The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text

§ 4

Closely allied to the foregoing, and constantly referred to in connexion with it by those Fathers who undertook to refute the heresy of Apolinarius, is our Lord’s declaration to Nicodemus,—‘No man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven’ (St. John iii. 13). Christ ‘came down from heaven’ when He became incarnate: and having become incarnate, is said to have ‘ascended up to Heaven,’ and ‘to be in Heaven,’ because ‘the Son of Man,’ who was not in heaven before, by virtue of the hypostatical union was thenceforward evermore ‘in heaven.’ But the Evangelist’s language was very differently taken by those heretics who systematically ‘maimed and misinterpreted that which belongeth to the human nature of Christ.’ Apolinarius, who relied on the present place, is found to have read it without the final clause (‘ο ων εν τω ουρανω); and certain of the orthodox (as Greg. Naz., Greg. Nyssa, Epiphanius, while contending with him,) shew themselves not unwilling to argue from the text so mutilated. Origen and the author of the Dialogus once, Eusebius twice, Cyril not fewer than nineteen times, also leave off at the words ‘even the Son of Man’: from which it is insecurely gathered that those Fathers disallowed the clause which follows. On the other hand, thirty-eight Fathers and ten Versions maintain the genuineness of the words ‘ο ων εν τω ουρανω561. But the decisive circumstance is that,—besides the Syriac and the Latin copies which all witness to the existence of the clause,—the whole body of the uncials, four only excepted ([Symbol: Aleph]BLT^b), and every known cursive but one (33)—are for retaining it.

No thoughtful reader will rise from a discussion like the foregoing without inferring from the facts which have emerged in the course of it the exceeding antiquity of depravations of the inspired verity. For let me not be supposed to have asserted that the present depravation was the work of Apolinarius. Like the rest, it is probably older by at least 150 years. Apolinarius, in whose person the heresy which bears his name came to a head, did but inherit the tenets of his predecessors in error; and these had already in various ways resulted in the corruption of the deposit.