Newton decided that believing God and Christ were one was a form of idolatry—the “betrayal of God” we spoke of in chapter 1. God had told Moses, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and it seemed to Newton that to elevate Christ to a position of equality with God was, if not to put another God before him, at least to place another God beside him, and that this—since it deflected attention from the single-minded concentrated adoration of God—was equally idolatrous, even blasphemous.*9
Newton said this to very few people during his lifetime, but there is ample evidence of this belief, found in the two letters to Locke and in other parts of his nonscientific writings unknown before 1936.
Over the years Newton acquired a comprehensive knowledge of the Bible equal to that of anyone in England. A leading Anglican bishop told philosopher Richard Bentley in 1699 that Newton “knows more than all the rest of us about Scripture.”5 The bishop would not have wanted to know some of the things Newton had come to believe. The more the great scientist studied Holy Scripture, the more he became convinced that very early on the church fathers had rewritten certain passages of the New Testament to falsely portray Christ as the equal of God. Richard Westfall writes that by the late 1680s Newton had become convinced that “a massive fraud, which began in the fourth and fifth centuries, had perverted the legacy of the early church. Central to the fraud were the Scriptures, which Newton began to believe had been corrupted to support trinitarianism.”6
Newton set himself the task of weeding out these corruptions. He brought all of his immense intelligence and learning to bear on this project. Newton scholar Justin Champion describes the working draft of the letters to Locke, which has come down to us.
The pages of Newton’s piece are littered with marginal references to biblical manuscripts and printed editions of all varieties: Slavonic, Ethiopick, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, French, Latin, and Greek. Specific and important codices were cited by name, library, and shelf mark; encouragement to ocular examination accompanied many of these citations. Codices such as Vaticanus, Claromontanus, Bezae, and Alexandrinus were the staple of orthodox biblical critics: Newton supplemented these with the codices Lobiensis, Tomacensis, Buslidianus, and Rhodiensis.7
What passages in the New Testament was Newton concerned with? In his first letter to Locke—which was actually two letters—Newton deals with the corruptions in just two biblical passages, 1 John 5:6–8 and 1 Timothy 3:16.
In the New Testament of Newton’s day, 1 John 5:6–8 read:
This is he who came through water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by the water and the blood. And the spirit is the one who testifies, because the spirit is truth. For there are three who give testimony in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit; and the three are one. And there are three who give testimony on earth: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three are one.
Newton decided that the phrase “in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit; and the three are one. And there are three who give testimony on earth” had been fraudulently inserted into 1 John 5:6–8, possibly at the time of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), and probably by the church father Athanasius, then very young and an assistant to the archbishop of Alexandria. Why was this change made? Here is how Newton explains it to Locke:
Now this mystical application of the spirit, water and blood to signify the Trinity, seems to me to have given occasion to somebody either fraudulently to insert the testimony of the three in heaven in express words into the text for proving the Trinity, or else to note it in the margin in his book by way of interpretation, whence it might afterwards creep into the text in transcribing.8
Newton further tells Locke that the phrase in question—which biblical scholars have come to call the comma Johanneum, or, “John’s phrase”—did not appear in earlier texts: “[It] is not read thus in the Syrian Bible. Not by Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Athanasius, Nazianzen Didym Chrysostom, Hilarious . . .”9 Newton had scrutinized more than thirty versions of the New Testament; he cites close to one hundred commentaries, by the church fathers and others, that seemed to refer to a 1 John 5:6–8 that is significantly different from the text that appeared in the Bibles of Newton’s day. In conclusion, writes Snobelen, “Newton characterizes the comma as a sham foisted on the text by the orthodox party and that the sense of the text was vastly superior without it.”10
But Isaac Newton was not the first to question the authenticity of the comma Johanneum. A small, frail, brilliant, and extremely courageous man from Holland had noticed this discrepancy a hundred years before and had had to pay a price for having noticed. This was the Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, theologian, popular writer, philosopher, and linguist Desiderius Erasmus, and it is important to understand him and exactly what he did if we are to understand the courage Newton showed in sending John Locke his letters.
Erasmus was born in Rotterdam, Holland, in 1466, dying in 1536. He was the illegitimate son of a priest by a washerwoman. The sickly child was raised in poverty, attending a one-room school where 275 boys were taught by a single master. At age eight he saw two hundred prisoners of war broken on the rack outside the gates of Utrecht by order of the local bishop. This made Erasmus a pacifist for life; and, though he became a devout Catholic, for the rest of his life he never accepted church doctrine uncritically.
His parents died when he was eighteen. Erasmus was left with nothing but a questioning mind and a thirst for learning. He became a priest—the only trade that enabled thousands of intelligent men of his time to be able to eat every day. His intellectual brilliance and practical competence were soon recognized, and he became secretary to a bishop who soon sent him to the university in Paris. Erasmus became a sort of itinerant, “Have genius, know Latin and Greek, will travel,” scholar and writer, working for a number of different church officials as he made his way across Europe. Eventually he arrived in England, and ultimately at Oxford University, where he spent extended periods of time at the home of Sir Thomas More, the celebrated author of Utopia.
