Transcription
[Music] and greetings welcome to the dividing line. My name is James white. Today we are going to be going in-depth into a discussion of the history of the New Testament. I hope you are ready for that. I want this particular program to be a resource that we can utilize, direct people to. And so I will avoid any of the discussions of current weather conditions or other things going on, so that it can have a more useful long-term life in that way.
When we talk about differences between Bibles, when we talk about what are known as textual variants, which come about due the fact that the that all all works of antiquity up until the invention of the printing press in the West were transmitted by handwriting, leaving out things chiseled in rocks or on metal. There were some metal plate experiments and transmission of things. The vast majority of written literature from the ancient world through the medieval period is written upon forms of paper or parchment, either made from plants or from animal skins, and they are done with the human hand and with the human eye and the human mind. If you want perfection of transmission of anything, you have to wait to 1949 and the invention of the photocopier. Though I can assure you, being the old guy that I am, photocopiers in the ancient days we're not all that great either. But it it should be exact if it's actually working right. The Olga Stetner stuff and things like that, they're they're different. But anyway, so any work of antiquity, any work somewhat contemporaneous with the New Testament, and obviously anything preceding that, has to come down to us in a written form. And in the vast majority of instances, that means we are reading manuscripts that were copied from preceding manuscripts.
Because paper parchment has to have particular conditions to be able to exist for long, long, long periods of time. Anyone who, for example, my library, I have books that I purchased. For example, if I look at the Mormon books that I purchased back when I first started studying Mormonism, their pages, page edges are yellowed in Arizona, dusty, but very different than what you would buy at the bookstore today. Because especially in these days, we use very low quality paper which has a very high content of acids and things like that that cause the degradation of the paper over time. And so if that's true today, then it certainly was true in in the past as well. And so we are looking at written documents that have been passed down to us through handwriting. And when human beings write things, they make mistakes. They make spelling errors. They, there are a lot, their eyes skip from one line to another, sometimes forwards, sometimes back. There's all sorts of things that can happen.
And of course, on this program over the years, we have discussed many textual variants. In the last program, we spent quite some time talking about Luke 23:34, Jesus' words, "Father, forgive them, thinking about what they do." The manuscripts that do and do not contain this. And we're very open about these things. There isn't any, there are some Christians that wish you wouldn't talk about such things. But the reality is, this is how God gave us his word. If it's true, it will remain true no matter how it is examined, as long as it is examined truthfully.
Now, when you talk about textual variants, the two largest textual variants, largest as in the amount of data, the amount of words, amount of letters that are contained, are 212 ver blocks. And that is the long grading of Mark, Mark 16:9-20. And what's called the Pericope Adulterae, the Latin for the story of the woman taken in adultery, the adulterous woman's story in John 7:53 through 8:11. And those are well known. One has significantly earlier and better evidence than the other. That is the long grading of Mark, as much better evidence than the prick of a adulterer, a does, which does not appear until the fifth century in any manuscripts who possess today. And so they might be considered the most famous because they're the largest. But it would seem to me that, especially in talking with people outside the Christian faith, what is known as the Comma Johanneum, which is a relatively short phrase, not a phrase, he's a couple of phrases found in at the end of John's first epistle, and what would be numbered in the King James Version of the Bible is 1 John 5:7. Maybe the most famous. I certainly know that in my own experience, I have probably had more people tell me I'm going to hell because of this particular passage than almost any other. I remember the man who was Alberto Rivera, who was behind the Alberto comics and the Jack Chick stuff about Roman Catholicism. He looked me right in the eye and told me I was going to hell 'cause I was carrying that, that one right there, that New American Standard Bible right over there. Can't reach her from here. But anyway, I had that one with me that night, and it doesn't have the Comma Johanneum. So if you don't have that, you're you're going to hell. And that's just how it works.
So given that, it would seem to me that that most Christians who want to give a defense of their faith and defense of the veracity of their translation of the Bible and its underlying Greek and Hebrew texts would like to know what the facts are. Because there is a great deal of emotional and traditional fervor that is to be found in materials that you might find on the internet in regards to this particular subject. And there are many individuals who will very strongly defend the comma. But they do so primarily for the broader defense of the Textus Receptus or the King James only position. You will not find those promoting the majority text or even the Byzantine text defending the Comma Johanneum. This is important to understand, and I will lay out the reasons for this.
So what are, what are we, what are we looking at? Well, we are looking at, when you, when you look at your Bible, if you have a modern translation that is not the King James or the New King James, then you have just a fragment of a verse in 1 John 5:7. And it's about the three witnesses. And who are the three witnesses? Well, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood. The Spirit, and the water, and the blood. And these are the ones who are testifying. But if you have a King James or New King James, then you would have these, the ones witnessing in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three they're testifying upon earth. And then you have what you have in your other translations. So that, that, that phrase, "in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one," is what's called the Comma Johanneum.
This is the disputed text. In the words of Dr. Metzger and his textual commentary, that these words are spurious and have no right to stand. The New Testament is certain in the light of the following considerations. And given the widespread distribution of Metzger's commentary, I'll just go ahead and read it because that's what most people would be exposed to. But we'll be looking more closely. External evidence. The passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight. And these contain the passage. Now, this is from the '70s, '80s. Some people would say as many as twelve. We're gonna look at specifics about this. But let's just be very clear. This is a massively minority reading. It is found in, it's a massively late minority reading. There are some readings in the New Testament that are minority readings, that is, they are contained only in a minority of manuscripts. But the reason they're found in the New Testament that we translate our New Testaments from today, such as this, the Nestle-Aland 28th edition of the Greek New Testament, I was gonna grab my ECM, I forgot to do that, apologize that I just mean taller stack over there. But these, these eclectic texts, they are, they are drawn from many different manuscripts. These printed editions from which we translate into other languages, they, including the English language, will have readings that are based upon a minority of the manuscripts. But in almost every one of those instances, those minority of manuscripts are extremely early. So a clear example, this is John 1:18, where Jesus is described as "ho monogenes huios," the unique God, over against the majority of manuscripts or say, "ho monogenes huios," the unique son, nor an only begotten son. So being a minority reading isn't necessarily bad if, if the minority of texts are super high quality manuscripts that are extremely early. Rather than what we have in the case, the comma, all of the manuscripts that contain the Comma Johanneum in the Greek tradition, and the Greek word, just original language of the New Testament, are extremely late. Many of them can be completely dismissed because they are produced after Erasmus's first edition of the Greek New Testament, after it's already being printed, because people continued to handwrite manuscripts. It's not like a Kinkos or a FedEx showed up at every corner the day after the printing press was invented. But as far as having great weight, none of these have great weight. There is no reason to believe any of them are copies of extremely early manuscripts or anything of the like. And in the majority of these manuscripts, no matter how you count them, the comma appears in the margin of the manuscript. It's not a part of the original manuscript itself. It's been written in by much later hands, sometimes as late as the 17th or 18th centuries. So obviously, those manuscripts are irrelevant. So we are talking about maybe at most, at absolute most, four to five manuscripts that actually have this as the text reading. One of which we know is written in 1520. We'll take a look at in a moment. None of them are earlier than the 15th century. So we are talking a massive minority reading, and it is massively late in its testimony. It is quite on, it's very accurate to say this is not a reading of the Greek manuscript tradition at all. As we will see, it is a reading of the later Latin manuscripts. For example, some of these manuscripts, some of the Greek manuscripts are diglots. There are on one page you have Latin, other page Greek, and it came in from the Latin. It simply isn't a Greek manuscript reading.
