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distinct citation of it appears. We should think that it needed no profound knowledge of the art of criticism, but only a little of that common sense which learning unfortunately cannot teach, to see that such a passage must be spurious, or that there is an end of all critical certainty. The Bishop of St. David's thinks he can set all this evidence aside, and these are his arguments: that the sense is imperfect and the construction solecistic, if the seventh_verse be taken away; that our Greek MSS. of this Epistle are comparatively modern, and, therefore, cannot prove what was the reading of the early ages: that the Latin Fathers quote it as early as Tertullian ; that Mr. Nolan, in his profound and interesting Inquiry into the Integrity of the Greek Vulgate," has made it probable that Eusebius struck out the Heavenly Witnesses in the days of Constantine : lastly, that Mr. Porson declared his willingness to come over to Mr. Travis' opinion, if two Greek MSS., 500 years old, could be produced, containing the verse, and that Dr. Adam Clarke thinks that one, the Dublin MS., is more likely to have been written in the thirteenth century than in the fifteenth. Let us examine these arguments separately.

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1. The harshness of construction and solecism, produced by the omission of the seventh verse, consists in this; that τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα, in the eighth verse are all neuters; and yet the apostle says of them, Tpe εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυρῶντες. Assuming it, therefore, to be a rule of Greek construction, (for his argument implies this, though he does not expressly state it, that nouns in apposition must be of the same gender as those to which they are apposed, the Bishop argues that St. John could never have fallen into such a solecism, as to use the masculine in the eighth verse, but for the circumstance of his having the moment before used of μaprupertec in the seventh, in connexion with aτὴρ, ὁ λόγος, καὶ τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα, where the masculine is grammatically correct. Now it is very obvious to reply to this, as Dr. J. P. Smith has done, (Scrip. Test. II. 545,) that the masculine is used because the words are personified. Bishop Burgess, indeed, objects that veμa cannot be

personified in the eighth verse, because in the sixth we read kai To TveŬμa 51 To μapTupey; but, in the first place, there is no reason that an author should always personify, because he sometimes does it; and, in the second place, the constructions have no analogy; To μapTupy, in the sixth verse, is the predicate of the proposition, in which it would certainly have been a harsh, though by no means unauthorized, construction, to have departed from the gender of the subject; the neuters in the eighth verse, instead of being either the predicate or the subject, are apposed, exegetically, to oi papTupevts, the subject. The logical order of the words is this; Ti μαρτυρῶντες (τὸ πνεῦμα. κ. τ. λ.) εἰσι τρεῖς. This distinction either Bishop Burgess and his oracles, Mr. Nolan and Dr. Hales, have overlooked, or they mean to maintain, that in all cases nouns in apposition must be in the same gender as those which they are introduced to explain. Let us hear the opinion of a much better grammarian than any of the three.

The apposed substantive should in strictness be of the same number and gender as the first; but they are often different, especially when the apposed word is an abstractum pro concreto." (Matthiä, § 431 of the smaller grammar; for the passage is not contained in the larger, translated by E. V. Blomfield.) He quotes, as examples, Eur. Troad. 429, απέχθημα πάγκοινων βροτοῖς οἱ περὶ τυράννες καὶ πόλεις ὑπη PETAL. Hes. Scut. Herc. 296, 313, ἄρχος, (τρίπος,) κλυτὰ ἔργα περίφρονος 'Hpaíso. Will it be said that Matthiä's examples are all from poets? In the book of Proverbs, xxx. 29, we read, Τρία ἔσιν ἃ ἐυόδως πορεύεται καὶ τέταρτον ὁ καλῶς διαβαίνει· σκύμνος λέοντος καὶ αλέκτωρ καὶ τράγος καὶ Bariλus. Here are four masculine nouns in the enumeration, but the relative and numerals are neuter; while, in the passage in John, the nouns in the enumeration are neuter, and the numeral and participle masculine. No doubt, had the author of the Proverb chosen, he might have said, Tpeç tio oi, and the author of the Epistle, rpía or a but the former wished to make his predicate as indefinite as possible, and the latter to make his as definite and personal as he could; and we humbly maintain

that neither of them has written in "defiance of grammar."

