in his book we learn from 
 himself that even this formidable fact is not 
 
 * P. 56 supra, f See Chapter III. 
 
 P 
 
2IO THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 necessarily fatal. He has to discuss (p. 448} 
 another alleged intrusion into St. John's 
 Epistle ; and, this time in defence of the sup- 
 posed intruder, his words are these : — "At 
 first sight it might seem to be fatal to the 
 reading, that it is not found in any existing 
 Manuscript. This fact must perhaps suffice 
 to exclude it from any accepted text of the 
 Greek Testament,* yet this seems to me to be 
 exactly one of those cases in which the read- 
 ing of existing MSS. is outweighed by other 
 authorities and other considerations." Now, 
 we have here the admission of a competent 
 scholar, that, overwhelming as the absence of 
 a reading from all existing manuscripts may 
 seem to be, there may, nevertheless, be other 
 considerations which outweigh it. That is- 
 exactly what we say about the disputed verse 
 
 "* Nevertheless, it is admitted into the margin of the 
 Revised Version. 
 
ADDENDUM. 2 I I 
 
 of the Three Witnesses. We admit its 
 absence from the manuscripts, but we plead 
 that there are other considerations which 
 might fairly have protected it, not perhaps 
 against Dr. Farrar's adverse opinion, but at 
 least against the contemptuous silence of the 
 Revised Version. 
 
 Once more, Dr. Farrar speaks of " the 
 gross immorality of defending a passage mani- 
 festly spurious because of its doctrinal use- 
 fulness." But why drag the "gross immo- 
 rality" into the calm atmosphere of what is 
 after all a very nice and subtle literary dis- 
 cussion, in which there is avowedly some- 
 thing to be said on both sides ? Those who 
 differ from this able writer are equally con- 
 vinced with himself that the doctrine of the 
 Trinity is perfectly safe without the verse. 
 Indeed, if there is any soundness in the state- 
 ment of Aquinas, cited in the preceding 
 
 P % 
 
2 I 2 THE THREE WITNESSES. 
 
 paragraphs, the doctrine of the Consubstan- 
 tiality in the Trinity is even safer without 
 the verse than with it. Take the verse by 
 itself and no doubt there is a gain to Church 
 doctrine in having the Three Persons ex- 
 plicitly named together : but take the verse in 
 connection with the next, and the Arian will 
 at once be free to argue that just as the 
 Spirit, the Water, and the Blood are not one 
 in substance, but only "in consensu," so you 
 cannot fairly affirm more of the Three in the 
 parallel of the preceding verse. 
 
 It may be well to set alongside this the 
 language which Dr. Farrar adopts in another 
 part of what most readers will agree to call 
 his very attractive work. This time he is not, 
 as in the case of the disputed verse of St. 
 John, the assailant, but himself inclined to be 
 the defender. He has to consider another of 
 the vexed questions of Scriptural learning — 
 
ADDENDUM. 2 I 3 
 
 the genuineness of the Second Epistle of St. 
 Peter. Just as in the case of St. John's 
 verse, great names may be cited both for and 
 against its genuineness : and Dr. Farrar says 
 (vol. i. p. 174), "although it is discourteous 
 and unwarrantable to pronounce the Epistle 
 to be so certainly spurious that nothing but 
 prejudice or ignorance could maintain its 
 genuineness, neither ought its defenders to 
 argue as though any hesitation as to its 
 genuineness was an impious arraignment of 
 the Spirit of God." Precisely so. That is 
 the tone of expression which properly belongs 
 to the question of St. Peter's authorship no 
 less than to that of St. John's — the tone 
 which, if it only prevail, will the most bril- 
 liantly exhibit the truly scientific spirit of 
 English scholarship, and which, we may be 
 sure, will in the end carry conviction to the 
 hearts of the English people. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 Abraham, Bishop, 199 
 Advocacy, rule of, 30 
 African Scriptures, 40, 118 
 
 Confession of Faith, 86, 87 
 origin of the disputed verse 
 
 alleged, 38 
 use of the disputed verse 
 
 unchallenged, 42 
 testimony to the disputed 
 verse, 195, 196 
 Agony in the Garden, 44 
 "Agree in One," how, 35, 36 
 Alexandrine MS., faults in, 
 
 200 
 Ancients do not notice the ques- 
 tion, 2 
 Aquinas, 34, 67 
 Arguments, summary of, 4, 5 
 Arian, 52, 68 
 
 possible use of disputed 
 
 verse by, 31, 34, 212 
 failure in getting disputed 
 verse condemned by 
 Church of England, 134 
 
 Arian, interest in Bentley's 
 labours, 127 
 
 precise point of difference 
 with Catholic, 30 
 Athanasius, 7, 24, 54 
 Atterbury, Bishop, 13 
 Augustine, St., 79 
 
 B. 
 