So I go back to Metzger. The passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight. And these contain the passage of what appears to be a translation from a late recension of the Latin Vulgate. For the eight manuscripts contain the passage, variant reading written in the margin as later edition. The manuscript, the eight manuscripts are as follows. We'll look at these a little bit later on. One of them he does mention is Codex 140a, which dates from around 1520. I'll show you that specific reading. So the passage is quoted, but not by none of the Greek fathers who, had they known it, would most certainly have employed it in the Trinitarian controversies. Sabellianism, and we'll talk a little bit more about that later on. Some arguments have been raised against that, which I think are very easily dealt with. Its first appearance in Greek is in a Greek version of the Latin Acts of the Lateran Council in 1215, 1200 years after the birth of Christ. The passage is absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions. This is extremely important. You must remember that the New Testament was translated into other languages early on in its transmission history. And while there is a limitation to the value of translations, for example, there are some, some languages we can't tell what the original Greek was if there's a variant there because the receptor language is not specific enough to be able to reflect differences in the Greek. For example, so there's certain, there's a limited value. But what foreign language translations are very valuable in is telling you about the original Greek that they're translating contained a verse or didn't. And all ancient versions, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Slavonic, except the Latin, do not contain this text. So all of those early. So, so when it is suggested, and there are people suggesting this, when it is suggested this was a widespread reading and it just simply hasn't come, scholars working in the field see no reason to believe that. See no reason to believe that because if it was in the Greek manuscript tradition, it would appear in at least some of these translations in some form. It does not. It is not found in the Old Latin, in the early form, Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, or in the Vulgate as issued by Jerome. Codex, well, Densest copy, drowned 541 to 546, and Codex Coislinianus, copied before 8716, as revised by Alcuin, and first hand of Codex from the ninth century. The earliest instance of the passage being quoted as a part of the actual text of the epistle is in a fourth-century Latin treatise entitled *Liber Apologeticus*, chapter 4, attributed either to the Spanish heretic Priscillian, who died about 325, or to his follower, Bishop Instantius. Apparently, the gloss arose. A gloss is an interpretation normally written in the in the margin. It's an interpretation. Apparently, the gloss arose when the original passage was understood to symbolize the Trinity, the original passage, "Spirit, blood, and water," through the mention of the three witnesses, "Spirit, the water, and the blood." An interpretation that may have been written first is a marginal note that afterwards found its way into the text. It wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened. John 5:4 would be another example. In the 5th century, the gloss was quoted by Latin Fathers in North Africa and Italy as part of the text, the Epistle. And from the 6th century onwards, it has found more and more frequently in the manuscripts of the Old Latin and of the Vulgate. In these various witnesses, the wording, the passage differs in several particulars. That is quite true. There are a number of variants between these. That's always a telltale sign of a later edition moving into the text.
Then, so under internal probabilities as regards transcriptional probability, if the passage were original, no good reason can be found to account for its omission, accidentally or intentionally, by copyists of hundreds of Greek manuscripts and by translators of the ancient versions. We will see that in seeking to overthrow this argument, the defenders of the Comma Johanneum are actually, and they don't do this intentionally, well, okay, the majority do not do it intentionally, but they actually end up embracing the same viewpoint as the most radical critics of the New Testament texts as to what scribes were attempting to do and what they're willing to do. They will really literally go so far as to say, "Well, they've just, this is just the Arians deleting stuff from the New Testament." Wow, they were really successful in doing so, weren't they? I mean, totally successful. I mean, successful on the level that Dan Brown would ever even think of. That's what, that's what's necessary for their, their theories to work. They don't realize that. They don't realize that they are utterly undercutting the reliability of the text of the New Testament with their arguments. Their traditions blind them to this. We're trying to point that out to them frequently. They respond with pure emotion when that's pointed out to them. But you do, you do what you can.
As regards intrinsic probability, the passage makes an awkward break in the sense for the story of how the spurious and blazing. There is, it is interesting to interpret what "spirit, water, and blood" means. But what it's not talking about specifically here is all of a sudden jumping into the doctrine of the Trinity. So while some people argue, "Well, it flows better." But the argument, the topic changed. The same thing with with the insertion of the Pericope Adulterae in John chapter 8. And so that is the commentary provided by by Metzger, which has been widely read for the vast majority of pastors and things like that. That's about as far as they want to get into it. And that's, that's gonna be the extent of it. We're gonna go a little bit more deeply into this because it is very important, I think. And though, again, I don't want to date this, we're doing a debate and a little over a week from now where this is one of the texts that has been presented by the man I'll be debating as evidence that the entirety of the Bible is unreliable. So it is an important thing to to examine.
So how do you know that we continue to possess what John wrote to us in his first epistle? Well, most Christians live and die without ever having knowledge of how many manuscripts do or do not contain 1 John. You've probably heard that we have almost 5,800 Greek portions of the New Testament. Very frequently, people are confused by that and they think that what that means is we have 5,800 manuscripts of Matthew through Revelation. That's not true. Many of those manuscripts, for example, are the earlier, they are the more partial, they are because the older they are. So all the papyri are partial. The papyri are the early manuscripts. The the earliest, earliest fragments we have of the New Testament are all written upon papyri. Vast majority of them were discovered time period of the 1930s, 1960s, which we're still, we're still cataloging new papyri. Just had a couple new papyri added to the list within the past year. But the vast majority were found during that particular time period, not found in the sense of dug up, but just happened to be located in libraries, mainly from the British having stolen them from other places in the world and dragged them back to England during the colonial period. The papyri are extremely important and have shed a tremendous amount of light on the history of the New Testament texts, especially when they are able to help us to look at the earliest major unsealed text, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, these, they're extremely, extremely important. And so we've talked on this program many times before about when you have P75, P or 75, a Gospels manuscript that lines up with Codex Vaticanus, they're both related somewhere up line to one another in their genealogy. When they both have the same reading, that's a reading that goes back very, very close to the origination of those gospel writings, within 30, 30 to 60 years. And there's no other work of antiquity that can even come close to this. All of this should, for a Christian, thrill our souls. We today can make arguments about the antiquity of the text of the New Testament that even men like Constantine von Tischendorf, only a century and a half ago, could wish to have been made, let alone going back to the Reformation or periods of time before that. So at the very time when we have the greatest attacks upon the New Testament, we also have the the greatest amount of information to us. And that's a great blessing from God. And that's one of the reasons we deal with this is because we want people to understand that information. It's not something that's normally talked about in churches. It should be, but it's not. And sadly, there are brothers and sisters in the Lord that for various reasons want us to avoid these things and to hold to traditional perspectives that are really indefensible apologetically speaking. So we want to deal with, with those things as well.
