"The Bible's teaching about Christ", by Viktor Rydberg (1862) (Part 19)
When Vigilius wrote this, the church that he belonged to was in the most difficult tribulation. The Arian Vandals were lords in Africa and had got a king in Hunnerik, who fanatically persecuted the ortodoxes.** Called to a synod in Carthage, they were called upon to prove their Trinity doctrine's compatibility with the Bible. In their distress they then resorted to the testimony which Idacius put in the apostle John's mouth. Maybe they had some handwriting to demonstrate, in which the words of »Idacius« were insmuggled.*** Hunnerik answered this attempt to falsification of the biblical text by dissolving the meeting and besieging several of the orthodox bishops with severe punishments. - But was the forgery, on the one hand, so clumsily done that it in everyone should arouse suspicion - »Idacius» had not only inserted a verse of his own, but also reworked the real Johannine verse about the three witnesses**** - so had, however, on the other hand, the habit of the symbolic interpretation of the words "the spirit, the water and the blood" made easier its introduction into the text, and the weapon thus obtained to the protection of the contested doctrine of the Trinity was considered way too necessary to waste. The spurious verse entered into more and more African manuscripts of the Latin New Testament and subsequently infected the Spanish and Italian manuscripts. However, only after the Lateran meeting in 1215 it obtained a more general reputation. That it in the sixteenth century received papal sanction, has already been mentioned.
When the Lutheran theologians, after Luther's death, insmuggled the false words in his translation of the New Testament, they invoked the learned Erasmus' of Rotterdam authority. Erasmus, who excluded them from the first two by him edited editions of the Greek New Testament, had namely, pressed by the church, been prompted to introduce them in his third edition (of the year 1522). The reasons he, in a defense writing, »Apologia ad Stunicam», shows for this change is probably the simplest one can imagine. He namely writes: »By the Englishmen is found a Greek codex*****, which contains the verse of the three witnesses in heaven. Out of this British codex we have taken what was said to be wrong in our, so that one would have no reason to slander us, although I suspect that this codex has also been chastised to conform with that of the Latinists.» –
* In the original language: »Johannes evangelista ad Parthos Tres sunt, inquit, qui testimonium perhibent in terra, aqua sanguis et caro et tres in nobis sant; et tres sunt, qui testimonium perhibent in coelo, pater, verbum et spiritus, et hi tres unum sunt.»
** At least according to their own stories. Generally the Arians distinguished themselves for tolerance, which deserves all the greater recognition, as the opponents did everything to forfeit their right thereto.
*** It would not then be the only time, when the African church has been guilty of such things. Also St. Athanasius' confession is considered to have been written by a fellow-countryman of Vigilius. The confession, which is originally written in Latin, does not appear in the oldest manuscripts that we own of Athanasius' works; no church father before the sixth century hints at its existence; Athanasius' own mother church, the Greek, which did not know the confession before the year 1000, has denied its authenticity, and also in the western church people only in the eighth century started to claim Athanasius to be its author.
**** Also this reworking has flowed into one or another latin codex. Hence it can be explained that one of these manuscripts, which we quoted in a note, p. 32, has, like Vigilius, the word flesh instead of spirit.
***** By this he means the one by us previously mentioned Dublin manuscript, which is only a few years older than Erasmus' own edition.
