Apocryphal New Testament — Historical English Collection

Apocryphal New Testament — Hone/Wake/Jones — Section 6

The verse above alluded to by Mr. Casly is 1 John, v. 7. This spurious passage, in the authorized version of the New Testament, printed by the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and the King's Printers, and appointed to be read in churches, stands thus : ^'For there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost ; and these three are one." This verse, Mr. Casly says, is now generally given up ; being in no Greek MS. save one at Berlin, which is discovered to have been transcribed from the printed Biblia Complutensia ; and another modern one at Dublin, probably translated or corrected from the Latin Vulgate. It is conjectured that it may have been inserted by the mistake of a Latin copyist: for the owners of MSS. often wrote glosses or paraphrases of particular passages between the lines, and ignorant transcribers sometimes mistook these notes for interlined omissions by the original scribes, and accordingly in re-copy- ing the MSS. incorporated these glosses or paraphrases into the body of the text. For instance, Jerome, in one of his letters, says that an explanatory note which he himself had made in the margin of his Psalter had been incorporated by some transcriber into the text ; and Dr. Bentley, in the 96th page of hLs Epistle, annexed to Malala's Chronicle, has proved liva opoq eariv ev ttj Apaj3i.g, in Galatians iv. 25, to be of the same stamp.f t Cat. King's Libr. Pref. p. xxi. vii *' The best that can be said for it is, that it might possibly have come in, in like manner, not long before, from a gloss