Erasmus and the Problem of the Johannine Comma

When Edward Gibbon decided to banish primary causes from the Decline and Fall and integrate secular and ecclesiastical history, he was completing a revolution that had begun unwittingly two centuries before. ¹ To bring into his narrative of empire a consideration of the “Johannine comma” (the interpolation in 1 John 5:7–8) was not perhaps either digressive or inevitable; but it would certainly have surprised and dismayed some of Gibbon’s immediate predecessors, such as the Catholic Frenchmen, Bossuet and Tillemont, each of whom had written about his subject and exercised an important effect on him at different times in his life; and it would have seemed even more incomprehensible to earlier generations. ² Something had happened in the two centuries between Erasmus and Gibbon to make this new vantage point possible and congenial.

It was, I think, nothing less than a victory for the idea of history. At the beginning of the sixteenth century theology still ruled as queen of the sciences and the claims of religion were largely justified by an appeal to reason and authority, that is, to Aristotelian logic and the dictates of the Church. By the end of the eighteenth century theology had become dependent on history, and religion was now justified by an appeal to “matter of fact.” ³ Even such mysteries as the doctrine of the Trinity, which had eluded the reason of St. Thomas and the schoolmen and had remained dependent on the dictates of Church Councils from Chalcedon to Trent, had come now to depend in some fashion on the evidence of Scripture considered as history. At the same time the removal of final causes from the narrative of human events threatened to leave it—with every other Christian doctrine and event—to the arbitrament of ordinary scholarship. Gibbon brings us to the edge of religious modernity, and the history of the comma exactly spans the period of that development. It was Erasmus, however, as Gibbon himself suspected, who had first set some of the key problems, which he and his enlightened friends believed they had solved.

For Erasmus the decision to edit the Greek New Testament was the result of an early commitment to Renaissance humanism and a response in particular to several lively currents in the contemporary intellectual scene. On the one hand Erasmus, encouraged perhaps by his new friend John Colet, began to think of the Bible principally as a record of history rather than as an arsenal of theological texts, above all as the story of Christ on earth—Christ as the supreme exemplar to be followed and imitated. Apparently, he had been well prepared for this by his acquaintance with the Brothers of the Common Life, and by a characteristic humanist distaste for logic and metaphysics—and a preference for rhetoric and history—which he displayed in all his early writing. ⁴ It seems to have been Colet’s Lectures on the New Testament that encouraged his view that Paul and the apostles, if not Christ himself, were best understood in their historical setting and that their message was primarily ethical. ⁵ In effect the churchman, Colet, and the wandering monk, Erasmus, wanted to place Christian responsibility back in the hands of the laity, in the conscience and behavior of the Christian believer, rather than in what they took to be the mechanical observances of Church ritual. This required that the Bible be placed at the very center of worship, in the hands of every man (and woman), accessible and intelligible as the Vulgate was not, and read in the first place for its story. There were others on the Continent who shared the same impulse—which, of course, the Protestant Reformation was also to endorse. ⁶

Secondly, Erasmus was encouraged to his work by his accidental discovery of Lorenzo Valla’s Notes on the New Testament. ⁷ He had already pledged himself to the culture of Italian humanism, to its determination to recover the Greek and Latin texts of classical antiquity and put them to use by imitation. Valla was the master of humanist technique, the greatest...