Crash the Future

We've been looking at the particular passages Bart Ehrman attacks in his book, and I'll look at the third here briefly.

1John 5:7-8.
A few late Latin manuscripts, following verse 7, add the phrase, “...in heaven, the Father the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth...” When a 16th Century scholar named Erasmus was compiling Greek manuscripts and practicing textual criticism in the early 1500's he realized that this phrase was not in any Greek or early manuscript. So, he left the phrase out of his Greek compilation. Of course, that was scandalous to some powerful people who were used to reading the Latin copy they had. They felt Erasmus was removing a verse of Scripture, and so Erasmus promised to include it in his compilation if a single Greek manuscript could be found containing the phrase. Miracle of miracles, an “authentic” Greek manuscript was soon found, arguably with the ink still wet. True to his word, but under protest, Erasmus included the phrase in his compilation.

Today this phrase is universally recognized by scholars to be a later addition. The manuscript evidence would seem to indicate that it found its way into the Latin manuscript as a scribe jotted a note to himself in the margin of a text with which he was working. The original verses reminded him of the Trinity and he wrote a note to that effect, similar to the interactive notes people often write in the margins of books today. A few later scribes then thought the note was supposed to be included in the text, and mistakenly inserted it in their Latin texts between verses 7 and 8. (This understanding is so certain that many modern translations will only include this phrase in footnotes at the bottom of the page, not even in brackets within the context of the remaining passage.)

The fact that this phrase is not original does not undermine any major doctrine (e.g. the Trinity) in Scripture, however. For instance, the Trinity is seen in the Genesis creation narrative, where God the Father says, “Let Us create man in Our image.” The Spirit hovers over the deep. And God in the flesh comes to walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden during the cool of the day. The Trinity makes an appearance in the different narratives of Jesus' baptism, where the heavens open, the Father's voice is heard affirming the Son, and the Spirit is seen descending as a dove. Other instances like this make it apparent that the doctrine of the Trinity can be found from the Old Testament to the New. It could not be seriously argued to rest on this phrase alone.

These three instances are by far the most substantial and shocking of the 40 remaining variations at which we arrived above. But these passages are hardly the trade secrets Ehrman would like to make them out to be. To illustrate this fact, I would simply point out that most Bible translations today put these passages in brackets and include a footnote that says something to the effect of, “Early manuscripts do not contain this passage,” or, “It is uncertain that this passage is original.” So if a passage does not have that footnote, then scholars have no question about the words being what was originally written.

After the three instances we just discussed, the remaining 37 variations consist primarily of single words in a given verse. I'll give some examples of those next time.