Re: [TruthTalk] Fw: Rikk Watts on Genesis 1

Wed, 11 May 2005 19:34:38 -0700

They are all WISHFUL thinking and fancy footwork in Latin
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2005 9:05 PM
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk] Fw: Rikk Watts on Genesis 1

Those quotes ARE NOT real.

Don't try to read these works they are not real:

"The Lord says, 'I and the Father are one' and likewise it is written of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 'And these three are one'." Cyprian Treatises 1 5:423

As John says "and there are three which give testimony on earth, the water, the flesh, the blood, and these three are in one, and there are three which give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one in Christ Jesus." Priscillian (385 AD) Liber Apologeticus

"And John the Evangelist says, . . . 'And there are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one'." Varimadum 90:20-21 (380AD)

Grammar problem of non existant "comma" discussed in 390AD ". . . (he has not been consistent) in the way he has happened upon his terms; for after using Three in the masculine gender he adds three words which are neuter, contrary to the definitions and laws which you and your grammarians have laid down. For what is the difference between putting a masculine Three first, and then adding One and One and One in the neuter, or after a masculine One and One and One to use the Three not in the masculine but in the neuter, which you yourselves disclaim in the case of Deity?" Gregory of Nazianzus Fifth Orientation the Holy Spirit (390 AD)

So somebody made them up? All of these? Who was this mystery man?

The story about Erasmus promising to insert it in his third edition is the Fable even your wonderful Metzger admits such  Dr. Bruce Metzger, this story is apocryphal (The Text Of The New Testament, 291).

SO here are some who qouted:

Cyprian (258 AD)

The Varimadum (380 AD)

Cassian (435 AD) Cassiodorus (580 AD)

Speculum (or m of 450 AD)

Victor of Vita (489 AD)

Victor Vitensis (485 AD)

Codex Freisingensis (of 500 AD)

Fulgentius (533 AD)

Isidore of Seville (636 AD)

Codex Pal Legionensis (650 AD)

Jaqub of Edessa (700 AD)

I bet you think these do not exist either:

Apostle's Creed used by the Waldenses and Albigensians of the twelfth century.

The early Latin manuscripts which date from the second, third, and forth centuries.

Editions of the Vulgate (forth century).

Old Latin manuscripts, such as m (ninth century) and r (seventh/eighth century).

Caroline Wong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Kevin, you are misinformed from erroneus sources. Those quotes ARE NOT real. People just wanted those verses to exist so they saw (and manufactured) evidence that DO NOT exist.
Please read the following from Wallace: The Comma Johanneum and Cyprian.
 

A friend recently wrote to me about the KJV reading of 1 John 5:7-8. He noted that I had not mentioned Cyprian in my essay on this text and that some KJV only folks claimed that Cyprian actually quoted the form that appears in the KJV (“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 question is, Did Cyprian quote a version of 1 John that had the Trinitarian formula of 1 John 5:7 in it? This would, of course, be significant, for Cyprian lived in the third century; he would effectively be the earliest known writer to quote the Comma Johanneum. Before we look at Cyprian per se, a little background is needed. The Comma occurs only in about 8 MSS, mostly in the margins, and all of them quite late. Metzger, in his Textual Commentary (2nd edition), after commenting on the Greek MS testimony, says this (p. 648):

(2) The passage is quoted in none of the Greek Fathers, who, had they known it, would most certainly have employed it in the Trinitarian controversies (Sabellian and Arian). Its first appearance in Greek is in a Greek version of the (Latin) Acts of the Lateran Council in 1215.

(3) The passage is absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Slavonic), except the Latin; and it is not found (a) in the Old Latin in its early form (Tertullian Cyprian Augustine), or in the Vulgate (b) as issued by Jerome ... or (c) as revised by Alcuin...

The earliest instance of the passage being quoted as a part of the actual text of the Epistle [italics added] is in a fourth century Latin treatise entitled Liber Apologeticus (chap. 4), attributed either to the Spanish heretic Priscillian (died about 385) or to his follower Bishop Instantius. Apparently the gloss arose when the original passage was understood to symbolize the Trinity (through the mention of three witnesses: the Spirit, the water, and the blood), an interpretation that may have been written first as a marginal note that afterwards found its way into the text.