But there is another reason why the seventh verse must be retained. Wolfius and the Bishop of Calcutta have observed, that without the of the seventh verse, the rov of the eighth is unaccountable. Let us see, then, what sense we get by making the Toy of the eighth refer to the of the seventh. "There are three which bear witness in heaven, the Father and the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one thing; and there are three which bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water and the blood, and these three are to that one thing." What meaning can be attached to these words we cannot imagine. There is no need of any new theory of the Greek article, to explain the use of ro before ; it marks more emphatically the absolute unity of purpose of the Three Witnesses. Unquestionably this might have been expressed by is, but less forcibly. So the Apostle, 1 Cor. xii. 11, might have contented himself with saying, Ev Kai Tò aтo TVμa, but he has chosen to say τὸ ἕν.

2. Bishop Burgess allows, that all the Greek MSS., save one, (the Codex Ravienus he abandons to its fate,) omit the seventh verse; but not at all dismayed by this circumstance, he sets himself to prove, by a most extraordinary process, that this is no reason for doubting its authenticity. He divides the whole time, from the composition of the Epistle to the invention of printing, into three periods, the first extending to the end of the third century, the second to the end of the ninth; and he observes, that during the first period there is no external evidence against the verse, because none of our present MSS. are as old as the third century. If this remark had proceeded from some one devoid of every tincture of critical knowledge, the confusion of ideas which it indicates, might be explained; if a Toland or a Collius had thrown it out as an insinuation against the evidence of the authenticity of Scripture, the motive would have been intelligible; but, surely, nothing except the blind zeal which leads a man to demolish the bulwarks of our common faith, if he thinks he can bury an adversary under the ruin, could have

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induced the learned and pious Bishop of St. David's to have furnished the infidels with such an argument as this. No external evidence, it seems, as derived from MSS., can be of higher date than the MSS. themselves. Now, it is pretty generally admitted that our present copies of the Hebrew Scriptures are not older than the tenth century; consequently there is an interval, from the time of Moses, of 2500 years, during which we have no external evidence of the existence of the Pentateuch. It is vain to talk of the collateral evidence of translations, &c.; nemo dat quod non habet; they all exist in MSS. equally recent with those of the Hebrew Scriptures, and having no evidence themselves, they can lend none to others. But to add inconsistency to absurdity, the Bishop goes on to say, that the "oldest Greek MS. extant is of much later date than the Latin Version of the Western Church." Has, then, this version come down to us on some tablet of brass or marble, while the Greek original is only to be found in modern and perishable parchment? If not, then we have as little external evidence of the one as of the other, not only during the first period, but down to the time when our present MSS. of each were written. We may be thought, perhaps, to pay a poor compliment to the sagacity of our readers, even by observing, in passing, that as MSS. are not created, 1 x övtwy, but copied from each other, the MS. of the fourth century, which is still preserved, is external evidence-not demonstration, but evidence of the existence of its TEXT in the preceding centuries, the MSS. of which have perished, and that thus the chain is carried up to the autograph of the author. Allowances must be made for the human infirmities of transcribers, and as these are repeated with every act of copying, the oldest MSS. are reasonably considered as the most valuable: but if, according to Bishop Burgess's principle, there could be no external evidence of the existence of a text, before the time when the existing MSS. of it were written, the scepticism of Harduin was moderate and rational.

But, on what ground does our author so confidently, and without giving his reader the smallest hint that

the matter is doubtful, speak of the Latin Version as having contained this verse during his first period? Did he not know that this very point is most strenuously contested by the opponents of the verse? Did he not know that the greatest critic of the age had pronounced the Latin MSS. which omit the verse, to be infinitely superior to the herd in which it is found? (See the passage quoted from Porson before.) Is he prepared to deny this? He knows himself, we apprehend, better than to venture to oppose himself on such a point to such an authority. He has dealt most disingenuously by Porson, in representing him as allowing that the verse in dispute was in the Latin Version, even from the end of the second century. How could he, unless the clearest of heads had become all at once as confused as that of certain defenders of orthodoxy, admit that a text was in the Latin Version, at this early period, and yet condemn the copies which contain this text as a worthless rabble? Porson is arguing for the moment upon a supposition (Letters, p. 143) which, in the whole of his subsequent reasoning, he refutes, that this text had been in the Vulgate from the end of the second century, and maintains, that even in that case, its authenticity would not be certain: the very next paragraph (p. 144) be gins with these words: "Thus I should argue if all the MSS. consented in the received reading." We confess it to be a very difficult stretch of our charity to believe, that Bishop Burgess mistook so common a phrase as allowing that it had been," for "I allow that it was;" at any rate, the man who can so misunderstand a plain sentence of his mother tongue, must excuse us if we do not attach much value to his judgment, when he talks of the internal evidence which arises from the connexion of an author's ideas and the coherence of his arguments.