So when it comes to 1 John, we do not have 5,800 manuscripts of 1 John. Obviously, the Gospels are so that are the books we have the most of, then the Pauline epistles, and then, you know, the numbers go down from there. But we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 grand total. But obviously, when you look at, at any New Testament book, what you're gonna have is a small number back in the early, you know, centuries, and then the numbers could go up and up and up in the number of manuscripts you have as the centuries go by, just simply because the closer you get to now, the more likely something can survive that particular period of time. The Gospels were more popular, they're more widely distributed, and so you have a larger number of them. We do not have any papyri that are directly relevant to our subject of inquiry here in regards to 1 John chapter 5. As with most works, the earlier portions and mid portions of a book are more widely represented. Sometimes the beginning of a book and the end of a book are less widely represented. The reason for that is damage to the book. If the book existed as a single work, 1 John would almost never be existing as a single work. So that doesn't apply as much here. But we, we do not, we can't go back to it in this situation. We can't go back to like what we can in the Gospels and be looking at P66 or P75 or P45 and looking at very early manuscripts, papyri manuscripts of these, of these texts. And so as far as I know, these are the two earliest manuscripts that we have of this particular text. And so this would be the relevant portion from Codex Sinaiticus containing, you can see here, and and even if you can't read Greek, you can see this. What, what are we talking about? We're talking about the testimony. What does that term in Greek? Is martyr. And you can actually see right here, martyr. You can see the word martyr right there, martyr. Right here, the one testifying. And here's the, here's what's called an nomina sacra. That's a pi and an nu. So, pneuma, the spirit. That line over top is indicating this is an abbreviation for the word, the spirit. You can see the word three right here. Here's testifying again, down here. So, pretty clear. And it does not contain the Comma Johanneum. As I said, it's not till the 15th century till you will find any manuscript that does. But this is probably the earliest copy we have.
And then there's a second, a second version, another version of a second reading, and this is Codex Vaticanus. Now, Vaticanus is normally very clear and very easy to see and to to read and stuff like that. This, unfortunately, isn't this particular sheet. And this happens, you know, I don't know if it was because a monk spilled his early morning coffee hundreds of years ago. Just what it is. But this is not nearly as easy to see. But here you can see, martyr, right here, three, and martyr. And should note that up here, and I cut it off too tight on the screen grab, sorry about that. You'll see two dots. There's actually three dots. And three dots in the margin normally refers to a variant. Problem is, we don't know when that was added. We don't know when that was put there. Why? Well, you can sort of see it with this. But one of the major problems with Codex Vaticanus is that at some point in its history, fairly recent history, at least after the second half of its life, split that one, someone, maybe the ink that had originally been used was not as dark or not as long-lasting. But you can sort of, sort of see this for yourself. You look at it, some lines get a little thicker, and that's because somebody went back through and retraced with new ink the entirety of this manuscript. That must, and given this, the old New Testament, can you imagine taking a printed Bible and retracing every letter at that? I'm sort of thinking this was penance for some monk that had done something got himself into trouble personally. But can't prove that. Anyway, so the point is, especially when it comes to things like the dots and and things like that, we don't know when those were put there. Whether that was there originally. There's really no reason to believe that, though some people would suggest it. In all probability, that's a fairly, fairly modern addition. But these, we don't know which came first. We don't know whether it was Sinaiticus or Vaticanus. It was copied, copied first. They're both probably from around 350. They could be as early as 330. We just, we just don't know. There's no date on it. They could be some of the ones that were copied with imperial monies that Eusebius tells us about at the Council of Nicaea, where Constantine gave money to the church to copy Bibles. He didn't tell them what to copy. But because the Roman Empire, only twelve years earlier, had been burning and destroying scriptures, he gave money to the church to copy those scriptures. They could be from that. They could be from a couple of decades later. But this is probably the earliest manuscript evidence we have for that particular text. And it reads as the modern eclectic text. That is, it does not contain the Comma Johanneum.
So what we have is a reading that first begins to appear in Latin manuscripts of the seventh and eighth centuries, primarily. Now, there are some who argue that early church writers made reference to this text. For example, they will point us specifically to the words of Cyprian. And Cyprian is the great martyr Bishop of Carthage. He dies right at the beginning of the great Imperial Persecution. It's gonna last for about 60 years. It was that, it was the worst part of the persecution, and it ends in 313. And he was beheaded. And in a rather important book that we have made reference to numerous times before in our debates with Roman Catholics on the subject of the papacy, and that is *On the Unity of the Catholic Church*. And there seems to have been more than one version of this book put out, and probably by Cyprian, began probably because of his encounters with a rather imperious Roman bishop by the name of Stephen. But we don't have time to get into that today. He says these words: "The Lord says, I and the Father are one." And again, it is written of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.
