How the Trinity Got Into the New Testament

Erasmus guessed that Stunica – like him – had been unable to track down any Greek manuscript that supported 1 John 5:7. But there was another potential source; as the decisions (Acta) of the Fourth Lateran Council were known to have been translated into Greek. This would have presented any scholar with an authoritative Greek text for the verse. But – when we compare the revised Complutensian text with that in the Lateran Council Acta – they are very different.

Erasmus though had an ace up his sleeve, as his friend and ally John Clement had shown him a recently written Greek New Testament, the Codex Montfortianus, including this verse. This had been produced by Franciscan scholars, likely the gospels copied in Cambridge, and the epistles in Oxford (as that is where their manuscript sources were in 1516). And Oxford almost certainly then did house a copy of the Lateran Acta in Greek – in Duke Humfrey’s Library.

Erasmus did not trust the Codex Montfortianus – it had clearly been adjusted to the Vulgate – but he could now claim Greek authority for his text, where Stunica could not.

Erasmus’s text for 1 John 5:7 in his 3rd edition – is an exact reproduction of that in the Codex Montfortianus. Erasmus’s text for verse 8 adds the second ‘and these three are one’, which is absent in Montfortianus, but present in Erasmus’s other manuscript sources.

The copyist of Montfortianus took his text for 1 John from GA 326; a Greek manuscript of Acts and the Epistles – then as now in Lincoln College Oxford. But GA 326 lacked 1 John 5:7-8. It is possible that the copyist just back-translated these from the Vulgate on his own; but the resulting text is fairly close to that from the Lateran Council translation (including omitting the second ‘and these three are one’). Recall that from Lincoln College library it was perhaps 30 yards to the Duke Humfrey. Maybe the copyist had consulted the Lateran text there.

Whereas both the other two late medieval back-translations of these two verses from the Vulgate – GA 629 of the mid 14th Century, and the revised Complutensian text, are very different – both from one another and Montfortianus; albeit that the Complutensian also omits the second ‘and these three are one’.

My view is that two arguments from silence were driving scholarly assessment of this verse in the early 16th century.

Erasmus appears very early to have been convinced by one such argument; the silence of the Greek fathers (especially Cyril) in not citing 1 John 5:7 in support of their defence of the doctrine of the Trinity.

But at the same time, nobody before Erasmus in the Latin Church seems to have noted this as a consistent variant; Lorenzo Valla, in particular, had never recorded it. Erasmus seems to have started with the expectation that the variant, though likely not original, would nevertheless be found in some Greek manuscripts. Which indeed it was; just very rarely.

So, the Franciscan copyist of the Epistles section of Montfortianus might not have had any expectation that the Lincoln college manuscript GA 326 would lack verse 7. He may have checked in the Duke Humfrey for the authoritative Greek form of verse 8 in the Acta of the Lateran Council; but then when he inspected GA 326 in Lincoln library and found it deficient in verse 7, he chose to remedy that defect from memory.