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Again, before we quit the subject of this first period, we must ask, is the Vulgate Latin Version the only one of this age which exists? A reader of Bishop Burgess might naturally suppose that it was; for we do not recollect that he enters into the slightest explanation, why John v. 7, is wanting in the Syriac, the earli

est, probably, of all the translations of the New Testament, and all the other oriental versions, which are not known to have been corrupted from the Latin in very recent times. Here is no discordancy of MSS., as in the case of the Latin Version; their testimony is clear and consistent, and the absence of the disputed text is to be accounted for in no other way than its absence in the Greek MSS. from which they were made. What are we to say of the dead silence of the Greek fathers, who never once, during this period, quote the verse in question? Bishop Burgess will not allow that a defender of the text is bound to explain this. It is an approved method of getting rid of a toublesome claimant, to deny the debt; but this silence of the fathers will remain an invincible argument of spuriousness till it is explained,* and that too in some better way than the disciplina arcani, or Mr. Nolan's dream of the erasure of the text by Eusebius. It is true, the Bishop does make a feeble effort to prove that the Greek original must have contained it in the two first centuries. The Alogi were a set of heretics, who rejected the writings of St. John, on account of their denial of his doctrine of the Logos. Now, it has been thought, that as the divinity of the Logos is taught in no part of the first Epistle, but in the text of the Heavenly Witnesses; they could have had no reason for quarrelling with it, had this text not been found in it from the earliest times. The reader will perceive, that this argument can have no force whatever, unless we are assured that the Alogi rejected the first Epistle, as well as the other works of the Apostle. But the proof of this completely fails. Epiphanius, who gives this account of the Alogi, only says, that they rejected the Gospel and the Apocalypse. O, but," says the Bishop, "they must have rejected the Epistle, because the doctrine of Christ's divinity is much more clearly taught in it

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than in the Gospel or the Apocalypse." Taught where? In other passages of the Epistle, or in the text of the Heavenly Witnesses ? If in other passages, then the Alogi, on the Bishop's own shewing, had their reasons for rejecting the Epistle, though the disputed text never made a part of it; if in this text itself, we shall have a beautiful specimen of the argument in a circle; the text is genuine, because the Alogi rejected the Epistle; and the Alogi must have rejected the Epistle because the text is genuine. The bishop himself is not only aλoy but aλoywrátos. On the whole, he has been as completely foiled as his pre. decessors have been in the attempt to produce even a tittle of evidence, that this verse existed in the earliest copies of the New Testament.

It is not without reason that he makes his second period to extend from A. D. 300 to 900, a division of which we did not at first discern the motive. In this period, the external evidence, even according to his own very original definition, begins to press hard upon his favourite text. The oldest MSS. of the Greek Testament fall within this period, perhaps not far from the commencement of it, and they with one consent omit the Heavenly Witnesses; no version except the Latin, and that only in the most modern and corrupted copies, exhibits them; no Greek father quotes them as a proof of the Trinity. What can be set against these proofs of spuriousness? The Bishop finds, that towards the end of what he makes his second period, after the Latin fathers had begun to use the words as Scripture, a Latin writer, (a forger of a prologue in the name of Jerome,) speaks of the verse as being exant in

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The fact is, that Epiphanius says expressly (Hær. li. 34), "that the Alogi rejected the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse, perhaps, also, (Taxa de Ka,) the Epistles, because they harmonize with the Gospels and the Apocalypse." It is evident that he had no other reason for believing that they did reject the Epistles, than this conjecture of his own; and of a multitude of authors who mention the Alogi as rejecting the Gospel and the Apocalypse, not oue mentions the Epistles. See Michaëlis Introd. Ch. xxx. $5.

the Greek. See, now, the advantage of the skilful construction of a period. Had he said that till the eighth cen tury, to which this respectable testimony belongs, there was no proof of the existence of the text of the Heavenly Witnesses in the Greek, even his orthodox readers would have been startled; but by speaking of the whole 600 years as a period, he hoped that they would forget that his argument (such as it is) applied only to the latter part of it, and agree with him that, in this period, there is positive evidence of the existence of the text in the Greek. And of what kind is this testimony? The author of it comes before us with a lie in his mouth; for he pretends that he is St. Jerome, a falsehood so glaring, that even the Bishop of St. David's gives him up; and he does not after all assert, but only insinuate, that the verse was found in Greek MSS. If, then, in spite of the disciplina arcani and the Arian erasures of Eusebius, this occidental forger found the Heavenly Witnesses in the Greek text, in the eighth century, what is become of those orthodox MSS.? A false witness, not unfre quently, by some casual concession, ruins the cause which he is produced to support, and such is the case with the Pseudo-Jerome. When he reproaches the Latin copies with the omission of the Heavenly Witnesses, he plainly shews, that in his time that version did not generally contain them; and what, then, becomes of its testimony to their having been in the Greek, in the age succeeding that of the Apostles? As to Walafrid Strabus, in the ninth century, who, in a Latin commentary, glosses on this verse, there is no proof that he had compared the Latin and Greek texts together, nor does he himself profess to have done it. That he includes 1 John v. 7 in his commentary, only shews, that in the ninth century it had gained a footing in the Latin MSS. The reader of Bishop Burgess would, indeed, conclude, from the artful arrangement of his words, that Walafrid Strabus had asserted the

