1.2.2.5
1 John 5:7
The only verses in the whole Bible that explicitly ties God,
Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in one "Triune" being is the verse of
1 John 5:7
"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the
Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."
This is the type of clear, decisive, and
to-the-point verse I have been asking for. However, as I would
later find out, this verse is now universally recognized as
being a later "insertion" of the Church and all recent versions
of the Bible, such as the Revised Standard Version the New
Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible, the
New English Bible, the Phillips Modern English Bible ...etc.
have all unceremoniously expunged this verse from their pages.
Why is this? The scripture translator Benjamin Wilson gives the
following explanation for this action in his "Emphatic
Diaglott." Mr. Wilson says:
"This text concerning the heavenly witness is not
contained in any Greek manuscript which was written earlier than
the fifteenth century. It is not cited by any of the
ecclesiastical writers; not by any of early Latin fathers even
when the subjects upon which they treated would naturally have
lead them to appeal to it's authority. It is therefore evidently
spurious."
Others, such as the late Dr. Herbert W. Armstrong argued that
this verse was added to the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible
during the heat of the controversy between Rome, Arius,
and God's people. Whatever the reason, this verse is now
universally recognized as an insertion and discarded. Since the
Bible contains no verses validating a "Trinity"
therefore, centuries after the departure of Jesus, God chose to
inspire someone to insert this verse in order to clarify the
true nature of God as being a "Trinity." Notice how mankind was
being inspired as to how to "clarify" the Bible centuries after
the departure of Jesus (pbuh). People continued to put words in
the mouths of Jesus, his disciples, and even God himself with no
reservations whatsoever. They were being "inspired" (see chapter
two).
If these people were being "inspired" by God, I wondered,
then why did they need to put these words into other
people's mouths (in our example, in the mouth of John). Why did
they not just openly say "God inspired me and I will add a
chapter to the Bible in my name"? Also, why did
God need to wait till after the departure of Jesus to "inspire"
his "true" nature? Why not let Jesus (pbuh) say it himself?
The great luminary of Western literature, Mr. Edward Gibbon,
explains the reason for the discardal of this verse from the
pages of the Bible with the following words:
"Of all the manuscripts now extant, above fourscore in
number, some of which are more than 1200 years old, the orthodox
copies of the Vatican, of the Complutensian editors, of Robert
Stephens are becoming invisible; and the two manuscripts of
Dublin and Berlin are unworthy to form an exception...In the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Bibles were corrected by
LanFrank, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicholas, a cardinal
and librarian of the Roman church, secundum Ortodoxam fidem.
Notwithstanding these corrections, the passage is still wanting
in twenty-five Latin manuscripts, the oldest and fairest; two
qualities seldom united, except in manuscripts....The three
witnesses have been established in our Greek Testaments by the
prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian
editors; the typographical fraud, or error, of Robert Stephens
in the placing of a crotchet and the deliberate falsehood, or
strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza."
"Decline and fall of the Roman Empire," IV, Gibbon,
p. 418.
Edward Gibbon was defended in his
findings by his contemporary, the brilliant British scholar
Richard Porson who also proceeded to publish devastatingly
conclusive proof that the verse of 1 John 5:7 was only first
inserted by the Church into the Bible in the year
400C.E.(Secrets of Mount Sinai, James Bentley, pp. 30-33).
Regarding Porson's most devastating proof, Mr. Gibbon
later said
"His structures are founded in argument, enriched with
learning, and enlivened with wit, and his adversary neither
deserves nor finds any quarter at his hands. The evidence of the
three heavenly witnesses would now be rejected in any court of
justice; but prejudice is blind, authority is deaf, and our
vulgar Bibles will ever be polluted by this spurious text."
To which Mr. Bentley responds:
"In fact, they are not. No modern Bible now contains the
interpolation."
