A little tale of scholarly intrigue

 My favorite story about Erasmus’s editions of the New Testament involves a passage called the Comma Johanneum. It’s a couple of verses in the first letter of St. John that are important in the Trinitarian doctrines of the Roman church.

Here’s the King James Version of I John 5:7-8:

… the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in the earth.

It’s in the Vulgate, the Latin Bible. But Erasmus left it out of his first (1516) and second (1519) editions of the New Testament because he couldn’t find a single Greek manuscript that supported it.

That’s strong evidence. We have relatively few copies of famous works of Ancient Greek writers such as Plato and Aristotle. Sometimes, what we have of a Greek author is based on a single manuscript. But scribes in monasteries made copies of the New Testament relentlessly. We have thousands. The fact that Erasmus couldn’t find a Greek manuscript that contained the famous formula is beyond suggestive.

Erasmus endured withering criticism from the traditionalists.

Stung, he famously promised that he would include the disputed passage in his next edition off the New Testament if anyone could produce a single Greek manuscript that included the passage.

It’s not certain, but the evidence suggests that a Franciscan friar named Froy or Roy translated the Latin from the Vulgate, making a Greek manuscript to order in 1520 — four years after Erasmus’s first edition.

Erasmus kept his word. He included the disputed passage in his third edition, published in 1522. But he added a footnote saying he thought something was fishy.

• Source: Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament; Oxford University Press, 1975, pp. 101-2.