NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 733 



tant articles to the discussion from about 1S80 to 1890, about two 

 to one reject the Johannine authorship of the Gospel in its present 

 shape ; that is to say, while forty years ago great scholars were 

 four to one in favor of, they are now tw o to one against, the claim 

 that the apostle John wrote this gospel as we have it. Again, 

 one half of those on the conservative side to-day scholars like 

 Weiss, Beyschlag, Sanday, and Reynolds admit the existence of 

 a dogmatic intent and an ideal element in this Gospel, so that 

 we do not have Jesus's thought in his exact words, but only in 

 substance." * 



In 1881 came an event of great importance as regards the de- 

 velopment of a more frank and open dealing with scriptural 

 criticism. In that year appeared the Revised Version of the New 

 Testament. It was exceedingly cautious and conservative ; but 

 it had the vast merit of being absolutely conscientious. One 

 thing showed, in a striking way, ethical progress in theological 

 methods. Although all but one of the English revisers repre- 

 sented Trinitarian bodies, they rejected the two great proof texts 

 which had so long been accounted essential bulwarks of Trinita- 

 rian doctrine. Thus disappeared at last from the Epistle of St. 

 John the text of the Three Witnesses, which had for centuries 

 held its place in spite of its absence from all the earlier important 

 manuscripts, and of its rejection in later times by Erasmus, 

 Luther, Isaac Newton, Porson, and a long line of the greatest bib- 

 lical scholars. And with this was thrown out the other like unto 

 it in spurious origin and zealous intent, that interpolation of the 

 word " God " in the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of the 

 First Epistle to Timothy which had for ages served as a war- 

 rant for condemning some of the noblest of Christians, even 

 such men as Newton and Milton and Locke and Priestley and 

 Channing. 



Indeed, so honest were the revisers that they substituted the 

 correct reading of Luke, ii, 33, in place of the time-honored cor- 

 ruption in the King James version which had been thought ne- 

 cessary to safeguard the dogma of the virgin birth of Jesus of 

 Nazareth. Thus came the true reading, "His father and his 

 mother," instead of the old piously fraudulent words "Joseph and 

 his mother." 



An even more important service to the new and better growth 

 of Christianity was the virtual setting aside of the last twelve 



* For the citations given regarding the development of thought in relation to the fourth 

 Gospel, see Crooker, The New Bible and its Uses, Boston, 1893, pp. 29, 30. For a very 

 careful and candid summary of the reasons which are gradually leading the more eminent 

 among the newer scholars to give up the Johannine authorship of the fourth Gospel, see 

 Schiirer, in the Contemporary Beview for September, 1891. 