 Babylonian School, 62 
 Barlow, Bisliop, 13, 72 
 Basil the Great, St., 24 
 Bengel, 13, 152, 164 
 Benson, paraphrase, 144 
 Benyon, Bishop Burgess' Letter 
 
 to, 189 
 Bentley, 112 
 
 "Proposals," 120 
 
 Arian interest in his labours, 
 127 
 
 Bishop Monk's Life of, 121, 
 128 
 Beveridge, Bishop, 9, 13 
 Bible, Rabbinic, quoted, 62 
 Bibliotheca Patrum, 25 
 
2l6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Bowyer, Greek Testament, 155 
 Bull, Bishop, 13, 77 
 Burgess, Bishop, 1 1 1 
 
 "Vindication," <fcc, 184 
 Burgon, on the last twelve 
 verses of St. Mark, 17 
 
 Calamy, 114 
 Cassiodorus xi. 
 
 Catholic Epistles, copies of, 
 scarce, 94 
 
 little quoted by Greek 
 
 Fathers, 22 et seq. 
 few modern Commentaries 
 on, 17 
 Chrysostom, St., 24, 26 
 Clarke, Dr., 98, 116 
 Complutensian Polyglott, 3, 35, 
 
 66 et seq., 112 
 Consubstantiality in the Trinity, 
 
 212 
 Convocation unwilling to ex- 
 punge the disputed text, 116 
 Crito Cantabrigiensis, 122, 186 
 Cyprian, 69 et seq. 
 
 character of his writings, 94 
 habit of quoting Scripture, 
 
 103 
 mystical interpretation in, 
 erroneously alleged, 105 
 Cyril, St., of Jerusalem, 25 
 
 D. 
 
 " Disputation against Arias," 
 55 
 
 Disputed verse, why not quoted 
 by Greek writers, 21, 37 
 knowledge of, not confined 
 
 to Latin writers, 56 
 effect of next verse on the,. 
 
 34,37 
 Du Piu, 103 
 
 E. 
 
 "Edinburgh Review," 12 
 Emlyn, 99 et seq. 
 Erasmus, 3, 40, 70 
 Eucherius, of Lyons, 140 
 Euthalius, 54 
 
 F. 
 
 Facundus, 79, 84 et seq., 159 
 
 Farrar, Dr., his statements ex~ 
 amined, 20S 
 
 Fashion in scholarship, 1 
 in opinion, 1 1 
 
 Fell, Bishop, 76 
 
 Forster, on " The Three- 
 Heavenly Witnesses," 13 
 
 Fulgentius, 81, 84 et seq. 
 
 G. 
 
 Gallandius, 25 
 Gastrell, Bishop, 13 
 Gibbon, 166 
 Grabe, 96 
 
 " Programmata," 75 
 
INDEX. 
 
 21/ 
 
 Greek Testament, Mill, 96 
 Wetstein, 148 
 Griesbach, 14S, 151 
 Bowyer, 155 
 Erasmus, 70 
 Bentley, 120 
 
 Greek writers, disputed verse 
 why not quoted by, 21,37 
 
 Gregory Nazianzen, St., 23, 32 
 why he does not quote the 
 disputed verse in his Ora- 
 tion, 32 
 
 Griesbach, New Testament, 148, 
 
 151 
 
 Grotius, 36, 206 
 
 H. 
 
 Hammond, Paraphrase, 71 
 
 Haya, 62 
 
 Home, Hartwell, his transcrip- 
 tion from the Polyglott, 35 
 
 Horsley, Bishop, 13 
 
 Hours of Prayer applied to 
 the doctrine of the Trinity, 
 179 
 
 Huet, Bishop, 13 
 
 Hunneric, S7 
 
 Iren.eus, St., 24 
 
 Italic version in Africa, 94, 165 
 
 James, Kev. John, on Alexan- 
 drine MS., 199" 
 
 Jerome, St., 41, 70, 76 
 
 Joachim, Abbot, 67 
 
 John, St., Synopsis of his First 
 
 Epistle, 47 et seq. 
 Justin Martyr, 25 
 
 Knight, Dr. 
 Knittel, 13 
 
 K. 
 
 117 
 
 Laterax, Council of 12 15, 39 
 Latin Scriptures, 67, 76 
 
 African origin of, 41, 197 
 
 M. 
 
 Manuscripts, their character, 44 
 
 Marsh, Bishop, 39 
 
 Martin, no 
 
 Mark, last twelve verses of St.^ 
 
 16 
 Massorah, 60 
 Maximus, 57 
 Middleton, 13 
 
 Mill, folio Greek Testament, 10, 
 20, 90 
 his theory on the question, 
 
 11 n., 13, 21 
 a defender of the disputed 
 
 verse, 96 
 on the Italic version, 117 
 Monk, life of Bentley, 121, 128 
 Montanists, date of their rise,. 
 157 
 
2lS 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 N. 
 
