Part VI: How Rome Changed the Book

1. THE COMMA JOHANNEUM -- A VERSE FOR THE TRINITY THAT JOHN NEVER WROTE #

KJV, 1 John 5:7-8:

"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."

The words "in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth" are NOT in the original text.

• They are absent from every early Greek manuscript. Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary counts only eight Greek manuscripts that contain them -- all late, four with the words added only in the margin.
• No Greek Church Father quotes them in the great Trinitarian battles of the fourth century -- when they would have been the perfect weapon.
• They first surface in Latin, around the 380s, in the writings of Priscillian -- the same man the Church executed for heresy in 385.
• They then crept into Latin Vulgate manuscripts and became standard in the medieval Latin Bible.
• Erasmus left them out of his first Greek New Testament (1516) and his second (1519). He added them in his third edition (1522) after a Greek manuscript containing them was produced -- Codex Montfortianus, written in England around 1520.
• LEGEND: the famous story that Erasmus "promised" to add the verse if anyone showed him a single Greek manuscript is a later legend; scholars (notably H. J. de Jonge, 1980) have shown he made no such promise. The record is simpler: the words came in late, through Latin.

And Rome? On January 13, 1897, the Holy Office in Rome -- the successor of the Inquisition -- was asked whether the authenticity of this text could safely be denied or called into doubt. Its answer, approved by Pope Leo XIII: NO. Catholic scholars were forbidden to doubt a verse that the manuscripts had already exposed. Only in 1927 did the same office quietly allow scholars to investigate.

   1 John 5:7 today:
   KJV ...... includes the Comma
   NIV ...... omits it; a footnote explains it is a late addition
   ESV ...... omits it
   NRSV ..... omits it
   NABRE .... omits it -- the CATHOLIC Bible has now removed the
              verse that Rome forbade its scholars to doubt in 1897

Rome's reply: the 1927 clarification left the question to scholars. Exactly -- after defending a forgery by decree for thirty years.

2. TWO FAMOUS PASSAGES THE EARLIEST BIBLES DO NOT HAVE #

MARK 16:9-20 -- the "long ending." This is where the risen Jesus says believers "shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them" (Mark 16:18).

• The two oldest complete Greek Bibles, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (both 4th century), end Mark at 16:8.
• Eusebius and Jerome both report that the accurate Greek copies in their day ended at 16:8.
• Modern Bibles (NIV, ESV, NRSV, NABRE) print 16:9-20 with a note or brackets saying the earliest manuscripts lack it.

JOHN 7:53-8:11 -- the woman caught in adultery. "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her" (John 8:7).

• It is absent from the earliest papyri of John (P66 and P75, c. 200) and from Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.
• Its first Greek appearance is in Codex Bezae (c. 400). Some manuscripts place it elsewhere -- after John 7:36, after John 21:25, even after Luke 21:38.

Both stories may preserve old tradition. That is not the point. The point is this: the Council of Trent (1546) declared the Latin Vulgate "authentic" and anathematized anyone who did not accept the books "entire with all their parts" -- passages like these included. Rome froze the scribes' additions into dogma.

3. "DO PENANCE" -- JEROME, ERASMUS AND LUTHER #

In Matthew 3:2 and 4:17 the Greek command is metanoeite -- "change your minds," "turn." Jerome's Latin Vulgate rendered it "paenitentiam agite" -- "do penance." The Douay-Rheims, the standard English Catholic Bible for centuries, printed: "Do penance: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

Out of that phrase grew a system: confess to a priest, receive a penance, perform satisfaction. Out of satisfaction grew purgatory accounting. Out of purgatory accounting grew the sale of indulgences (Part VII).

• In 1516 Erasmus published the Greek New Testament with a fresh Latin translation and notes. He argued that metanoeite means a change of mind -- "come to your senses" (Latin resipiscite) -- not a ritual act.
• In 1517 Martin Luther opened his Ninety-Five Theses with exactly this word: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent' (poenitentiam agite), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance." (Thesis 1)
• Thesis 2: "This word cannot be understood as referring to the sacrament of penance, that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the clergy."

