The Comma

Looking around today I came across one "Berean Patriot", a Christian student of that Bible. Internally I brace myself when I see "Christian!" and "patriot!!" in juxtaposition; but this time I thank He Who Is Above All Things that I chose tolerance, on account the BP knows his stuff.

Given that the Patriot knows his stuff, of interest is his defence of the Johannine Comma in that first Catholic Epistle. The Patriot is not a KJV-bro; if the Patriot defends a reading, it is because he honestly believes in it.

You know "orthodox corruption of scripture"? Claromontanus and Bezae (on opposite sides) have taught us that corruption can extend so far it stretches against orthodoxy. The Comma is Trinitarian, sure. But - the Patriot points out - for some generations under the first Constantines (excepting Julian), the full weight of Empire went forth on the Eunomian side. The "Alexandrian/-ine" (Ephesian?) text might actually be a Eunomian project, or at least subordinationist; this Epistle's Latin translation, as it happens, is from the Alexandrine text. The oldest surviving Latin of 1 John is the Fuldensis, which omits the Comma. Theodosius, for all his support of the Antiochene (fuller) text for the Gospels (including John), might not have dared put the Comma back into John's Epistle. And the Church of the East never included the Comma in Syriac, to this day.

We can quibble this or that. I think more highly of Nestorius and of the Oriental Syriac Church than the Patriot seems to. Some commenters have pointed out not only that the Fuldensis omits the Comma but that claims that Jerome knew it appear forged. UPDATE 7/8: Also: the Alexandrine tradition - e.g. Vaticanus - approved high-Christology Hebrews as Pauline, which not everyone did, a skepticism Theodoret of Cyr noted of the Eunomia. I should add that Latins, even where unaware of Pauline authorship of Hebrews, tended to accept it as from Barnabas, with equal apostolic authority. It's a bit much to blame Alexandrine deviations upon heresies, at least on this one.

Back to 1 John and the Comma: this too entered most the other Latin MSS. Also if the subordinationists under the Vandal Kingdom accepted the Comma, that's a strong hint that Latin MSS with the Comma were normative in Africa before the Fuldensis.

The Fuldensis codex may well be a monument to a forgotten strain in Christendom. I'd thought I'd heard of it and - sure enough - the BP notes that it contained a Tatianic harmony, "Western Recensionist" per Barker and now Zola. In Armenia the Marcionites, also subordinationist in their way, were adopting a parallel harmony in their Grabar. Marcionites and Paulicians might not accept 1 John, any of 1 John. But Eunomians accepted what they accepted of it, and Nestorius and the East never questioned that Comma-less version of it. Might Tatian have been a subordinationist before Arius and the Eusebii?