 Nelson, Robeiit, 116 
 
 New facts, dearth of, 1 5 
 
 New Testament text, how deter- 
 mined, 14 
 
 Newton, Sir Isaac, 66, 98, 138, 
 142 
 
 0. 
 
 •CEcumenius, 55 
 
 Old Testament, textual question 
 in, 63 
 
 Parallelism between the dis- 
 puted verse and the next, 31, 
 35, 212 
 Pearson, Bishop, 13 
 Peter, question of second epistle 
 
 of St., 213 
 Porson, his difficulties with the 
 Synopsis of Holy Scripture, 
 5o 
 
 ''Letters to Travis," 157 
 his unscholarly criticism, 
 
 161 
 criticized by Bishop Bur- 
 gess, 168 
 his manner of conducting 
 controversy, 181 
 Possevinus, 74 
 
 Prayer, Three Hours of, emble- 
 matic of Trinity, 179, 1S8 
 
 Q. 
 
 " Quarterly Review," 205 
 
 reply to, by Bishop Burgess, 
 187 
 
 R. 
 
 Rabbinic Bibles, 62 
 
 Radak, 63 
 
 Received text, 3 
 
 Revision, ancient arguments for, 
 
 reproduced, 41 
 Rivetus, 75 
 
 S. 
 
 Sandius, 74 
 
 Scholars of old time in favour 
 
 of the disputed verse, 12 
 Seeker, Archbishop, 13 
 Selden, 72 
 Simon, jy et seq. 
 Sinaitic MS., 9 
 Smallbrooke, Bishop, 111 
 Socinian use of Cyprian, 139 
 Socinus, 70 
 Sophronius, 54 
 Synopsis of Holy Scripture, 46 
 
 et seq. 
 
 T. 
 
 Taylor, Abraham, 118 
 Tertullian, 71 
 Theodoret, 26 
 Theophylact, 55 
 Travis, 85, 157 
 
INDEX. 
 
 219 
 
 Trinity, influence of the disputed 
 verse on the doctrine of, 29 
 the true nature of the ques- 
 tionbetween Catholic and 
 Arian, 30 
 Turton, Bishop, 186, 205 
 T wells, 136 
 
 U. 
 
 Unity of the Church, 187 
 V. 
 
 Vaughan, 
 206 
 
 Henry, the Silurist, 
 
 Vesture of Our Lord, not rent, 
 
 meaning of, 154 
 Victor, 78 
 
 w. 
 
 Wake, Archbishop, 13, 120 
 Waterland, 118 
 Wetstein, 131, 148 
 Whiston, 98, 134 
 Whitby, " Dissertation," 103 
 Wiseman, Dr., Letters in sup- 
 port of the disputed verse, 195 
 
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 JULY XIX 
 
 - « |- 5 He that is mighty hath done to - ? a 
 
 ww^ me great things ; and holy g & < 
 
 | g' * 3 is his name. § §3 
 
 S 2. 1 * . -5 ' V 
 
 e g. I | , g- o 
 
 m J < . Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among <« 5" 
 
 o m a the gods ? who is Hke thee, glorious in m § 
 
 °3. g. holiness, fearful in praises, doing won- g> 5 
 ^ g p ders? — Among the gods there is none p g* 
 ja gj like unto thee, O Lord : neither are » c* 
 B | t- there any works like unto thy works.— g §. 
 « ig. « \yjjo s ] ia u not fear thee, O'Lord, and B. J 
 ^ Z " glorify thy name? for thou only art g 5 g 
 ~ 5. ^. holy. — Hallowed be thy name. ^ *■ 
 
 1 • | Elessed be the Lord God of Israel ; | I 
 g S 3 for he hath visited and redeemed his 5 B 
 
 1 1 I P e °P le - | i 
 
 £. I. 3 "Who is this that cometh from Edom, f S 
 
 |. © I with dyed garments from BozrahP this "£. £T 
 
 « 3 | that is glorious in his apparel, travelling 8 ~ 
 
 • = «§i g in the greatness of his strength P I that ?; o? 
 
 I | : § speak in righteousness, mighty to save. |" P 
 
 jf ta ■- — I have laid help upon one that is =~ ™ 
 
 §." §. J^ mighty; I have exalted one chosen out §, §, 
 
 § S of the people. § p* 
 
 <q §< Now unto him that is able to do ex- ^ • 
 
 2 ceeding abundantly above all that we if § 
 
 j~ ask or think, according to the power *** p. 
 
 2 1 that worketh in us, . . be glory. ' - 
 
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