Now, what we have with all of the texts that defenders of the comma have pointed to is, at best, an allusion, not an allusion to something, alluding to it. It is not a quotation. It is not a citation. And you would think that, especially on something this important, that if the comma existed in the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament in the primitive days, that this would be a well-known text and it would be quoted repeatedly by many people. For example, the first heresy that had to be dealt with in the church in regards to Christ was not Arianism. It was not the denial of the deity of Christ that you deal with at the Council of Nicaea. No, a hundred years before that, you're dealing with Sabellianism, modalism, Patripassianism, dynamic monarchianism. You're dealing with people who are denying the distinction of the persons and are basically saying that there is one God who acts like the Father, or acts like the Son, or acts like the Holy Spirit. The modern version of this is the the United Pentecostal Church International, though they have their own spin to it, which isn't necessarily identical to what you have in some of the early church situations. But especially the church in the East had to deal a lot with that particular problem. And in fact, some of the problems to the Council of Nicaea was that Eastern Christians were very uncomfortable with, some like the very term *homoousios*, of one substance. They're like the Patripassians, the the the Sabellians, they'll think we're saying what we've said was wrong. They'll think that we were agreeing with them. Now, that was one of the problems was how to affirm the full deity of the Son without at the same time giving a necessary ammunition to the heretics over on the other side who are saying, "Oh yeah, yeah, he's, he's God. In fact, there's only one person who's God, and Jesus is the Father," and so on and so forth. So when you keep that in mind, then you realize that this text in the second century, if it had been available to the Patripassians, to the Sabellians, everything would have talked about it because they would have been using it constantly. "See, Father, no, Spirit, they're one. They're one. They're one." And there would have had to be constant explanations of what the nature of that one was. Just as we have to have constant conversations of the text in John 14, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father." "I and the Father were one," John chapter 10. What is, well, "We are one" (plural). It's not saying we are one person. We have to talk about that all the time. Not a word. Not a knot. And people say, "Well, this is all our silent, our arguments of silence." Remember, if you're going to assert that this is an original part of the New Testament that was lost from its original language component, the Greek manuscript tradition, and had to be restored from a later version of one foreign language translation, not all the other translations, it would be one thing if it was gone from the Greek. But it's found all the early translations. No, it's not found in any of the early translations. It's only found in the later versions of the Latin manuscripts. If you're going to argue that, then the weight is upon your shoulders to establish its originality. And since you have no evidence of it in the early period, then this isn't an argument from silence. This is a confirmation of what the manuscript tradition actually says. The manuscript tradition says it wasn't there. And the patristic sources say it wasn't there because if it had been there, then it would have been in this conversation, this conversation, that conversation. But they say, "Oh, but, but there are allusions to it." Well, any discussion of the Trinity as a whole is going to have the language of three and one. Any discussion of the Trinity has Father, Son, Spirit, and one. So without specificity, saying as John said in his first epistle quotation, then all you, none of these can be demonstrated as having any meaningful validity at all.
And it's interesting. I will try to blow this up so that it's so as visible. One of the nice things about the UBS fifth edition, and I hope someday I'll have something called the ECM in in accordance when it's finally available, is they give much more attention to patristic citations. And so down here at the bottom of the page here, here's the the text along with the comma. And then you have references. So for example, 61 here is Codex Montfortianus, we're gonna look at that in a second. And end of the variants and stuff. And then once you get past those small number of manuscripts and giving the Latin here, you have some names. You have Cyprian, Pseudo-Cyprian, Brazilian, Speculum, Varro, Madame, Pseudo-Virgilius, and Fulgentius. But you will notice that Cyprian is listed, but has parentheses around them. That is the editors' way of saying, "Maybe, maybe not." It is certainly not certain that he did this. And so you only end up with non-parenthesis names when you get to the period of time where it's very clear that this had now become a part of the of some of the Latin manuscripts around the time of Fulgentius. So you get into that, that time period later on. But when we talk about Augustine, or Tertullian, or Cyprian, Rome, for example, some of the defenders will say, "Well, there is this introduction to some of the letters in in Jerome that makes mention of it." Except the text doesn't have it. So the vast majority, again, of people who don't have an axe to grind on this subject, recognize that that introduction was added at a later period of time. That it's far more likely that the introduction is added at a later period of time by somebody else than it was that the text itself was changed. One of the things you got to keep in mind is that the defenders of the comma are more than willing to say that there have been, there has been massive editing of the text of the New Testament at this point by heretics, and they were successful. They were successful. So if we've determined the heretics only by the use of one translation in later versions, how many places have we missed? How many places have we missed? Now, they would have a theological response to that. They would not have a historical response to that. In reality, I would suggest if you're going to defend this, you should simply say, "I believe this as a pure matter of faith. I do not make a historical argument whatsoever." Because the, once you start getting into the historical argument, you end up utterly undercutting the reliability of the text of the New Testament. You don't intend to, but that's exactly what you do. And we're gonna give an example of it later on.
So during the Arian controversy, this would have been a key text. Doesn't come up. Sabellianism, key text. Doesn't come up. It's simply not a part of the patristic material. There are allusions to the oneness of three persons, but that doesn't mean they're quoting from 1 John 5:7. If they had wanted to quote from it, they could have very clearly. If it was a part of their manuscripts' traditions, they didn't. So the, the scholar who wants to look at the material, the scholar who, and this is why I've said many times, that holding to the comma destroys all apologetic method. All. When I am critiquing the harmonized revision of the Quran, I have to be as fair and accurate as I can be. I actually have to try to be unbiased in my analysis of the data for my criticism to carry appropriate weight. I cannot use unequal scales. I'm constantly criticizing my Muslim debate opponents in using unequal scales. They will use one standard for the New Testament, a different standard for the Quran. I'm not going to do that. They may continue to do that. And you might say, "It puts you at a disadvantage." Not in God's eyes, it doesn't. But we have to use equal scales. And when we use even scales, then we sit back and we go, "Okay, here is a reading unknown in the Greek manuscript tradition until the 1400s. It's not a part of any of the early translations of the New Testament. It comes into the Latin at a later period of time, only slowly moving to a position of predominance in the later editions of the Latin Vulgate. It is, it is fairly clear it was, what it is clear it was not a part of Jerome's original translation of the Vulgate. Of course, the Vulgate by the time of the Reformation was a different thing."
So upon what basis then, it anybody, anybody who holds to, well, there are different schools of textual critical methodology. The vast majority of Christian scholars, say believing Christian scholars, believe in what's called eclectic texts. There's continues to be arguments about how you weigh external evidence versus internal evidence and things like that. Today, there's some, I've talked about in the program in the past, we don't have time to go into it today, called CBGM, Coherent Base Genealogical Method. CBGM has, you know, doesn't give any place whatsoever to the Comma Johanneum. It can't. They're starting off manuscripts. It's not even really a part of the manuscript tradition to even look at it. So it can't even enter into the analysis that we do with serious textual variants. This is, this is not in the, in the, in the understanding of the vast majority of textual critical scholars, this is not a serious textual variant. It has no probability of being original. And so it doesn't get discussed all that much on that side of things. For people holding that perspective, the late dates of the few manuscripts, all the early translations, early church fathers, not a chance. It is a one, it is one of the, it is the clearest example of a text that pollutes the New Testament from outside because it becomes popular in common use. It is one of the best examples of why we need textual critical analysis and that we have to determine what it is. Do we want, do we want to know what John wrote? Or do we get to determine what John wrote? We want John to write what we want. I mean, it'd be very convenient to have 1 John 5:7. But John didn't write 1 John 5:7. So if you love the truth, you don't love that which is not true.