Erasmus was a born writer in the popular vein; he knew how to connect with the man and woman on the street. He had to earn a living, his creative powers needed expression, and he was becoming increasingly indignant at the injustices of the world; all of this drove Erasmus to turn out book after book.
At first his books weren’t much more than collections of dialogues and adages and how-to techniques. Basically they told people, in an engaging, down-to-earth, humanistic fashion, ways they could nourish their souls. The prolific author-priest became an internationally best-selling author; in some years, one-tenth to one-fifth of all the books sold in the capital cities of Europe were written by Erasmus.
The Dutch scholar-priest’s most enduring work is The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium) (1514). In Erasmus’s lifetime it went into more than forty editions and was translated into twelve languages. The book is narrated by the Goddess of Folly, who has no trouble proving how widespread her influence is. She provides the reader with a nearly endless catalog of human folly, and it is through this device that Erasmus is able to gently satirize practically everything in the world.
This even included the doctrine of the Trinity. In The Praise of Folly, Erasmus/Folly describes a priest delivering a sermon on a new way of interpreting the Trinity.
[T]o wit, from the Letters, Syllables, and the word Itself; then from the Coherence of the Nominative Case and the Verb, and the adjective and Substantive: and while most of the Auditory [audience] wondered, and some of them wondered that of Horace, “what does all this Trumpery drive at?” at last he brought the matter to this Head, that he would demonstrate that the Mystery of the Trinity was so clearly expressed in the very Rudiments of Grammar, that the best Mathematician could not chalk it out more clearly.11
Perhaps it was because he was a priest and known to be an ardent Catholic, or perhaps because he was so universally popular—or maybe because, no matter what he sai
d, he never actually advocated changes in the orthodox church—but Erasmus and his Praise of Folly somehow managed not to bring down the wrath of the Vatican. In fact (as Erasmus himself tells us), Pope Julius II “read the Moriae in person but he laughed. His only comment was, ‘I am glad that our Erasmus himself was in the book.’” A contemporary letter by a French abbot tells us that Julius’s successor, Pope Leo X, read the whole book with “evident delight” as did all his bishops, archbishops, and cardinals.12
This would soon change. What happened to Erasmus next would prove to be a grim warning to those who were starting to read the New Testament with the fresh, clear, rational eyes that Isaac Newton was to apply to the text with laserlike intensity a century later.
Erasmus published his most important book, a Greek-Latin parallel New Testament titled the Instrumentum Novi Testamenti, in 1516. Sales of this work were greatly helped by the popularity of Erasmus’s other books; at one point, 300,000 copies of his parallel New Testament were in circulation.
The New Testament was originally written in Greek. Late in the fourth century AD, Saint Jerome translated it into Latin. Jerome’s Latin text came to be called the “Vulgate” Bible, because Latin was the everyday, “vulgar” language of the Roman people.
Erasmus had originally intended his Greek-Latin parallel New Testament to contain the original Greek version from which Jerome had worked. In making a new translation of this version into Latin, Erasmus used a number of other ancient, sometimes different, manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. The Dutch scholar-writer examined each word anew, sometimes coming up with a different translation from Jerome’s. Erasmus’s Latin New Testament ended up being an updated—in fact, a corrected—version of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate.
In making this new translation, Erasmus discovered that the phrase known today as the comma Johanneum was not present in 1 John 5:6–8 in any of the earlier versions of the Greek New Testament he consulted. So when he published his 1516 parallel New Testament, he left the phrase out of both the Greek and Latin translations.
Perhaps the Vatican had resented Erasmus’s satirical runs at the church in The Praise of Folly more than the world realized—more, even, than the Vatican itself knew. At any rate, Erasmus’s innocent deletion of the comma Johanneum from both texts triggered a torrent of abuse. The Vatican was incensed at Erasmus for sundering what it viewed as a fundamental defense, directly from the Word of God, against the heresy of anti-Trinitarianism. The English theologian Edward Lee, later arch-bishop of York, hinted darkly that the Dutch humanist was a heretic in disguise and accused him of indolence in not looking harder for an early Greek version of the New Testament that actually contained the comma Johanneum.
In May 1520, Erasmus replied: “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 is 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.”13
This didn’t make the church any happier, and near the end of 1520 a Franciscan friar at Oxford somehow came up with a previously unknown Greek copy of the New Testament containing the comma Johanneum. Erasmus had to bow to the Vatican and include the phrase in the third, 1522, edition of his parallel New Testament. (He had excluded it from the second, 1519, edition.)
This did not mollify the church. In his annotations to his translation, Erasmus had observed that Christ was rarely explicitly called “God” in the New Testament. In the third edition he intimated that he thought the comma Johanneum in the text found at Oxford was a forgery. Erasmus insisted that his comments were philological, not doctrinal. Nevertheless, at a conference in Valladolid, Spain, in 1527, the Vatican hierarchy drew up a list of charges against him. His most determined critic at the conference was the Spanish priest-theologian Diego López Zúñiga (Stunica), who lobbied then, and lobbied until his own death in 1631, that Erasmus be burned at the stake.
