At an earlier or later period he would doubtless have paid for
his temerity with his life; fortunately, just at that time the
ruling pontiff and his Contemporaries cared much for literature and
little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid defiance
to the Inquisition.
While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a
much greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe.
Erasmus, with his edition of the New Testament, stands at the
source of that great stream of modern research and thought which is
doing so much to undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of
patristic and scholastic interpretation.
Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to
encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may
stimulate reflection. He had found, what some others had found
before him, that the famous verse in the fifth chapter of the
First Epistle General of St. John, regarding the "three witnesses,"
was an interpolation. Careful research through all the really
important early manuscripts showed that it appeared in none of
them.
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