So then you have other folks. And I see what's interesting is there are certain people, I'm not gonna name names, but there are certain people. There's one particular gentleman I can think of who simply, if I said the sky was blue, he'd find a way to argue about it and write a lengthy article about it. But actually, there are lots of people like that. Sadly, though, on one hand, I'm sort of glad I give them a reason for living, getting up each morning. But other than that. But there are people who would hold what would be called a majority text platform. And from their perspective, the majority of the manuscripts determine what the proper reading is to be. Now, it's interesting, a lot of people who will defend the comma will use majority arguments up to a point. They never should. If you ever defend the comma as original, then you have to reject majority argumentation because you know there's the Hodge, as far as data text, according to according to the majority text, it does not contain the Comma Johanneum. Anyone who holds the majority text theory, anyone who holds the idea that the scribes purified the text over time, and I know I'm thinking one person locally here who recently said, "That's exactly what the scribes did." And will be looking at a video you did. Defame the comma. It's incoherent. It's a complete contradiction. If you're a majority text advocate, you do not believe the Comma Johanneum because it's not a majority reading by any stretch of the imagination. Even if you count the late, late, late, late, late manuscripts, it's found in still 99% of all the manuscripts. So 1 John doesn't contain it. Now, you might say, "Well, but they allow them to contain 1 John 5." So they might have contained it. But you can't assume that. See, that's, that's one of the problems here. The weight of the assertion lies upon you. You cannot assume they were a part of manuscripts that do not contain 1 John 5 because you have no evidence of it. You have no foreign language translations of. You don't have any basis for asserting that. You're making an assertion that has no evidence behind it whatsoever. So it's not a majority text reading. And those people who hold to the Byzantine priority position, like the Robinson-Pierpont text, doesn't have the Comma Johanneum. It's not a Byzantine reading either. The Byzantine manuscript tradition does not contain the Comma Johanneum. So the only people who have it are Textus Receptus only advocates, or King James only. And then when you transfer King James only-ism into whatever language that you want to send it off into, these are the only people who are going to be defending the Comma Johanneum.
Now, this is, this is a point of tremendous inconsistency that I need to communicate to you. If you hear anyone utilizing arguments about the antiquity of the Byzantine text, or the the idea, what could a set of scribes correcting things over time that gives us the Byzantine text, if the Pickering model of using numbers to say, "Well, you know, the the early, the earliest readings going to become the predominant readings over time," etcetera, etcetera. Anybody using that kind of argumentation who defends the comma is defying the comma at the cost of everything they said before. They are contradicting themselves. It's an incoherent argument. It's not a Byzantine reading. It's not a majority reading. So if they ever use either the majority or Byzantine priority argumentation for anything else in the New Testament, they then have to abandon that and contradict that for this one verse. And here's something I'm just gonna put it back out there because it is simple truth, and those who deny it cannot refute it. In fact, they just ignore that it exists. If you hold to a text, and you cannot present a consistent methodology of examining the manuscripts that gives you that text, you are not engaging in truthful scholarship, and you're not engaging in truthful, honest study. Your position is self-refuting, incoherent, and in error. You can sugarcoat that and cover that over with a thick layer of wonderful theological frosting if you want, but it will not change the fact that if you hold to a position where you have to use one set of arguments for this verse and then a completely opposite set of arguments that refute these arguments for this verse to hold your text together, you are a traditionalist, and you're only playing with history. Please stop doing that. It's incoherent, and something that is incoherent is untruthful. It is not marked by a desire for consistency and coherence. The arguments that we make for any particular text need to be coherent. They need to go to a consistent set of principles. And no one who argues for the comma does that. They can't. It's not possible. Because if they are an advocate of the Textus Receptus, then the arguments they're going to use for the comma are going to be different. The arguments they use for Revelation 16:5, which would be different, for the text in Ephesians 2, Luke 2:22. There, they're going to utilize different argumentation for each variant, not because the context requires it, but because there is no coherence in their methodology. They have a text that arose from differing sources, very few sources, in the midst of political issues, political in the sense of Rome was a political power at that time, and hence is inconsistent with itself in certain places. And so the people who are Byzantine priority people, the people who are majority people, they'll sit back, any honest one will sit back, and they'll say two things. They'll say, "The Textus Receptus needs revision, and the Comma Johanneum is not original." Now, they may say this. They may like this better than they like this. But what they will say, if they were honest, and they will not argue this, and they will confirm this as much as it bothers them to no end to have to agree with me on this point, they will agree with me: "The Textus Receptus contains errors and must be revised, and the Comma Johanneum is not original." That's what they'll say. Like I said, it just may give them hives to have to agree with me about something, but they, but they will say it if they have the convictions to do so.
So there's, there's the information. Let me, let me show you. Let me show you one of the, here are some of these later manuscripts where you have the Comma Johanneum in the actual text. So you've got Codex Usserianus, from the 14th, 15th century. However, notice it is a Greek-Latin diglot. The Greek has been taken from the Latin text, and we know that the, the comma arose from the Latin. Skip Codex 140a for a moment. You have 918, 110, Codex Regius, and 2318. Notice the dates, 16th and 18th century. So Codex Regius is is written after you have the printed editions of the Greek New Testament where this is already being thought about to begin with. But number 61, Codex Monfortianus, I'd like to show you what that reads. And here is, that's a picture of me and Doug McMasters and a friend of ours. We are in the reading room at the Trinity Library in Dublin, Ireland. And the manuscript laying before us is Codex Monfortianus. And here's what Codex Monfortianus says. You will notice that it is not actually identical in its reading to what you have in the TR, but it's close enough. But here you have the comma. And most scholars are convinced enough that we can put an exact date on this manuscript, 1520. It is relevant to the dispute that has been had regarding why it is that Erasmus in his first two editions did not have the comma. He does in the third. Well, he was attacked. Well, he was attacked for a lot of things. He clearly initially thought he would be attacked for his messing with the Latin Vulgate texts. He fully expected that. But the Greek was not his focus at all when he first, that's why it was done rather haphazardly initially, and continued to be haphazard even after that, as we've discovered only recently as to why that was as well, especially in certain parts of the New Testament. But this manuscript, the argument that was made is that in response to his critics, Erasmus said, "I've never seen a manuscript that contained this." Now, what that's turned into over time is, he made a wager or a challenge, "Show me a manuscript." Well, if you say, "I've never seen one," there is an implicit challenge, "Well, show me one." But it's not exactly the same thing. But if you've got someone who's attacking you, they're going to interpret you in those ways. And so it is quite possible that this specific
The manuscript was produced, and these words put there specifically to say, "Well, here's one. You said you hadn't seen one before. What are you gonna do now?" He inserts it in the third edition, includes a long note in his annotations indicating he does not believe it's original. That may be why some people actually allege that Erasmus was non-Trinitarian. I don't, I don't think so. He was attacked for all sorts of stuff, and back then, one of the most effective ways of attacking somebody, similar to our political [climate] today, but back then, was to question their Trinitarian bona fides. Ask a guy forty years later by the name of Sir Vedas how that goes. And so, I'm really hesitant to give much weight to those criticisms of Erasmus, but might have had something to do with this. But here's Codex 140 honest, and there's your comma.
