Now, this verse reads: “For there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one.” This verse, which has been “appointed to be read in churches,” is now known to be spurious. It is not to be found in any Greek manuscript, save one at Berlin, which was transcribed from some interpolated paraphrase between the lines. In the first and second editions of Erasmus, printed in 1516 and 1519, this allusion to these three heavenly witnesses is _omitted_; and the text is not contained in any Greek manuscript which was written earlier than the fifteenth century.[300] It was not mentioned by either of the Greek ecclesiastical writers nor by the early Latin fathers, so anxious to get at every proof in support of their trinity; and it was omitted by Luther in his German version. Edward Gibbon was early in pointing out its spurious character. Archbishop Newcome rejected it, and the Bishop of Lincoln expresses his conviction that it is spurious.[301] There are twenty-eight Greek authors--Irenæus, Clemens, and Athanasius included, who neither quote nor mention it; and seventeen Latin writers, numbering among them Augustine, Jerome, Ambrosius, Cyprian, and Pope Eusebius, who appear utterly ignorant of it. “It is evident that if the text of the heavenly witnesses had been known from the beginning of Christianity the ancients would have eagerly seized it, inserted it in their creeds, quoted it repeatedly against the heretics, and selected it for the brightest ornament of every book that they wrote upon the subject of the Trinity.”[302] Thus falls to the ground the strongest trinitarian pillar. Another not less obvious forgery is quoted from Sir Isaac Newton’s words by the editor of the _Apocryphal New Testament_. Newton observes “that what the Latins have done to this text (_First Epistle of John_, v.), the Greeks have done to that of St. Paul (_Timothy_ iii. 16).” For, by changing ΟΣ into ΘΣ, the abbreviation of Θεος (God), in the Alexandrian manuscript, from which their subsequent copies were made, they now read, “_Great is the mystery of godliness_, GOD _manifested in the flesh_;” whereas all the churches, for the first four or five centuries, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome, as well as the rest, read: “Great is the mystery of godliness WHICH WAS _manifested in the flesh_.” Newton adds, that now that the disputes over this forgery are over, they that read GOD made manifest in the flesh, instead of the _godliness which was_ manifested in the flesh, think this passage “one of the most obvious and pertinent texts for the business.”