158 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



General Epistle of St. John, regarding the " three witnesses," was 

 an interpolation. Careful research through all the really impor- 

 tant early manuscripts showed that it appeared in none of them. 

 Even after the Bible had been corrected in the eleventh and 

 twelfth centuries by Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and 

 by Nicholas, cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church, " in 

 accordance with the orthodox faith/' the passage was still want- 

 ing in the more authoritative Latin manuscripts. There was not 

 the slightest tenable ground for believing in the authenticity of 

 the text ; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that, after a 

 universal silence of the orthodox fathers of the Church, of the 

 ancient versions of the Scriptures, and of all really important 

 manuscripts, the verse first appeared in a Confession of Faith 

 drawn ujd by an obscure zealot toward the end of the fifth 

 century. In a very mild exercise, then, of critical judgment, 

 Erasmus omitted this text from the first two editions of his 

 Greek Testament as evidently spurious. A storm arose at once. 

 In England, Lee, afterward Archbishop of York ; in Spain, Stu- 

 nica, one of the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot ; and in 

 France, Bude*, Syndic of the Sorbonne, together with a vast army 

 of monks in England and on the Continent, attacked him fero- 

 ciously. He was condemned by the University of Paris, and 

 various propositions of his were declared to be heretical and im- 

 pious. Fortunately, the worst persecutors could not reach him ; 

 otherwise they might have treated him as they treated his dis- 

 ciple, Berquin, whom they burned at Paris in 1529. 



The fate of this spurious text throws light into the workings 

 of human nature in its relations to sacred literature. Although 

 Luther omitted it from his translation of the New Testament, and 

 kept it out of every copy published during his lifetime, and al- 

 though at a later period the most eminent Christian scholars 

 showed that it had no right to a place in the Bible, it was, after 

 Luther's death, replaced in the German translation, and has been 

 incorporated into all important editions of it, save one, since the 

 beginning of the seventeenth century. So essential was it found 

 in maintaining the dominant theology that, despite the fact that 

 Sir Isaac Newton, Richard Porson, the nineteenth-century revisers, 

 and all other eminent authorities have rejected it, the Anglican 

 Church still retains it in its Lectionary, and the Scotch Church 

 continues to use it in the Westminster Catechism, as a main sup- 

 port of the doctrine of the Trinity. 



Nor were other new truths, presented by Erasmus, better re- 

 ceived. His statement that " some of the Epistles ascribed to St. 

 Paul are certainly not his," which is to-day universally acknowl- 

 edged as a truism, also aroused a storm. For generations, then, 

 his work seemed vain. 