The Dutch humanist took this list of charges so seriously that he responded by listing eighty places in his writings where he explicitly stated his belief in the doctrine of the Trinity. But the humanist’s Instrumentum Novi Testamenti was repudiated by the church at the Council of Trent in 1559, and Jerome’s Vulgate edition of the New Testament was adopted as the “official” Vatican text. Thus 1 John 5:7, with its comma Johanneum, remained up front and center as an important biblical affirmation of the dogma that Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit are one.
A few brave men followed in Erasmus’s footsteps, often with tragic results. The young Spanish nobleman Miguel Servet (1509/1511–1553) was passionately devoted to religion; hearing Erasmus’s name often, he became intrigued, read the Dutch humanist’s works, and immersed himself in the study of scripture. In 1531, Servet published, under the name Michael Servetus, his first important work, On the Errors of the Trinity.
The title was a dangerous one. But Servetus seemed to make it clear that he did not want to repudiate the doctrine of the Trinity. We would not be wrong in saying that he regarded this doctrine as the keel of a ship—a keel that had once kept the ship of the church beautifully upright but that had, on account of a great many stormy voyages, become so heavily encrusted with mud, slime, and barnacles that the ship listed this way or that from time to time. Servetus wanted to clean all the muck off the keel so the ship could sail briskly forward, upright, and in its original pristine glory. (Servetus didn’t think anyone remembered exactly what the original keel had looked like. He wanted to find out.)
The daring, if not reckless, Spanish theological writer went on to become a medical doctor; included in his later work is a treatise on anatomy in which he anticipates Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. But the Vatican had never quite gotten over Servetus’s first book, On the Errors of the Trinity. In 1553, the still very young writer completed his masterpiece, the seven-hundred-page Restitution of Christianity; he did this even as the Inquisition was beginning to pursue him from city to city. When he arrived in Geneva he didn’t bother to hide himself and was quickly rooted out by the severe inventor of Calvinism, John Calvin. This provoked dire consequences, because Servetus had been embroiled in a vicious controversy with Calvin for over a month. The virulently anticlerical Voltaire, whose rallying cry was “Ecrasez l’infame!”—“Crush the infamy [of religion]!”—completes the story: “[Calvin] was cowardly enough to have him [Servetus] arrested, and barbarous enough to have him condemned to be roasted by a slow fire—the same punishment which Calvin himself had narrowly escaped in France. Nearly all the theologians of that time were by turns persecuting and persecuted, executioners and victims.”14
Along with the comma Johanneum, Newton grappled in depth with another suspect passage in his first “Notable Corruptions of Scripture” letter to John Locke. This was a passage in 1 Timothy 3:16 that read, “And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh.”
Richard Westfall tells us that “Newton found that early versions did not contain the word [‘God’] but read only, ‘great is the mystery of godliness which was manifested in the flesh.’”15 Reading through the religious debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, he found many instances where this passage, if it had included the word “God” as in his own day, could have been used effectively by the orthodox Trinitarian Church as doctrinal ammunition against the anti-Trinitarian heretics; but it never was. Newton could only conclude that this doctrinal ammunition hadn’t been used because the word “God” hadn’t yet been added to the passage.
In his second letter to Locke, written in late November 1690, Sir Isaac anatomized and deconstructed twenty-seven more “corruptions” in the New Testament. He prefaces his demolition job in this way:
Having given you an historical account of the corruption of two texts of scripture, I shall now mention some others more briefly. For the attempts to corrupt ye scriptures have been very many & amon
gst many attempts ’tis no wonder if some have succeeded. I shall mention those that have not succeeded as well as those that have, because the first will be more easily allowed to be corruptions, & by being convinced of those you will cease to be averse from believing the last.16
The twenty-seven corruptions were in the following passages.
John 3:6 Acts 13:41
Philippians 3:3 2 Thessalonians 1:9
1 John 5:20 Acts 20:28
Luke 19:41 1 John 3:16
Luke 22:43–44 Jude 1:4
Matthew 19:16–17 Philippians 4:13
Matthew 24:36 Romans 15:32
Ephesians 3:14–15 Colossians 3:15
Ephesians 3:9 Apocalypse 1:11
Apocalypse 1:8 2 Peter 3:18
Corinthians 10:9 Romans 9:5
Jude 1:5 Hebrews 2:9
1 John 4:3 Philippians 2:6
John 19:40
The reader will find the text of these passages, with comments on Newton’s deconstruction of each, in appendix B, “Further Corruptions Found in the New Testament.”
Was Newton correct in labeling these passages corrupt and in fact deliberately corrupted? Regarding the comma Johanneum, the eminent dissident Catholic theologian Hans Küng writes:
Historical-critical research has unmasked this sentence as a forgery which came into being in North Africa or Spain in the third or fourth century, although the Roman Inquisition [still part of the ongoing Catholic Church, according to Küng] was still vainly attempting to defend its authenticity at the beginning of our century. . . . Although there are so many triadic formulas in the New Testament, there is not a word anywhere in the New Testament about the “unity” of these three highly different entities [the Father, the Word, and the Spirit].17
The Metaphysical World of Isaac Newton Page 6