Page 59 - Countering Trinitarian Arguments With Historical Reference

1 John 5:7, The Three Gods that are in Heaven?
Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, IV by Edward Gibbon, page 418 states. “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 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 witness 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 delibereate falsehood, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza.”
Benjamin Wilson writes in his Emphatic Diaglott the following about the false Catholic creed 1 John 5:7-8: “This text concerning the heavenly [Three] 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 the early Latin fathers even when the subjects upon which they treaded would naturally have lead them to appeal to it’s authority. It is therefore evidently spurious.”
Dr. Peaks’s Commentary on the Bible 1919, also states: “The famous interpolation after “three witnesses’” is not printed 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 century Latin Text, it entered the Vulgate and finally the NT of Erasmus.” 1 John 5:7-8, like its triune counterpart Matthew 28:19, later found its way into our King James Version of the Holy Bible. Also the pagan Greek “Logos” or Son of God/second Person in the triad/trinity terminology was erroneously transmitted to us.
Sir Isaac Newton also did not ascribe to the Catholic triune creed of 1 John 5:7. “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 (Trinitarian) business and would assuredly have been too with them, if it had been in their books...Let them make good sense of it (1 John 5:7) that are able. For my part I can make none.”
Integrative Theology By G. R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, 1996, page 267. “The AV reading of 1 John 5:7 provides an explicit declaration of the Trinity: “There are three
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