One mistranslated verb. One industry. One Reformation.

4. "SHE SHALL CRUSH THY HEAD" -- GENESIS 3:15 AND THE IPSA READING #

God speaks to the serpent: the offspring of the woman will strike its head.

   Hebrew .............. hu   = "HE" (or "it" -- the offspring)
   Septuagint (Greek) .. autos = "HE"
   Vulgate (Latin) ..... ipsa = "SHE"
   Douay-Rheims ........ "she shall crush thy head"
   KJV ................. "it shall bruise thy head"
   NABRE ............... "He will strike at your head"
   Nova Vulgata (1979) . ipsum = "IT" -- Rome's own revised Latin

The Hebrew says HE (or IT). The medieval Latin said SHE -- and that SHE became Mary, crushing the serpent. Look at a thousand statues of Mary standing on a snake. Pope Pius IX cited this very verse in "Ineffabilis Deus" (1854) when he defined the Immaculate Conception.

Jerome himself, in his Hebrew Questions on Genesis, noted that the Hebrew reads "he." The "ipsa" reading spread through the Latin manuscript tradition anyway, and devotion was built on it. Rome's own Nova Vulgata finally corrected it in 1979 -- 125 years after using it to support a dogma.

And here is the Gnostic twist they never mention: in the Gnostic retellings of Eden, the serpent is not the villain at all, but the one who brings knowledge (see Part X). The verse they bent to glorify Mary was a verse about the war on knowledge.

5. PETROS AND PETRA -- THE ROCK THAT BECAME A THRONE #

"And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter (Petros), and upon this rock (petra) I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." -- Matthew 16:18 (KJV)

• Petros (masculine) is a stone; petra (feminine) is a bedrock, a cliff. Matthew uses two different words.
• The verse says nothing about Rome, nothing about successors, nothing about bishops, nothing about infallibility.
• Even within the same chapter, five verses later, Jesus says to Peter: "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me" (Matthew 16:23).
• Paul says the foundation is Christ: "For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11). And he opposed Peter "to the face, because he was to be blamed" (Galatians 2:11).
• Augustine -- Rome's greatest theologian -- wrote late in life that he had often explained "this rock" as Christ, whom Peter confessed, and left the reader to choose between that and Peter himself (Retractations 1.21).

Rome's reply: in Aramaic Jesus would have said kepha both times (compare "Cephas," John 1:42). Grant it. A rock is still not a throne, a verse is still not a dynasty, and nothing in the text puts it in Rome.

6. CLOSING THE CANON -- TRENT, 1546 #

For fifteen centuries there was no dogmatic, binding, Church-wide definition of exactly which books were Scripture. There were lists -- Athanasius (367), Hippo (393), Carthage (397), the Council of Florence's decree for the Copts (1442) -- but no anathema.

Then came the Reformation. On April 8, 1546, at its fourth session, the Council of Trent:

• fixed the canon, including the deuterocanonical books;
• declared that anyone who does not receive these books "entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition" is anathema;
• declared the Latin Vulgate the "authentic" text for public use;
• forbade anyone to interpret Scripture contrary to the sense held by "holy mother Church."

Read that last point again. The book was closed, the Latin edition was crowned, and the meaning was reserved. Three locks on one door.

7. THE INDEX OF FORBIDDEN BOOKS -- 1559 TO 1966 #

In 1559 Pope Paul IV issued the first papal Index of Forbidden Books. The Council of Trent's revised Index followed in 1564. Its fourth rule held that reading the Bible in the vernacular, without written permission, did more harm than good, and required a license from a bishop or inquisitor.

• The 1559 Index placed ALL the works of Erasmus on the list.
• Copernicus' "On the Revolutions" was suspended "until corrected" in 1616; Galileo's "Dialogue" was banned in 1633.
• The Index went through many editions, the last in 1948, and was abolished only in 1966.

