Whatever Erasmus' motives were in including 1 John 5:7 (and I am still researching those motives) into the NT Text, the overriding issue is the sovereignty of God in preserving this passage in the Reformation Text.
We can see from the lengthy quote of John Gill above, that Gill said, “...out of sixteen ancient copies of Robert Stephens’, nine of them had it”. Evidently none of these have survived, but we do have this testimony.
The stance the Reformers took vis-à-vis Rome was they had the
providentially preserved Scripture, and this was their bulwark against the claims of the Papacy, and the Reformers defended this text they had in hand.
Concerning the variants, Dr. Theodore P. Letis showed we can see that John Owen (and perhaps Turretin) owned possible minute variants within the TR editions, and their view was that God had allowed them:
This is from Letis’
The Majority Text: Essays and Reviews in the Continuing Debate:
Owen saw only the minor variants between the various editions of TR as valid areas for discrimination, staying within the broad parameters of providential preservation, as exemplified by “Erasmus, Stephen, Beza, Arias Montanus, and some others.” Within the confines of these editions was “the first and most honest course fixed on” for “consulting various copies and comparing them among themselves.”
This is both the concrete domain of the providentially preserved text, as well as the only area for legitimate comparisons to choose readings among the minutiae of differences. In fact, “God by His Providence preserving the whole entire; suffered this lesser variety [within the providentially preserved editions of the TR –TPL] to fall out, in or among the copies we have, for the quickening and exercising of our diligence in our search into His Word [for ascertaining the finality of preservation among the minutiae of differences among the TR editions –TPL] (The Divine Original, p. 301)* It is the activity, editions, and variants after this period of stabilization that represent illegitimate activity, or, as Owen says, “another way.”
Thus Owen maintained an absolute providential preservation while granting variants. (“John Owen Versus Brian Walton” fn 30, p. 160)
* Owen’s
Divine Original online:
DIVINE ORIGINAL, AUTHORITY, SELF-EVIDENCING LIGHT, AND POWER OF THE SCRIPTURES. This is from volume 16 of Owen’s works.
I recently came across an important contribution to this issue of the Textus Receptus (particularly the 1894 of Scrivener) by Will Kinney, in an online article he wrote called,
”Tyndale, the Textus Receptus or the King James Bible?” We do not have the exact manuscripts the translators of the AV 1611 used – the Greek, other language versions, other English versions – and we do not have notes as to the reasons they made what choices they did, I believe because of one of the great London fires, which destroyed such records. What we have is the English version the Lord providentially brought into existence, from the Greek and other mss He provided the Reformation editors and the KJV translators. The Scrivener 1894 TR is but a back-translated Greek text from the English of the AV. We really don’t have a Greek text that is perfect and which we can call “exact”, although by the method of John Owen (noted above) he arrived at “an absolute providential preservation while granting variants”.
Is this not – what Owen referred to – the Greek spoken of in the WCF 1:8?
The Confession at 1:8 reads (in part):
The Old Testament in Hebrew (which was the native language of the people of God of old), and the New Testament in Greek (which, at the time of the writing of it, was most generally known to the nations), being immediately inspired by God, and, by His singular care and providence, kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical...
The Greek editions of the Reformation Textus Receptus contained 1 John 5:7. This was not a variant issue for them, as perhaps Romans 7:6 was.
The long and short of all this is: we have, amazingly, the English rendition of the Word of God preserved and prepared for His post-Reformation church. I will hold to it.
I will abide by their wisdom in refusing the Vatican manuscripts with their variants, as these were the weapons of Rome against the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. And they still are.