Now, here's, here's the question: Is that how you want the text of your New Testament determined, based upon events such as that? That really, really, really is a question that I think any person needs to needs to consider. So, we'll take that down, and I think in listening to this video, we will be able to pick up any of the other particular aspects of the issue that we need to address. But there you have the background information material, maybe more information than you ever wanted, but it's important to have it.
And so, I want to look at Taylor de Soto's video that was put out just a few days ago. It's 23 minutes long, and so if I started to do that right now, I assume it takes about three minutes for me to respond to each minute. So, we'd have another hour and a half of the program to go, and we generally don't go that long. Most people don't like to listen to something that long. So, in the last six minutes, he gave what he called a positive case for the Comma Johanneum. What he did in the preceding part was to respond to what he considers to be the arguments against the Comma. I don't think those were really the arguments. Totally one part we did deal with, and that is the fact that this text is not found in the patristic argumentation. He also spent a lot of time on the argument that the papyri somehow has something to do with this. I don't know anybody who's made that argument. I've never seen it in print, but maybe he ran into somebody on the web or something that did. I don't know. They didn't seem to be the best arguments, at least they really didn't deal with what we've presented, let's put that way. That aside, the last six minutes are the positive presentation. So, it's five minutes, we can probably get done and still keep this to an hour and a half. So, I want to respond to these things. I think it's, I think it's important to do so. So, let's present a positive case for the Comma Johanneum.
The Comma Johanneum is indeed the most difficult passage to defend, especially against those who deny the authenticity of non-Alexandrian readings. Okay, I'm gonna be stopping and starting. It has nothing to do with Alexandrian readings because this isn't a Byzantine reading, this isn't a Western reading, this isn't a Caesarean reading. Just let people know, outside of Byzantine, those categories I think are going to be going the way of the dodo bird in not too distant future. I know what terminologies are going to be taking its place, but over the next twenty years, those, those terms are going to be passing away due to the application of CBGM. But be that as it may, it has nothing to do with Alexandrian readings because this isn't, this is not a Byzantine reading against an Alexandrian reading. It is a Greek manuscript reading versus a late Latin manuscript reading. And yeah, that is indefensible. It is, it does require a radical, radical reorientation of the entirety of New Testament text criticism to take a late Latin reading and demand its insertion into the Greek manuscript tradition by basically saying it was there originally. That's the level of corruption that, there's, that level of corruption. The vast majority of scholars, including unbelieving scholars working in their New Testament, do not have that low a view of the scribes in the transmission of the text. That's how radical it is.
I've said before, if you, if you go full Comma today, knowing what we know today, and they'll talk about, "Well, Calvin liked it fine." Calvin did not have one-fifth of the information that we have today. Trying to drag those people into this conversation is, it's bogus. It would never survive in a, in a debate. It's, it's irrelevant. They did not have the information we have today. Believe that. Aside the fact of the matter is, you're presenting a perspective that would require a massive level of corruption of the New Testament to actually be relevant, which is not the foundation, which is the exact opposite. The perspective of Byzantine priority was the exact opposite of the perspective of majority text, and it's the exact opposite of the perspective that this gentleman presented himself. Actually, that is co-pastor presented in the pulpit and pen article that I probably should have mentioned because we want to make this a free-standing thing. But in a, there was a recent article that talked about how the scribes were used in the process by God of purifying the text. Well, if you, if you go for Comma, you can't believe that. So maybe they disagree on this, I don't know. But you can't hold both of them at the same time. It can't be done.
In this presentation, I will examine the Greek support for the passage, the commentary by various theologians, and the internal evidence of the disputed passage. Greek support: The Comma Johanneum is supported by 11 Greek manuscripts, six of which were corrected by a second hand to add the verse. Okay, so that's a little bit higher than I've seen. But the, the point is, over half of them, it is a later, sometimes even an 18th-century hand, written in the margin. Textually irrelevant. Textually irrelevant. It just needs to be, needs to be said. As discussed earlier, there are zero extant papyri manuscripts containing 1 John 5. And of the near 6,000 extant manuscripts we do have, just under 500 contain any part of 1 John at all. Okay, now keep in mind, even though he's not gonna mention this, none of those that contain 1 John for the first 1,400 years of church history contained this reading. Positively, he's gonna argue, "Well, they only contained primarily the first part of the book." Maybe, maybe they contained it again. Notice the difference between doing textual criticism where you actually have to bring forth evidence of something, and the defense of a traditional text. We can go, "Well, it might have been this, it might have been that." We don't know. Could have been. Don't know. That's why I say, "We don't know." "I don't know" is not an apologetic methodology either, and is fundamentally destructive of an apologetic methodology.
It is important to note that though the majority of these extant witnesses do not contain the disputed verse, the majority of these extant manuscripts also exclude all of the verses past chapter two of the Epistle. So, it's slightly misleading to say that most of the manuscripts exclude this passage. Okay, so again, this is not textual criticism, this is theologizing, this is traditionalism, but it's not text criticism. The assertion is being made, it's a positive assertion that goes against all the ancient documentation. Therefore, it requires positive evidence. You can't just simply go, "It might have been." You, that this is, this, if you find that to be compelling, then one of two things is true: either you've already made up your mind and you want to be TR only or something like that, or you've never done textual criticism before. You've never looked at any other variant. You've never, you've never tried to defend. You know, through the years, we have looked at numerous passages here on the program and defended New Testament readings from criticisms from Muslims or atheists or others. You have to have a consistent historical basis. Going, "Might have been there" is not enough. That is destructive to apologetics. That's why we're addressing this and will continue to address this. It's vitally important.
This does not mean that there were only ever 11 manuscripts throughout the history of the New Testament copying that contained the passage. It simply means that 11 have survived. So, what's the assumption? Well, there, there may have been more. Could have been more. There could have been thousands more, but it just so happens that the ones that have come down to us don't contain it. But there, there may have been lots of others. Again, notice, notice the actual reasoning here. You're starting with your conclusion and then you're trying to backfill from there. This would not survive meaningful cross-examination. It would not survive in a textual critical classroom, at least I hope it wouldn't. This is reasoning backwards. Sounds good to someone who doesn't do textual criticism, doesn't actually take this out there and and defend it. It sounds, it sounds good, but once you stop and go, "You're sort of assuming your conclusion, aren't you?" "Yeah, that's exactly right. You are."
