WinAce

I've read some things on Peter Kirby's website and Richard Carrier's Formation of the NT Canon, but didn't find an answer.

Somewhere else, it was mentioned that the chapter and verse numbering system (like John... 3:16) wasn't around in the early church. I'm just curious as to who invented the ingenious system, how early such "indexes of writing" were made and by whom (Persians? Babylonians?), etc.

To confound matters, Google-searching for anything involving "chapter" or "verse" produces myriad fundie websites, not scholarly resources.

Apikorus

Try this.

Peter Kirby

Roger Pearse, an amateur like me with a genuine interest in history, has put together Some notes on summaries, chapter divisions and chapter titles in ancient and medieval manuscripts.

best,
Peter Kirby

chimaira

The mister site kirby and other specialists are well to understand the historic compilation of the Bible and for the knowledge of the apocryphal books but has my regret they does not speak of the "ajouts" of versets, doherty speaks enough briefly of the adds of several versets in Marc.

1 John 5:7 : "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."



The scripture translator Benjamin Wilson gives the following explanation for this action in his "Emphatic Diaglott." Mr. Wilson says:


"This text concerning the heavenly witness is not contained in any Greek manuscript which was written earlier than the fifteenth century. It is not cited by any of the ecclesiastical writers; not by any of early Latin fathers even when the subjects upon which they treated would naturally have lead them to appeal to it's authority. It is therefore evidently spurious."


Others, such as the late Dr. Herbert W. Armstrong argued that this verse was added to the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible during the heat of the controversy between Rome, Arius, and God's people. Whatever the reason, this verse is now universally recognized as an insertion and discarded. Since the Bible contains no verses validating a "Trinity" therefore, centuries after the departure of Jesus, God chose to inspire someone to insert this verse in order to clarify the true nature of God as being a "Trinity." Notice how mankind was being inspired as to how to "clarify" the Bible centuries after the departure of Jesus (pbuh). People continued to put words in the mouths of Jesus, his disciples, and even God himself with no reservations whatsoever. They were being "inspired" (see chapter two).

The great luminary of Western literature, Mr. Edward Gibbon, explains the reason for the discardal of this verse from the pages of the Bible with the following words:


"Of all the manuscripts now extant, above fourscore in number, some of which are more than 1200 years old, the orthodox copies of the Vatican, of the Complutensian editors, of Robert Stephens are becoming invisible; and the two manuscripts of Dublin and Berlin are unworthy to form an exception...In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Bibles were corrected by LanFrank, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicholas, a cardinal and librarian of the Roman church, secundum Ortodoxam fidem. Notwithstanding these corrections, the passage is still wanting in twenty-five Latin manuscripts, the oldest and fairest; two qualities seldom united, except in manuscripts....The three witnesses have been established in our Greek Testaments by the prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors; the typographical fraud, or error, of Robert Stephens in the placing of a crotchet and the deliberate falsehood, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza."

"Decline and fall of the Roman Empire," IV, Gibbon, p. 418.


Edward Gibbon was defended in his findings by his contemporary, the brilliant British scholar Richard Porson who also proceeded to publish devastatingly conclusive proof that the verse of 1 John 5:7 was only first inserted by the Church into the Bible in the year 400C.E.(Secrets of Mount Sinai, James Bentley, pp. 30-33).


Regarding Porson's most devastating proof, Mr. Gibbon later said


"His structures are founded in argument, enriched with learning, and enlivened with wit, and his adversary neither deserves nor finds any quarter at his hands. The evidence of the three heavenly witnesses would now be rejected in any court of justice; but prejudice is blind, authority is deaf, and our vulgar Bibles will ever be polluted by this spurious text."


To which Mr. Bentley responds:


"In fact, they are not. No modern Bible now contains the interpolation."


Mr. Bentley, however, is mistaken. Indeed, just as Mr. Gibbon had predicted, the simple fact that the most learned scholars of Christianity now unanimously recognize this verse to be a later interpolation of the Church has not prevented the preservation of this fabricated text in our modern Bibles. To this day, the Bible in the hands of the majority of Christians, the "King James" Bible, still unhesitantly includes this verse as the "inspired" word of God without so much as a footnote to inform the reader that all scholars of Christianity of note unanimously recognize it as a later fabrication.


Peake's Commentary on the Bible says


"The famous interpolation after 'three witnesses' is not printed even in RSVn, and rightly. It cites the heavenly testimony of the Father, the logos, and the Holy Spirit, but is never used in the early Trinitarian controversies. No respectable Greek MS contains it. Appearing first in a late 4th-cent. Latin text, it entered the Vulgate and finally the NT of Erasmus."


It was only the horrors of the great inquisitions which held back Sir Isaac Newton from openly revealing these facts to all:


"In all the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the Trinity in Jerome's time and both before and long enough after it, the text of the 'three in heaven' was never once thought of. It is now in everybody's mouth and accounted the main text for the business and would assuredly have been so too with them, had it been in their books… Let them make good sense of it who are able. For my part I can make none. If it be said that we are not to determine what is scripture and what not by our private judgments, I confess it in places not controverted, but in disputed places I love to take up with what I can best understand. It is the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion ever to be fond of mysteries, and for that reason to like best what they understand least. Such men may use the Apostle John as they please, but I have that honor for him as to believe that he wrote good sense and therefore take that to be his which is the best"

bye all ...