"Ut libere dicam quod sentio, testimonio illo (sc. prologi) auctoritatem textui conciliare velle nihil aliud esse puto quam, ἀπὸ τοῦ ψεύδους την αλήθειαν συςήσασθαι.” Millius ad loc.

superior authority of the Greek to the Latin in this passage. "He could not be ignorant either of the defects which the author of the Prologue attributes to the Latin copies of his day, or of the integrity of the Greek as asserted by him; and he directs his readers to correct the errors of the Latin by the Greek." Who would not suppose that Strabus had directed his readers to insert 1 John v. 7 from the Greek?-No such thing; this is only a general recommendation to his reader to apply to the Greek and Hebrew; having no reference to this passage; and it does not appear that he himself understood either, unless it be argued that an author has always tried himself every practice which he recommends to his reader. Epiphanius and the Alogi appear again upon the stage, but with as little benefit as before to the Bishop's cause, and very little credit to his fairness." Epiphanius, who lived in the fourth century, says, that the Epistles agree with the Gospel and the Apocalypse' in the doctrine of the Logos, and assigns this agreement as the reason for thinking that the Alogi rejected the Epistles as well as the other writings of St. John." The reader, whom previous experience has put on his guard, will perhaps perceive, that the words" in the doctrine of the Logos," on which the whole force of the argument depends, are those of the Bishop, not of Epiphanius; but most persons, certainly, would understand them as if Epiphanius himself had stated this as the point of agreement. We have already seen that there is no proof whatever that the Alogi rejected the Epistles of John; but if they did, and on the ground of the term Logos being applied to Christ, they may have taken offence at the very, first verse, "That which was in the beginning, &c., concerning the word of life." So far is it from being true, that the Gospel and Epistle correspond only in the controverted

verse.

3. We are next to accompany the Bishop in his inquiry into the citations of the Latin Fathers, the only part of the argument which affords even the shadow of a reason for maintaining the authenticity of the common read ing. He asserts that Tertullian, because (C. Praxean, 25) he uses the

words qui tres unum sunt of the Father, Son, and Spirit, meant to quote 1 John v. 7, though there is not a word of allusion to St. John, and though Tertullian justifies his own expression by the words of Christ, Ego et Pater unum sumus. This point has been so amply discussed in the course of the controversy, that it is unnecessary to dwell upon it. Cyprian, it is acknowledged, says, "De Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto scriptum est Et Tres Unum Sunt." See Griesb. ad loc. 1 Jo. v. 7, p. 13. And we do not wonder that any one who considers this passage alone, and is accustomed to the more accurate way of speaking of modern times, should regard this as a proof, that Cyprian's copy of the Epistle contained the Three Heavenly Witnesses. But how was this passage of Cyprian understood by those who lived near his own time, and who must, therefore, have been the best judges of the meaning of his phrases? Facundus, in the sixth century, quoting this passage from Cyprian, says expressly, that Cyprian had understood the words of the Apostle respecting the Spirit, the water and the blood, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now, the stronger the words of Cyprian are the more decisive is the proof, that the copy which Facundus used did not contain the seventh verse; for wo would ever have referred Cyprian's words to an allegory of the eighth verse, if they expressed the literal sense contained in the seventh? It must, however, be admitted, that some MSS. of the Latin, even in this age, did contain the seventh verse; for Fulgentins, writing against the Arians, quotes it, and explains Cyprian's words as an allusion to it. But as Fulgentius lived after Vigilius Tapsensis, who clearly quotes the seventh verse, his evidence adds nothing to the antiquity of the reading; and Facundus is a sufficient proof, that the words of Cyprian do not necessarily imply that it was extant in Cyprian's time.

We pass over two or three authors who use the phrase tres unum sunt, which only expresses a doctrine unquestionably then prevalent in the church, but are no proof of a quotation to reach Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons, in the fifth century. The

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