Thus, a careful distinction needs to be made between the actual text used by Cyprian and his theological interpretations. As Metzger says, the Old Latin text used by Cyprian shows no evidence of this gloss. On the other side of the ledger, however, Cyprian does show evidence of putting a theological spin on 1 John 5:7. In his De catholicae ecclesiae unitate 6, he says, “The Lord says, ‘I and the Father are one’; and again it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, ‘And these three are one.’” What is evident is that Cyprian’s interpretation of 1 John 5:7 is that the three witnesses refer to the Trinity. Apparently, he was prompted to read such into the text here because of the heresies he was fighting (a common indulgence of the early patristic writers). Since John 10:30 triggered the ‘oneness’ motif, and involved Father and Son, it was a natural step for Cyprian to find another text that spoke of the Spirit, using the same kind of language. It is quite significant, however, that (a) he does not quote ‘of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit’ as part of the text; this is obviously his interpretation of ‘the Spirit, the water, and the blood.’ (b) Further, since the statement about the Trinity in the Comma is quite clear (“the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit”), and since Cyprian does not quote that part of the text, this in the least does not afford proof that he knew of such wording. One would expect him to quote the exact wording of the text, if its meaning were plain. That he does not do so indicates that a Trinitarian interpretation was superimposed on the text by Cyprian, but he did not changed the words. It is interesting that Michael Maynard, a TR advocate who has written a fairly thick volume defending the Comma (A History of the Debate over 1 John 5:7-8 [Tempe, AZ: Comma Publications, 1995] 38), not only quotes from this passage but also speaks of the significance of Cyprian’s comment, quoting Kenyon’s Textual Criticism of the New Testament (London: Macmillan, 1912), 212: “Cyprian is regarded as one ‘who quotes copiously and textually’.” The quotation from Kenyon is true, but quite beside the point, for Cyprian’s quoted material from 1 John 5 is only the clause, “and these three are one”—the wording of which occurs in the Greek text, regardless of how one views the Comma.

Thus, that Cyprian interpreted 1 John 5:7-8 to refer to the Trinity is likely; but that he saw the Trinitarian formula in the text is rather unlikely. Further, one of the great historical problems of regarding the Comma as authentic is how it escaped all Greek witnesses for a millennium and a half. That it at first shows up in Latin, starting with Priscillian in c. 380 (as even the hard evidence provided by Maynard shows), explains why it is not found in the early or even the majority of Greek witnesses. All the historical data point in one of two directions: (1) This reading was a gloss added by Latin patristic writers whose interpretive zeal caused them to insert these words into Holy Writ; or (2) this interpretation was a gloss, written in the margins of some Latin MSS, probably sometime between 250 and 350, that got incorporated into the text by a scribe who was not sure whether it was a comment on scripture or scripture itself (a phenomenon that was not uncommon with scribes).

----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:15 PM
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk] Fw: Rikk Watts on Genesis 1

It is a VERY SIMPLE QUESTION!
If the JH did not exist before Erasamus, how did Church fathers quote the non existant text starting 1200 years earlier?
 
If the Johanine Commatext (1 Jn 5:7-8)  did not exist before Erasmus. Please explain how a good number of Church fathers quoted it all the way back to 300AD. Magic? ESP? Or you are in error?
 
NO ANSWER??????????

Caroline Wong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Another extended quote from Wallace (b/c I could not be type all this out)
 

This longer reading is found only in eight late manuscripts, four of which have the words in a marginal note. Most of these manuscripts (2318, 221, and [with minor variations] 61, 88, 429, 629, 636, and 918) originate from the 16th century; the earliest manuscript, codex 221 (10th century), includes the reading in a marginal note which was added sometime after the original composition. Thus, there is no sure evidence of this reading in any Greek manuscript until the 1500s; each such reading was apparently composed after Erasmus’ Greek NT was published in 1516. Indeed, the reading appears in no Greek witness of any kind (either manuscript, patristic, or Greek translation of some other version) until AD 1215 (in a Greek translation of the Acts of the Lateran Council, a work originally written in Latin). This is all the more significant, since many a Greek Father would have loved such a reading, for it so succinctly affirms the doctrine of the Trinity.2 The reading seems to have arisen in a fourth century Latin homily in which the text was allegorized to refer to members of the Trinity. From there, it made its way into copies of the Latin Vulgate, the text used by the Roman Catholic Church.

The Trinitarian formula (known as the Comma Johanneum) made its way into the third edition of Erasmus’ Greek NT (1522) because of pressure from the Catholic Church. After his first edition appeared (1516), there arose such a furor over the absence of the Comma that Erasmus needed to defend himself. He argued that he did not put in the Comma because he found no Greek manuscripts that included it. Once one was produced (codex 61, written by one Roy or Froy at Oxford in c. 1520),3 Erasmus apparently felt obliged to include the reading. He became aware of this manuscript sometime between May of 1520 and September of 1521. In his annotations to his third edition he does not protest the rendering now in his text,4 as though it were made to order; but he does defend himself from the charge of indolence, noting that he had taken care to find whatever manuscripts he could for the production of his Greek New Testament. In the final analysis, Erasmus probably altered the text because of politico-theologico-economic concerns: he did not want his reputation ruined, nor his Novum Instrumentum to go unsold.

----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 10:44 AM
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk] Fw: Rikk Watts on Genesis 1

If the Johanine Commatext (1 Jn 5:7-8)  did not exist before Erasmus. Please explain how a good number of Church fathers quoted it all the way back to 300AD. Magic? ESP? Or you are in error?

Caroline Wong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I thought about posting a long post explaining textural variants in the Hebrew texts, the making of the Septuagint, what is considered the most reliable version of the Septuagint today, the Hebrew texts KJV translators used and the differences between them, Jewish criticism of the translations, but then I thought, oh why bother?
 
