ult to find what the
"authority of Scripture" really was. To the greater number of Protestant
ecclesiastics it meant the authority of any meaning in the text which
they had the wit to invent and the power to enforce.

To increase this vast confusion, came, in the older branch of the
Church, the idea of the divine inspiration of the Latin translation
of the Bible ascribed to St. Jerome--the Vulgate. It was insisted by
leading Catholic authorities that this was as completely a product
of divine inspiration as was the Hebrew original. Strong men arose to
insist even that, where the Hebrew and the Latin differed, the Hebrew
should be altered to fit Jerome's mistranslation, as the latter, having
been made under the new dispensation, must be better than that made
under the old. Even so great a man as Cardinal Bellarmine exerted
himself in vain against this new tide of unreason.(469)

(469) For Valla, see various sources already named; and for an
especially interesting account, Symond's Renaissance in Italy, the
Revival of Learning, pp. 260-269; and for the opinion of the best
contemporary judge, see Erasmus, Opera, Leyden, 1703, tom. iii, p. 98.
For Erasmus and his opponents, see Life of Erasmus, by Butler, London,
1825, pp. 179-182; but especially, for the general subject, Bishop
Creighton's History of the Papacy during the Reformation. For the attack
by Bude and the Sorbonne and the burning of Berquin, see Drummond, Life
and character of Erasmus, vol. ii, pp. 220-223; also pp. 230-239. As
to the text of the Three Witnesses, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, chap. xxxvi, notes 116-118; also Dean Milman's note
thereupon. For a full and learned statement of the evidence against
the verse, see Porson's Letters to Travis, London, 1790, in which an
elaborate discussion of all the MSS. is given. See also Jowett in Essays
and Reviews, p. 307. For a very full and impartial history of the long
controversy over this passage, see Charles Butler's Horae Biblicae,
reprinted in Jared Sparks's Theological Essays and Tracts, vol. ii. For
Luther's ideas of interpretation, see his Sammtliche Schriften, Walch
edition, vol. i, p. 1199, vol. ii, p. 1758, vol. viii, p. 2140; for some
of his more free views, vol. xiv, p. 472, vol. vi, p. 121, vol. xi, p.
1448, vol. xii, p. 830; also Tholuck, Doctrine of Inspiration, Boston,
1867, citing the Colloquia, Frankfort, 1571, vol. ii, p. 102; also
the Vorreden zu der deutschen Bibe