This is perfectly reasonable. As hand copying of manuscripts was largely discontinued after the printing press, and I did find that somewhat humorous for one reason. Where are the majority of manuscripts that actually contain the Comma? They're written out to the printing press. They're inserted probably from a printed text, which, which means that that 11 number is actually, like, four meaningful. Those are the ones we looked at before where it's actually a part of the text and not written in the margin and not written in a hand from two, three hundred years down the road. Per is prone to disruption by just about everything. In the last 200 years, the theory that the oldest surviving manuscripts were the best without question has held its place as the chief principle of textual criticism. Now, it's never been the chief principle. It is an important principle because of a simple reality, and that is a manuscript written in 200 has to have fewer generations of copying between the original and it than the same type of manuscript written in the year 1200. So, it is highly improbable that a manuscript written in 1200 is a copy of a manuscript that was written in the year 200. We have a couple that are 1881, 1739, come to mind as 9th and 10th-century minuscules that we can tell were copying 3rd or 4th-century texts, maybe even 2nd-century texts, but they are the rarity, they are the exception, not the rule. So, yes, it is pretty obvious to most people that a copy of the Gospel of John, such as P75, which is written around the year 200 by a very careful scribe who wrote one letter at a time, that has further evidence of the antiquity of its readings in Codex Vaticanus from a separate line that greatly enhances its value, is to be given more weight than a 12th-century minuscule manuscript. Yes, that is logical. That is pre-eminently logical. I, I don't know how someone can not see that. And if you can't, then you have to ask yourself the question, why? What's what's standing in your way?
The restructuring of these principles has inserted doubt into the theory, and it may be wise to surrender the argument on the available data. These late manuscripts that contain the Comma could have easily been copied from a manuscript of great quality and antiquity. Again, a necessary assumption provided without evidence. Show it to my knowledge, and again, we only have four manuscripts, the ones in the column, that's irrelevant, that's irrelevant. To my knowledge, there is nothing found in any manuscript. It's a throwaway. It's not textually relevant. I've never seen anyone go, "Wow, 140 Honest has all these amazing early Byzantine readings and all that." I'm not seeing anyone make an argument that any of those manuscripts have any claim whatsoever to the kind of weight that's been given to 1881 and 1739. And without the provision of evidence of that, then what you have here is wishful thinking, not solid argumentation. Just whittling it. "They may have been, could have been, who knows?" Well, if, again, you're the one making the argument, you have to provide solid foundation for that. I've given you two manuscripts, 1881, 1739. There are numerous scholarly articles that analyze these manuscripts and demonstrate that they were copying early exemplars. And we can tell why? Because they differ from their contemporaries. Where do these manuscripts differ from their contemporaries, other than the Comma? I mean, 140 Honest is an entire, entire manuscript. It's not just 1 John, but its readings are all common. Around 1520. Around 1520, that's where it came from. It's not the copy of some ancient manuscript. There's no evidence for it.
There is plenty of evidence, by the way, of theologians throughout the ages that testify these great number of manuscripts contain that great a great number of manuscripts contain this passage. Okay, now let's stop right there. Theologians. Well, we can have great respect for theologians, but I know a number of theologians that, that to be honest with you, if you, if you opened up, if you open up this up to many of the theologians I know and ask them to interpret the notes above the page, they'd have no idea what they're looking at. It's just not something they do. And until you have this level of information available to you, you know, we look at Jerome, and man, Jerome is a goldmine of information about manuscripts in one particular area at one particular time, but he only, only had access to that particular area. And he was probably the most important person at that time. Origen was so weird, who knows, but he's important too. But the point is, you couldn't call up your friend a thousand miles away and ask for a fax. "Hey, could you do a screen capture of that for me? PDF that for me?" Couldn't do it. So, any commentary up until the modern period about the manuscript tradition as a whole is extremely fragmentary, extremely fragmentary. So, the, the idea that because someone was a great theologian, they somehow knew what all the manuscripts across Europe meant or contained, nobody did. No one had that information. So, any statement about how many manuscripts or how widely distributed like that up until at least the last century, and really the middle of the last century, are just simply wild guesses. There, there's, there's nothing more to be given to them than that. I mean, that's just, that's just recognizing the limitations of what had yet been done in the creation of a critical text.
End point. I have already demonstrated that Calvin, and in other presentations, Turretin and John Owen agreed to this. Francis Chan of St. John's College, Oxford, said this in the 17th century: "Quote, these words in 1 John 5:7 are to be found in copies of great antiquity and best credit." End quote. Now, it's interesting, "great antiquity." Back to when? Which one? What did he have access to? Which manuscripts do you have access to? They don't know. They can't say. But they want to say, "Well, he must have stuff that we don't have now, and he must have known that it was greatly, it was from antiquity." How did he date them? Paleography is a rather modern invention. It requires access to a large number of manuscripts. It's been greatly enhanced by our discovery of the papyri, for example. So, how does he know? There are a lot of people. Erasmus was known to refer to manuscripts in antiquity that were from like the 1200s. That's not antiquity, at least not from our perspective. So, you get one guy someplace with no manuscript evidence, and that's supposed to be a sufficient grounds for the insertion of a reading into Holy Scripture. Think about that, folks. Think about what the foundation of this really is. What's really being said?
Further, in Codex Vaticanus, there are three dots left by the scribe at 1 John 5:6-8 that indicate the scribe knew of a textual variant. This is available publicly on the internet for all to see. Go and look at the manuscript. That means that this text was disputed as early as the 4th century, which is coincidentally when many other passages were being omitted from specifically Alexandrian manuscripts. Ah, now, two things. We showed that earlier on. I mentioned we don't know what the dating of these dots is because of the nature of Vaticanus and the fact that it was overwritten and things like that. But let's say they, it was then. That means Vaticanus is as old as we've always said that it was. But B, what would I hope you caught what was just being said? All these texts were being deleted from the Alexandrian manuscripts. Now, they have to believe that if, because the Textus Receptus is at least 1% longer than the corresponding, what would in the past we called Alexandrian version of the of the same thing. And so, from their perspective, people were successfully deleting material. Well, not successfully, because they end up being in the Byzantine manuscripts, but this is the exception. So, the idea being that somehow, somehow, well, man, I, I need to, I need to repent because Dan Brown got it right. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, got it right. Here's Taylor de Soto telling us that Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, got it right. That somehow at that time period, 'cause that's the same time as Constantine, the whole, the whole thing for Dan Brown was that Constantine gathered up the manuscripts and made changes and did it so well that we'd never found out about it. I've always said that was absolute fiction. That it was absurd. Well, it is fiction, and it is absurd. And the idea that this text was in manuscripts and then deleted from those manuscripts, successfully from the entire Greek manuscript edition, that not a single one of all those manuscripts had one copy that managed to make it down through through history, is absurd.
