The Dutch scholar, Desiderius Erasmus, produced and published the Greek New Testament in 1515, which became known as the editio princeps (first published edition) using rather late, and not necessarily reliable, Greek manuscripts which he happened to find in Basel. He relied heavily on one 12th century manuscript for the Gospels and another 12th century manuscript for the book of Acts and the Epistles, and several other manuscripts as the basis of corrections. For the book of Revelation he used an incomplete manuscript and filled in the gaps using the Latin Vulgate Bible.
Numerous editions followed from several publishers, all of which relied on the texts of previous editions with minor changes, all going back to the flawed text of Erasmus.
Stephanus's third edition of 1550 was the first edition to include notes documenting differences among some of the manuscripts consulted; his fourth edition (1551) was the first Greek New Testament divided into verses.
The manuscripts used by Erasmus were produced about 1100 years after the originals documents and contained significant differences. For example, the manuscript Erasmus used for the Gospels contained both the story of the woman taken in adultery in John and the last twelve verses of Mark - passages that did not originally form part of the Gospels.
An important passage missing from Erasmus's source manuscripts is 1 John 5:7-8, known as the Comma Johanneum. This is in the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts. It is significant because it is the only passage in the Bible that explicitly defines the Trinity: three persons in the godhead, with all three constituting just one God. In the Latin Vulgate, the passage reads:
"There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one."
Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity has to be contrived from interpretations of a range of passages throughout the Bible. But 1 John 5:7-8 states the doctrine in black and white. However, Erasmus could not find it in any of his Greek manuscripts, which simply read:
"There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one."
So, Erasmus naturally left out any reference to the "Father, the Word, and the Spirit" as they were not in any of his manuscripts. This did not go down well with the Christian authorities. For example, Archbishop Edward Lee accused Erasmus of deliberately eliminating the doctrine of the Trinity and therefore devaluing the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. Lee had been a prominent opponent and critic of Erasmus for some time, perceiving him to have a humanist view of the New Testament (their arguments escalated to the point that Henry VIII became involved). The prominent theologian Jacobus Stunica, one of the chief editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, publicly defamed Erasmus, accusing him of negligence and heretical thinking, among other things - charges that could lead to imprisonment and execution. Archbishop Lee went as far as to write that the omission of the Comma Johanneum brought with it the danger of a new revival of Arianism.
Erasmus was therefore under great pressure to include the Johannine Comma even though it could not be found in any Greek manuscripts. That is until 1521, when a version in Greek was produced. But this was not an original manuscript.
Erasmus wrote his Apologia respondens ad ea quae in Nouo Testamento taxauerat Iacobus Lopis Stunica in September 1521. In this document he explains, in dealing with 1 John 5, that having made clear the Comma Johanneum was not in any Greek manuscript, he had eventually received a transcript of it, but that it had been translated from Latin into Greek, the source being Codex Britannicus, and so in the face of fierce criticism for not including the passage, he had inserted it into the text of 1 John in his third edition of his Greek New Testament.
The Codex Britannicus was indeed the first Greek manuscript that had been found to contain the Comma Johanneum, but it was itself copied from a 10th-century manuscript at Lincoln College, Oxford, which did not include the Comma Johanneum. It had been inserted into the Greek text, back-translated from a much later Latin document. Its earliest known owner was Froy, a Franciscan friar, then Thomas Clement (1569), then William Chark (1582), then Thomas Montfort, from whom it derives its present name, then Archbishop Ussher.
So why did Erasmus include the passage knowing full well that it was a forgery? Erasmus explained that it was... “so that no one would have occasion to criticise me out of malice”, or as he expressed it in his Annotationes on 1 John 5, 7 ne cut sit ansa calumniandi.
Erasmus had reason to fear that if he were suspected of heretical sympathies, not only did he risk severe punishments, he would also fail to meet his ultimate goal of producing a new, modern and readable translation of the New Testament in Latin, but based on authentic Greek manuscripts. This new Bible would supersede the widely circulated Vulgate which was difficult to read and unclear.
This incident severely compromised that goal. Erasmus chose to avoid being slandered and accused of heresy and included the Comma Johanneum even though he was convinced it was not part of the original text of 1 John. [see reference 6 page 384]
The various Greek editions of the 16th and 17th centuries were so similar that eventually printers claimed the text was universally accepted by all scholars and readers of the Greek New Testament. This was a truism as it was the only text available. An edition produced in 1633 by Abraham and Bonaventure Elzevir claimed that...
"You now have the text that is received by all, in which we have given nothing changed or corrupted."
This phrase gave rise to another phrase, Textus Receptus (abbreviated T.R.), a term used by textual critics to refer to that form of the Greek text that is based, not on the oldest and best manuscripts, but on the form of text originally published by Erasmus and handed down to printers for more than three hundred years, until textual scholars began insisting that the Greek New Testament should be established on scientific principles based on our oldest and best manuscripts.
The Evolution of the New Testament
Scholars agree that the transmission of the New Testament occurred as follows.
First, there was the oral tradition where individuals spread the news of Christ’s resurrection and ministry by word of mouth. Then, for a variety of reasons, the spoken word was recorded in written form. Paul was writing letters to various congregations to help them resolve internal problems. Another possible reason for committing the oral gospel (“good news”) to writing was the failed occurrence of the Parousia, the return of Christ and the final resurrection. This hoped for event of salvation was delayed so the message needed to be preserved.
Regardless of the reasons, around the turn of the first century, a flurry of copying commenced. Patzia provides a good overall view of what happened:
Soon after the autographs were written they began their long and exciting journey of transmission. At first, a second copy—or perhaps several copies—was made from the original manuscript. Shortly after, copies were made from the copies, and so on, so that in a very short time there were many copies in circulation. By the second century a similar process developed in the church, with the creation of lectionaries for public and private worship and the use of the New Testament texts by the church fathers in preaching and writing.
Around 200 AD Latin began replacing Greek in the Roman Empire. The widespread shift in language necessitated a good Latin translation and resulted in Pope Damasus’s request to Jerome and, eventually, The Vulgate. Previously, the early congregations were limited to possessions of the Hebrew Scriptures and copies of the Greek Old Testament or Septuagint (LXX).
With its many editions and translations, the New Testament has had a long, tortuous, and convoluted history. One of the best descriptions of this early publishing process comes from Kurt and Barbara Aland:
"As copies multiplied their circulation became steadily wider and wider, like the ripples from a pebble cast in a pond. This means that from the writing of a document to its use in all the churches of a single diocese or throughout the whole Church, a certain amount of time must have elapsed. Meanwhile, every copy made from another copy repeated the same pattern of expansion, like another pebble cast into the pond making a new series of ripples. These rippling circles would intersect. Two manuscripts in a single place (each with its own range of textual peculiari- ties, depending on its distance from the original text) would influence each other, producing a textual mixture and starting a new pattern of ripples—a process which would be repeated continually. Finally, to continue the metaphor, the pool becomes so filled with overlapping circles that it is practically impossible to distinguish their sources and their mutual relationships. This is precisely the situation the textual critic finds when attempting to analyse the history of the New Testament text.
References:
1 J.B. Lightfoot, R.C. Trench, C.J. Ellicott, The Revision of the English Version of the NT
2 Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development and Significance.
3 Bart Ehrman; Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
4 Kurt and Barbara Aland. The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism
5 Arthur Patzia The Making of the New Testament
6 Ephemerides Theologcae Lovanienses 1980: Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum by HJ De Jonge
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