Excellent!
And do you agree that Grantley’s appeal to Facundus and Haymo about this “in terra” being part of the heavenly witnesses verse formation is anachronistic, is not scholarship and is totally illogical.
No. I was only speculating. I conceded a possibility (not a probability) due to accepted widespread post-dated recension of Latin manuscripts. Newton reckons that the Comma was derived fromTertullian by a two stage process (a) a marginal allegoresis of the "earthly" witnesses as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, per Matt 28:19, and (b) that the insertion of the "heavenly witnesses" in 1 John 5:7 only followed later in the disputes with the Vandals.
Actually, the full Comma may have arisen from the Monarchian tendency within RC e.g. Priscillian before the Vandals arrived. We can't know (at least I don't know).
(He could remove it from his next rodeo, if it is not yet cast in stone at the printers, and he could include it in the corregidor of Raising the Ghost of Arius.)
Rather see P.204 ARA et. seq.
"Newton begins his account by noting that the spuriousness of the comma
had previously been exposed by Erasmus, Luther, Bullinger, Grotius and other
“learned and quick-sighted men” who “would not dissemble their knowledge.”
Newton was clearly impressed by Erasmus’ attitude of critical scepticism, and he
takes over several broad arguments and many details from Erasmus’ Annotationes
and his reply to Lee. But despite the doubts of such men, Newton sighs, many of
his own contemporaries hung on to the comma as a defence against heresy.
For Newton, such deceit was unforgivable, especially in a Protestant:
“But whilst we
exclaim against the pious frauds of the Roman church, and make it a part of our
religion to detect and renounce all things of that kind, we must acknowledge it a
greater crime in us to favour such practices, than in the Papists we so much blame
on that account: for they act according to their religion, but we contrary to
ours.”
Yet Newton was also hostile to Socinians whom he accused for example
of dealing “too injuriously with Cyprian” when they argued that the important
passage from his De unitate was corrupt. (To distance himself explicitly from the
Socinians, even on such an innocuous critical point as this, may have been a ploy
to ward off any suspicion that he wished to promote similar ideas. But it is
important to note that he had actually read the works of several Socinians,
including Sandius and Crell.) By contrast,
Newton suggested that Cyprian’s
employment of the phrase tres unum sunt rather than the comma in its fully
developed form is consistent with the conclusion that it was unknown in the
Latin text in general circulation during his lifetime. The absence of the comma
from the biblical text known to the early apologists is suggested furthermore by
its absence from their apologies:
“For had it been in Cyprian’s Bible, the Latines
of the next age, when all the world was engaged in disputing about the Trinity,
and all arguments that could be thought of were diligently sought out, and daily
brought upon the stage, could never have been ignorant of a text, which in our
age, now the dispute is over, is chiefly insisted upon.”
In support of his contention, Newton mentions Eucherius’ statement that many people
interpreted the three earthly witnesses as types of the Trinity,
and the evidence
given by Facundus that Cyprian interpreted 1 Jn 5:8 as a type of the Trinity.
“Now if it was the opinion of many in the Western churches of those times, that
the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, signified the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost; it is plain that the testimony of Three in Heaven, in express words, was
not yet crept into their books: and even without this testimony, it was obvious for
Cyprian, or any man else of that opinion, to say of the Father, and Son, and Holy
Ghost, ‘it is written, “And these Three are One.”’” In an interesting aside,
Newton even suggests that Cyprian’s formulation “Father, Son and Holy Spirit”
rather than “Father, Word and Holy Spirit” suggests that he was referring not to
the comma as it would later become established, but to the baptismal formula
given at the Great Commission (Mt 28:19), “the place from which they tried at
first to derive the Trinity.” (At this point Bishop Horsley, the editor of
Newton’s works, added a note deflecting the suspicion that this statement
revealed any hint of Socinianism on Newton’s part.)
From Cyprian, Newton worked backwards to Tertullian.
The fact that
Tertullian was the first to give a Trinitarian interpretation to the phrase tres unum
sunt led Newton to suggest that this interpretation was “invented by the
Montanists for giving countenance to their Trinity. For Tertullian was a
Montanist when he wrote this; and it is most likely that so corrupt and forced an
interpretation had its rise among
a sect of men accustomed to make bold with the
Scriptures.” On Tertullian’s authority, Newton suggests, this interpretation was
subsequently adopted by Cyprian and other Latins.
Newton then suggests that
the Trinitarian allegoresis of the earthly witnesses led a scribe (or scribes) either
to record this allegoresis in the margin, “whence it might afterwards creep into
the text in transcribing,” or to insert it into the text “fraudulently.”
.
.
.
For Newton, the most compelling evidence against the original presence
of the comma in the Greek text was its demonstrable absence from the text
during the time of the earliest Fathers.
As to the accusation that the comma had
been excised by the Arians, Newton found this simply ludicrous: “Yes, truly,
those Arians were crafty knaves, that could conspire so cunningly and slily all the
world over at once […] to get all men’s books in their hands, and correct them
without being perceived: ay, and conjurors too, to do it without leaving any blot
or chasm in their books, whereby the knavery might be suspected and
discovered; and to wipe away the memory of it out of all men’s brains, so that
neither Athanasius, or anybody else, could afterwards remember that they had
ever seen it in their books before; and out of their own books too; so that when
they turned to the consubstantial faith, as they generally did in the West, soon
after the death of Constantius, they could then remember no more of it than
anybody else.” Such was the absurd conclusion obtruded upon those who
asserted that the comma was penned by St John himself. Those of Newton’s
contemporaries who excused themselves for inserting the comma against the
evidence of the manuscripts thus revealed themselves as “falsaries by their own
confession, and certainly need no other confutation,” unless they could prove
that the comma had been removed early from the text “by some better argument
than that of pretence and clamour.”
But having dismissed the comma as a later intrusion into the text, Newton
was thus under an onus to explain how the comma arose. H
e suggested that this
first happened “by that abused authority of Cyprian […], in the disputes with the
ignorant Vandals […].” Moreover, he suggests that while the comma became
established early in Africa, it did not become commonly accepted in Europe until
the twelfth century or so. This error can perhaps be explained by the fact that
many important texts from the early middle ages still remained unpublished until
after Newton’s time.
Newton also pointed out that the evidence of the Latin
bibles is ambiguous, since earlier manuscripts were corrected according to later
recensions, causing a considerable variety amongst the texts in circulation: “the
old Latin has been so generally corrected, that it is nowhere to be found
sincere.”In the case of the Johannine comma, the inconsistent application of
these corrections—later joined by the mistaken injunctions of Aquinas against
the phrase tres unum sunt in 1 Jn 5:8—led to an astonishing variety of different
readings."