But folks, you need to see the radical nature. These guys don't look radical, they sound as conservative as can be. But you need to understand that when you apply the principles outside of the Comma, they are defending it. It results in the radical deconstruction of the entire foundation of the New Testament itself. Because they don't use these, this argumentation anywhere. These are complete. The defense of Revelation 16:5, different set of Revelation 14:1 features, three sets, etc. They used all sorts of different arguments. They're never consistent themselves. They can't be. But this argument means that we have zero confidence, outside of restoring texts from foreign language translations, that the Greek manuscript tradition actually represents what was written by John or Paul or Peter. In videos that you heard, you heard it. If anything, the exclusion of the passage from the manuscript tradition is evidence that the passage was contested early on in the transmission process, not that it was absent to begin with. So, you begin with yours, with your conclusion, and now you're saying, "Well, the fact that it's not there shows that it was disputed." See, there's no reasoning with this. You've, you've started with your conclusion, and then whatever evidence you encounter, you then fit it into what your conclusion requires it to be. So, if we don't find manuscripts, if we don't find it in Vaticanus, we don't find it in Sinaiticus, that means that it was disputed, and that there was a reason for its being excluded, and that means it was there originally. Which can be done with any text, any text whatsoever. There are some quotes from Clement of Alexandria. We have no idea what Clement of Alexandria is talking about when he actually sounds like he's quoting from scripture. What if you're dealing with someone who grabs hold of some of his stuff and says this was original too, and it has just as much evidence as the Comma Johanneum? These guys got no response. I do. I do. Because of coherence, consistency, I have called into question and demonstrated the lack of integrity of those manuscripts formerly belonging to the Alexandrian family on my channel before. So, it should not be surprising that they would contain such an omission. And all the Byzantine manuscripts, and all the Western manuscripts, all Greek manuscripts, all Greek manuscripts. The Alexandrian has nothing to do with this. It's all the Greek manuscripts. In fact, it is far, it is obvious that the four Greek manuscripts that contain it in the text do so because of Latin contamination. One of them's a polyglot, it's got the Latin right there. That's where it came from. It's, it's obvious that's where it came from, is from the Latin. In every single one of them, due to the predominance of the Latin Vulgate in the West, there is no evidence of an antiquity in the manuscript to this reading at all in any family.
But you, you'll notice the assumptions that are constantly put into what is a supposed to be a positive presentation. Let's look at internal support though. Many modern commentaries dismiss the disputed verse as being incoherent. Theologians for centuries have found the passage fits most comfortably at verse 7. Remember Calvin, who said, "Quote, since, however, the passage flows better when this clause is added, and as I see that it is found in the best and most approved copies, I'm inclined to receive it as the true reading." End quote. And Calvin was wrong about that. He was not only wrong about it flowing, but he was wrong about the copies. And living at the time he was living at, given the amount of information he had, even if he had the 1550 Stephanus, there are places where Stephanus wasn't exactly spot-on. So, there's, there's no, the introduction of the doctrine of the Trinity at this point when you're talking about the Spirit, the water, and the blood, which are probably references to the humanity of Christ, to the nature of Christ. That point, I mean, I'm not saying that it, that we can't find it some place. You know, I can't find it some. It's just the idea, the idea of defending a reading that has no basis before the 14th or 15th centuries on the basis of is incredibly weak, incredibly weak. Call the new Greek better than I would say any scholar alive today. I would not say that. All in Calvin never said it. I think that's ridiculous. He certainly knew Latin very well, but prematurely did. But I see absolutely no reason for all the respect that I have and how many hours I've spent defending John Calvin, even to the point of defending his pastoral ministry and things like that, I would never ever say what was just said there.
The verse indeed seems to be required to fit the flow of the passage, not only is it parallel to "to quote these three bear witness on earth," which is a common pattern for the Apostle. There are some tactical ramifications if the passage is not authentic. R.L. Dabney notes that "article" in verse 8 has no antecedent without verse 7. As you would expect, and anyone who has taught Greek and taught through 1 John knows that trying to demand that John utilize that level of provision of clear antecedents is absurd. The whole argument about 1 John 5:20, there are just so many places where the antecedent is not expressed or is allowed to remain ambiguous in John that it's, it's again, an extremely weak argument. More structure of the sentence. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nazianzus comments that the passage is confused in its grammar without the first phrase, which we now know is 7:4. In that, after using three masculine-gendered words, he follows with three neuter words, which is "contrary to the definitions and laws which you, which you have in your grammarians have laid down." End quote. This, which could then be charged against John in other places, and Paul in other places as well. Again, this kind of, "Well, it just to be so much smoother if it was there. Let's not worry about the manuscripts." Argumentation. There you go. If fourth-century Bishop Dabney agrees with Gregory's analysis, given the parallel structure common to John and the strange grammar construction without verse 7, it seems unlikely that the passage was originally penned from verse 6 to 8, omitting verse 7.
Conclusion: The Comma Johanneum has been one of the most widely contested passages in the history of the text. Okay, there was the entire positive presentation. That was all of it. I played it, and what it was was, "We're going to assume it was there and then try to get around the evidence that it wasn't." That's all it was. And if I can demonstrate that, then atheists and skeptics and Muslims can do the exact same thing. And to be honest with you, should do the exact same thing. So, I, well, let's just finish it up. Shouldn't the New Testament, alongside with the ending of Mark and the / chapter today? Given that many of the claims regarding the phrase can be demonstrated to be false, it should be considered way more carefully than it is currently. It is important to note that throughout the transmission of the text of the New Testament, heresies and theological controversies have indeed resulted in contest and debate over which passages truly belong in the scripture. And in some cases, those scriptures being removed. Did you catch that? Been removed. By whom? How? When? And where? And are you seriously saying, 'cause it's the only way to understand the position, that in this instance, they succeeded? They succeeded. I mean, that is a radical position of skepticism for the New Testament. Radical, which would then require the radical theological reestablishment of the text, which is really what you have fundamentally. If you're gonna say this, and this alone, doesn't matter what the manuscripts say, all the rest of that stuff, I think you should just be straight up front and say, "God inspired this. This is our standard. It was done in 1633." If you wanted really, this, go with Trinitarian Bible Society. Was it? Was done? Was an 1880s period? And that's it. And, and, and stop saying that you're making a historical argument because you're not making a historical argument. You're saying it was corrupted, was lost, it's been found, it's been restored, and here's how, and here's that worked out. That would be, that would be the way I think to to go.
Well, I noticed in the time that it would be a convenient point to wrap this up and keep it right where it needs to be. Hopefully, this has been useful to you in navigating sometimes some confusing stuff that is to be found out there. It's also hopefully been a mechanism whereby you can understand that this field of study is vitally important. There are certain rules that are in accordance with truth. You cannot simply assume your conclusion and then try to make the facts fit it. You need to be consistent in your application of standards. That's true when it comes to this area. It's true when it comes to exegesis and theology and everything else along along the lines. So, hopefully, it's been helpful to you. I certainly would rather have been talking about some theological other theological things today, but hey, all that stuff is dependent upon having a text that has not been radically corrupted. And thankfully, ours hasn't been. And this is a part of the defense of doing that. So, next time, maybe we can talk about some theological things. Please. Wow. I was gonna say, pray for us. We've got a lot coming up, but I, again, we'll talk about that when we get a chance to get together again. Thanks for listening to the program today. We'll see you next time. God bless.
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