Johannine Comma and Codex Montfortianus

From Textus Receptus

Codex Montfortianus

Comma Johanneum in Codex Montfortianus. It reads: ὁτϊ τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτϋροῦντ·¨ ἐν τῶ ουνω, πηρ, λογος, καί πνα αγῖον, καί οὗτοι οἱ τρεῖς εν εισϊ. καί τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτϋροῦντ·¨ ἐν τῃ γῃ, πνα, ὑδωρ, καί αιμα.

Codex Montfortianus reads:

ὁτϊ τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτϋροῦντ·¨ ἐν τῶ ουνω, πηρ, λογος, καί πνα αγῖον, καί οὗτοι οἱ τρεῖς εν εισϊ. καί τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτϋροῦντ·¨ ἐν τῃ γῃ, πνα, ὑδωρ, καί αιμα.

Codex Montfortianus and Beza's 1598 compared:

Minuscule 61	Beza 1598
ὁτϊ	ὅτι
τρεῖς	τρεῖς
εἰσιν	εἰσιν
οἱ	οἱ
μαρτϋροῦντ·¨	μαρτυροῦντες
ἐν	εν
τῶ	τῷ
ουνω,	οὐρανῷ,
	ὁ
πηρ	πατήρ
	ὁ
λογος,	λόγος,
καί	καὶ
	τὸ
πνα	ἅγιον
αγῖον,	Πνεῦμα·
καί	καὶ
οὗτοι	οὗτοι
οἱ	οἱ
τρεῖς	τρεῖς
εν	ἕν
εισϊ.	εἰσι·

Adam Clarke

Adam Clarke said of Codex Montfortianus:

The Codex Montfortii, or Codex Dubliniensis, cited by Erasmus, under the title of Codex Britannicus, in Trinity College, Dublin. This may be said to be the only genuine MS. which contains this text; as no advocate of the sacred doctrine contained in the disputed passage would wish to lay any stress whatever on such evidence as the two preceding ones afford. Michaelis roundly asserts, vol. iv., page 417, of his Introductory Lectures, that this MS. was written after the year 1500. This, I scruple not to affirm, is a perfectly unguarded assertion, and what no man can prove. ln 1790 I examined this MS. myself, and though I thought it to be comparatively modern, yet I had no doubt that it existed before the invention of printing, and was never written with an intention to deceive. I am rather inclined to think it the work of an unknown bold critic, who formed a text from one or more MSS. in conjunction with the Vulgate, and was by no means sparing of his own conjectural emendations; for it contains many various readings which exist in no other MS. yet discovered. But how far the writer has in any place faithfully copied the text of any ancient MS. is more than can be determined. To give the reader a fair view of this subject, I here subjoin what I hope I may call a perfect fac-simile of the seventh and eighth verses, as they exist in this MS., copied by the accurate hand of the Rev. Dr. Barrett, the present learned librarian of Trinity College.

Codex Montfortianus reads "Holy Spirit" instead of "Spirit" as the Textus Receptus reads. (The articles are also missing before the three earthly witnesses - spirit, water, blood.)

James Snapp

Erasmus’ first (1516) and second (1519) editions of the Greek New Testament did not include the Comma Johanneum in the text of First John. The Comma Johanneum, which refers to the Father, Word, and Holy Spirit as three heavenly witnesses, had become very popular in Europe due to its inclusion in medieval editions of the Vulgate. Some scholars (especially Edward Lee and Jacobus Stunica) protested against Erasmus’ non-inclusion of the Comma Johanneum. The late Bruce Metzger wrote that in response, “In an unguarded moment Erasmus promised that he would insert the Comma Johanneum, as it is called, in future editions if a single Greek manuscript could be found that contained the passage.” James White has similarly stated that “Erasmus had promised, in his response to Lee, to include the passage should a Greek manuscript be found that contained it.”