I (and many others) are fully convinced that no translation is error free but the modern ones are very good. We've looked into the matter and decided the KJV is inferior.
 
I'll throw in a paragraph by Daniel B. Wallace, PhD. for free (because I don't have to type it out :-) Read it or not, I don't care.
 

Second, the Greek text which stands behind the King James Bible is demonstrably inferior in certain places. The man who edited the text was a Roman Catholic priest and humanist named Erasmus.[1] He was under pressure to get it to the press as soon as possible since (a) no edition of the Greek New Testament had yet been published, and (b) he had heard that Cardinal Ximenes and his associates were just about to publish an edition of the Greek New Testament and he was in a race to beat them. Consequently, his edition has been called the most poorly edited volume in all of literature! It is filled with hundreds of typographical errors which even Erasmus would acknowledge. Two places deserve special mention. In the last six verses of Revelation, Erasmus had no Greek manuscript (=MS) (he only used half a dozen, very late MSS for the whole New Testament any way). He was therefore forced to ‘back-translate’ the Latin into Greek and by so doing he created seventeen variants which have never been found in any other Greek MS of Revelation! He merely guessed at what the Greek might have been. Secondly, for 1 John 5:7-8, Erasmus followed the majority of MSS in reading “there are three witnesses in heaven, the Spirit and the water and the blood.” However, there was an uproar in some Roman Catholic circles because his text did not read “there are three witnesses in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit.” Erasmus said that he did not put that in the text because he found no Greek MSS which had that reading. This implicit challenge—viz., that if he found such a reading in any Greek MS, he would put it in his text—did not go unnoticed. In 1520, a scribe at Oxford named Roy made such a Greek MS (codex 61, now in Dublin). Erasmus’ third edition had the second reading because such a Greek MS was ‘made to order’ to fill the challenge! To date, only a handful of Greek MSS have been discovered which have the Trinitarian formula in 1 John 5:7-8, though none of them is demonstrably earlier than the sixteenth century.


[1] Now a humanist in the sixteenth century is not the same as a humanist today. Erasmus was generally tolerant of other viewpoints, and was particularly interested in the humanities. Although he was a friend of Melanchthon, Luther’s right-hand man, Luther did not care for him.

----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 10:41 PM
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk] Fw: Rikk Watts on Genesis 1

There is a mountain of evidence that the KJV is not the best English translation
 
Like the mythological Septuagint, we are still looking for?
 
"Mountain of evidence" of which by the way you have provided only three very questionable examples! What was that one about cattle that was a classic, could you resend that?

Caroline Wong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi Terry and Izzy;
 
It boils down to faith. I know a little of philosophy, a little theology, a little church history and I know how trends in thinking and beliefs change over time and in different cultures. Faith is what keeps me going when things are dark and uncertain and I've just learned something that I wished I never knew. Faith assures me this is not the end even when others abandon the journey at the very way station I'm at. Faith can blithely park anomalous data for decades just in the off chance that some day it will make sense. Faith keeps my eyes on Christ as I shift around jigsaw pieces of hell, election, freewill, suffering, joy, grace, works etc.
 
Most people operate the same way. There is a mountain of evidence that the KJV is not the best English translation but by faith many say it is. There is evidence all over that God has abandoned some children to hideous suffering but by faith we say He has not. Logically, no one can be both 100% God and 100% man at the same time but by faith, we declare Jesus Christ is exactly that. Rationally, three Gods in one is nonsensical but by faith we relate to all three distinctively and as one.
 
I've know the stories of Christians who persevered despite all odds, even to a martyr's death. I know some who met up with evidence that was beyond reasonable doubt and they walked away from Christianity. (ex. Charles Templeton). My pastor is fond of saying to me "Fides quarens intellectum" which is Latin for "faith seeking understanding". That is what theology is. It is not to explain Christianity so that we can believe. As Augustine said, "I believe in order that I may understand."
 
So in summary, my main objection to your assertion that if someone proved Jesus is false, then it would be logical to stop believing is this: there is no room in my faith for such a thought. It is like asking me "is yellow circular?" or "are circles cold?" or "are my cats pious?" :-)
 
I know this is kind of long and I hope it makes sense. I hope this will also show why the Mormon people and the Canadians are so resistant to your arguments.
 
Love,
 
Caroline
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 7:24 AM
Subject: Re: [TruthTalk] Fw: Rikk Watts on Genesis 1

Caroline Wong wrote:
I consider myself Christian. There are tons of definitions of Evangelical. The simplest is a person who belongs to an Evangelical denomination. I define it as a person who tells another the good news.
 
BTW, was it you who said that if someone proved to you Jesus was false, you would stop believing? (I think it was in relation to the LDS people and Joseph Smith) I was completely stunned by that post and not sure if I read it right.
 
Love,
 
Caroline
================================================================
If you had absolute proof that Jesus was not the Savior, you would be out of your mind to continue to believe.  I am a realist.  I have examined the evidence.  Jesus is real!!!
Terry

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