Mr. Bentley, however, is mistaken. Indeed, just as Mr. Gibbon
had predicted, the simple fact that the most learned scholars of
Christianity now unanimously recognize this verse to be a later
interpolation of the Church has not prevented the preservation
of this fabricated text in our modern Bibles. To this day, the
Bible in the hands of the majority of Christians, the "King
James" Bible, still unhesitantly includes this verse as the
"inspired" word of God without so much as a footnote to inform
the reader that all scholars of Christianity of note unanimously
recognize it as a later fabrication.
Peake's Commentary on the Bible says
"The famous interpolation after 'three witnesses' is not
printed even in RSVn, and rightly. It cites the heavenly
testimony of the Father, the logos, and the Holy Spirit, but is
never used in the early Trinitarian controversies. No
respectable Greek MS contains it. Appearing first in a late
4th-cent. Latin text, it entered the Vulgate and finally the NT
of Erasmus."
It was only the horrors of the great inquisitions which held
back Sir Isaac Newton from
openly revealing these facts to all:
"In all the vehement universal and lasting controversy
about the Trinity in Jerome's time and both before and long
enough after it, the text of the 'three in heaven' was never
once thought of. It is now in everybody's mouth and accounted
the main text for the business and would assuredly have been so
too with them, had it been in their books� Let them make good
sense of it who are able. For my part I can make none. If it be
said that we are not to determine what is scripture and what not
by our private judgments, I confess it in places not
controverted, but in disputed places I love to take up with what
I can best understand. It is the temper of the hot and
superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be
fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they
understand least. Such men may use the Apostle John as they
please, but I have that honor for him as to believe that he
wrote good sense and therefore take that to be his which is the
best"
Jesus, Prophet of Islam, Muhammad Ata' Ur-Rahim, p. 156
According to Newton, this verse first
appeared for in the third edition of Erasmus's
(1466-1536) New Testament.
For all of the above reasons, we find that when thirty two
biblical scholars backed by fifty cooperating Christian
denominations got together to compile the Revised Standard
Version of the Bible based upon the most ancient Biblical
manuscripts available to them today, they made some very
extensive changes. Among these changes was the unceremonious
discardal of the verse of 1 John 5:7 as the fabricated insertion
that it is. For more on the compilation of the RSV Bible, please
read the preface of any modern copy of that Bible.
Such comparatively unimportant matters as the description of
Jesus (pbuh) riding an ass (or was it a "colt", or was it an
"ass and a colt"? see point 42 in the table of section 2.2) into
Jerusalem are spoken about in great details since they are the
fulfillment of a prophesy. For instance, in Mark 11:2-10 we
read:
"And saith unto them, Go your way into the village over
against you: and as soon as ye be entered into it, ye shall find
a colt tied, whereon never man sat; loose him, and bring [him].
And if any man say unto you, Why do ye this? say ye that the
Lord hath need of him; and straightway he will send him hither.
And they went their way, and found the colt tied by the door
without in a place where two ways met; and they loose him And
certain of them that stood there said unto them, What do ye,
loosing the colt? And they said unto them even as Jesus had
commanded: and they let them go And they brought the colt to
Jesus, and cast their garments on him; and he sat upon him. And
many spread their garments in the way: and others cut down
branches off the trees, and strawed [them] in the way And they
that went before, and they that followed, cried, saying,
Hosanna; Blessed [is] he that cometh in the name of the Lord:
Blessed [be] the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the
name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest."
Also see Luke 19:30-38 which has a similar detailed
description of this occurrence. On the other hand, the Bible is
completely free of any description of the "Trinity"
which is supposedly a description of the very nature of the one
who rode this ass, who is claimed to be the only son of God,
and who allegedly died for the sins of all of mankind. I found
myself asking the question: If every aspect of Christian faith
is described in such detail such that even the description of
this ass is so vividly depicted for us, then why is the same not
true for the description of the "Trinity"? Sadly, however, it is
a question for which there is no logical answer.
Once again, here is the table:
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