That story has been circulated by many commentators. (Even Samuel Tregelles spread this story, back in the 1800’s.) However, researcher Henk de Jonge, via a detailed direct study of the relevant compositions, has shown that Erasmus never made the promise described by Metzger, White, and many others. Instead, Erasmus, in a letter written in May of 1520, in the course of explaining why he had not included the Comma Johanneum, stated, “If a single manuscript had come into my hands which attested to what we read [in the Vulgate], then I would certainly have used it to fill in what was missing in the other manuscripts I had.”

Erasmus also stated that Edward Lee did not have a valid reason to accuse Erasmus of negligence in this regard; de Jonge provides Erasmus’ retort: “What sort of indolence is that, if I did not consult the manuscripts which I could not manage to have? At least, I collected as many as I could. Let Lee produce a Greek manuscript in which are written the words lacking in my edition, and let him prove that I had access to this manuscript, and then let him accuse me of indolence.”

Shortly after this exchange between Edward Lee and Desiderius Erasmus, the existence of Codex Montfortianus, and the inclusion of the Comma Johanneum in its text of First John, were pointed out to Erasmus. Erasmus never made a promise to include the Comma Johanneum in a future edition of the Greek New Testament if a Greek manuscript containing it could be found; he merely insisted that he could not validly be accused of omitting it in his first two editions due to negligence, because he had not found it in the manuscripts accessible to him. However, it is also clear that because of Erasmus’ statement that he would have included the Comma Johanneum if he had found it in a single manuscript, Erasmus could easily anticipate in 1522 that if he were to omit the Comma Johanneum in his third edition, after being informed of the existence of a Greek manuscript that contained the passage, he would certainly be accused of inconsistency, having already stated that if he had possessed a single Greek manuscript with the passage, he would have included it.

Erasmus consequently included the Comma Johanneum in subsequent editions (with some adjustments to its text). It was also included in the editions of Stephanus and Beza later in the 1500’s – and thus it was in the base-text used by the translators of the Geneva Bible and the King James Version. So although minuscule 61 is relatively unimportant as far as most other passages of the New Testament are concerned, in First John 5:7-8 its impact has been enormous.

J. Rendel Harris, in 1887, proposed that Codex Montfortianus was produced – with the Comma Johanneum – by a Franciscan monk named William Roy (sometimes called Froy, because, in theory, an abbreviation for “Fratris” (“brother”) was misinterpreted as part of his name), who was working at the time under the auspices of Henry Standish, a British bishop who opposed both Erasmus’ Greek New Testament and the Protestant Reformation in general. (Froy went on to leave the Franciscan order in the early 1520’s; he became an assistant of William Tyndale for a while, and was eventually martyred, in Portugal, in 1531.) Roy was in the right place, at the right time, and possessed the necessary training and resources to produce the manuscript (in which the text of Revelation appears to have been copied from minuscule 69).

Richard Brynckley (or Brinkley) is another suspect. This erudite scholar was Provincial Minister from 1518 to 1526, and he had taught at Cambridge from 1492 to 1518, when minuscule 69 was kept there. (Brynckley was at Cambridge when Erasmus lived there in 1511-1513, and Erasmus later sent greetings to Brinkley in a letter to Henry Bullock.) Grantley McDonald, in a recent book, has recently questioned the possibility that Brinkley made MS 61, on the grounds that the script that Brinkley used to write his name and title in another manuscript does not match the script in MS 61. However, Brinkley may have been, like many people, capable of using one kind of script when writing his signature, and another handwriting-style for other purposes.

Yet another suspect is Francis Frowyk. Grantley McDonald proposes that Harris’ identification of “Froy” as Fratris Roy does not fit the evidence as well as the identification of Froy with Francis Frowyk, a Franciscan colleague of both Erasmus and John Clement (one of the owners of MS 69). Frowyk, according to McDonald, visited Erasmus in August of 1517. Frowyk had the requisite skill in Greek, and access to minuscule 69, and interest in Erasmus’ work. It may be that Codex Monfortianus was produced not by an enemy intent on embarrassing Erasmus, but by a friend who discerned that an opportunity existed to quietly provide a resource which would give Erasmus the means to deflect some accusations of heresy which several critics were making against him.

Johannine Comma and Codex Montfortianus

From Textus Receptus

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Codex Montfortianus

Adam Clarke

James Snapp

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