Erasmus, with
his edition of the New Testament, stands at the source of that great
stream of modern research and thought which is doing so much to
undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of patristic and scholastic
interpretation.

Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to
encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may stimulate
reflection. He had found, what some others had found before him, that
the famous verse in the fifth chapter of the First Epistle General of
St. John, regarding the "three witnesses," was an interpolation. Careful
research through all the really important 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 wanting
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 up 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, Stunica, 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 ferociously. He was condemned by the
University of Paris, and various propositions of his were declared to
be heretical and impious. Fortunately, the worst persecutors could not
reach him; otherwise they might have treated him as they treated his
disciple, Berquin, whom in 1529 they burned at Paris.

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 although at a later period the most
eminent Christian scholars showed that it had no right to a place in