An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture is a dissertation by the English mathematician and scholar Sir Isaac Newton. First published in 1754, 27 years after his death, it claimed to review all the textual evidence available from ancient sources on two disputed Bible passages: 1 John 5:7 and 1 Timothy 3:16.
Newton describes this letter as "an account of what the reading has been in all ages, and what steps it has been changed, as far as I can hitherto determine by records",[1] and "a criticism concerning a text of Scripture".[2] He blames "the Roman church" for many abuses in the world[1] and accuses it of "pious frauds".[2] He adds that "the more learned and quick-sighted men, as Luther, Erasmus, Bullinger, Grotius, and some others, would not dissemble their knowledge".[3]
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In the King James Version Bible, 1 John 5:7 reads:
Using the handpicked writings of the early Church Fathers, the Greek and Latin manuscripts and the testimony of the first versions of the Bible, Newton claims to have demonstrated that the words "in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one," in support of the Trinity doctrine, did not appear in the original Greek Scriptures. He then attempts to demonstrate that the purportedly spurious reading crept into the Latin versions, first as a marginal note, and later into the text itself. He noted that "the Æthiopic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, and Slavonic versions, still in use in the several Eastern nations, Ethiopia, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Muscovy, and some others, are strangers to this reading".[4] He argued[5] that it was first taken into a Greek text in 1515 by Cardinal Ximenes on the strength of a late Greek manuscript 'corrected' from the Latin. Finally, Newton considered the sense and context of the verse, concluding that removing the interpolation makes "the sense plain and natural, and the argument full and strong; but if you insert the testimony of 'the Three in Heaven' you interrupt and spoil it."[6] Today most versions of the Bible omit this verse, or retain it as only a marginal reading.
The shorter portion of Newton's dissertation was concerned with 1 Timothy 3:16, which reads (in the King James Version):
Newton argued that, by a small alteration in the Greek text, the word "God" was substituted to make the phrase read "God was manifest in the flesh." instead of "He was manifest in the flesh." He demonstrated that early Church writers in referring to the verse knew nothing of such an alteration.[7]
Newton concludes: "If the ancient churches in debating and deciding the greatest mysteries of religion, knew nothing of these two texts, I understand not, why we should be so fond of them now the debates are over."[8] It was only in the nineteenth century that Bible translations appeared correcting these passages. Modern versions of the Bible usually omit the addition to 1 John 5:7, but some place it in a footnote, with a comment indicating that 'it is not found in the earliest manuscripts'.[9] Modern translations of 1 Timothy 3:16 now typically replace "God" with the correct "He".[10]
Newton did not publish these findings during his lifetime, likely due to the political climate. Those who wrote against the doctrine of the Trinity were subject to persecution in England. The Blasphemy Act 1697 made it an offence to deny one of the persons of the Trinity to be God, punishable with loss of office and employment on the first occasion, further legal ramifications on the second occasion, and imprisonment without hope for bail on the third occasion. Newton's friend William Whiston (translator of the works of Josephus) lost his professorship at Cambridge for this reason in 1711. In 1693 a pamphlet attacking the Trinity was burned by order of the House of Lords, and the next year its printer and author were prosecuted. In 1697 Thomas Aikenhead, an eighteen-year-old student charged with denying the Trinity, was hanged at Edinburgh, Scotland.
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