For four hundred and seven years, the Church kept an official list of what you were not allowed to read.

8. KEEPING THE BIBLE FROM THE PEOPLE #

• COUNCIL OF TOULOUSE, 1229, canon 14 -- held in the wake of the Albigensian Crusade: "We prohibit also that the laity should be permitted to have the books of the Old or the New Testament; unless anyone from motive of devotion should wish to have the Psalter or the Breviary for divine offices or the hours of the blessed Virgin; but we most strictly forbid their having any translation of these books."
• THE ARUNDEL CONSTITUTIONS, drafted at Oxford in 1407 and issued in 1409 under Archbishop Thomas Arundel: no one may translate Scripture into English on his own authority, and no one may read any such translation made "in the time of John Wycliffe" or since, until it is approved by the bishop. Owning a Wycliffe Bible became evidence of heresy.
• WILLIAM TYNDALE translated the New Testament from Greek into English (1526). The Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall, had copies bought up and burned at St Paul's. Tyndale was arrested near Antwerp in 1535, condemned as a heretic, strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in October 1536. Tradition gives his last words as "Lord, open the King of England's eyes" -- that comes from John Foxe's martyrology; treat it as tradition, not transcript.

Rome's reply: the bans targeted unapproved translations, not Scripture itself. That is the point. Approved by whom? The same men whose doctrines the translations exposed.

Seventy-five years after Tyndale's death, in 1611, scholars estimate that well over three-quarters of the King James New Testament followed his wording. They killed the man and kept his words.

9. THE DONATION OF CONSTANTINE -- A FORGERY THAT BUILT AN EMPIRE #

The "Donation of Constantine" claims that the Emperor Constantine, cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester I, handed the pope imperial honors and authority over Rome and the western provinces.

• It is a forgery, most likely composed in the eighth century.
• Pope Leo IX quoted it in his letter to Patriarch Michael Cerularius (1053-54) -- in the very conflict that produced the East-West schism.
• It was copied into collections of canon law and used for centuries to support papal claims to temporal power.
• In 1440 the Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla proved it false with linguistic evidence: its Latin was centuries too late for Constantine, and it spoke of Constantinople as a leading see before Constantinople existed.

The papacy's temporal power was propped up for centuries on a document that Constantine never wrote.

10. THE PSEUDO-ISIDORIAN DECRETALS -- FORGED PAPAL LAW #

Around the middle of the ninth century (c. 847-852), in the Frankish kingdom, someone writing as "Isidore Mercator" produced a huge collection of church law. Mixed in with genuine material were dozens of forged letters attributed to the earliest popes, from Clement I onward.

• The forgeries exalted the authority of the bishop of Rome and protected bishops from local rulers and synods.
• They flowed into later canon law, including Gratian's Decretum (c. 1140), the foundation of medieval Church law.
• Their falsity was exposed by Protestant scholars of the Magdeburg Centuries (from 1559) and decisively by David Blondel in 1628. No serious historian, Catholic or otherwise, defends them today.

SCORECARD: HOW THE BOOK WAS CHANGED #

   CHANGE                          WHAT IT SERVED            EXPOSED BY
   ------------------------------  ------------------------  -------------
   Comma Johanneum (1 Jn 5:7)      Trinity proof-text        manuscripts;
                                                             even NABRE
   Mark 16:9-20, John 7:53-8:11    canonized by Trent        Sinaiticus,
                                                             Vaticanus
   "Do penance" (Matt 3:2)         penance, indulgences      Erasmus 1516
   "ipsa" -- she (Gen 3:15)        Marian dogma              Hebrew text
   Petros / petra (Matt 16:18)     papal primacy             Greek text
   Vulgate "authentic" (1546)      frozen Latin errors       Greek, Hebrew
   Index (1559-1966)               control of reading        abolished
   Vernacular bans (1229, 1409)    clerical monopoly         Tyndale
   Donation of Constantine         temporal power            Valla 1440
   Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals      papal law                 Blondel 1628