Raymond Brown & the Comma pt. 2
A. The Textual Evidence before 1500
The key to the Comma lies in the history of the Latin Bible in Spain, but first let us discuss the non-Latin evidence (or lack thereof) pertinent to the Comma.
1. The Non-Latin Evidence
The italicized words above that constitute the Comma appear in only eight among some five thousand known Greek biblical MSS. and lectionaries; and in none of the eight can they be dated before A.D. 1400. In four of the eight the Comma appears in the text; in the other four it is a marginal addition serving as an alternative or variant reading. The eight are as follows according to the Gregory enumeration:(3)
• 61: the Codex Montfortianus (Britannicus), an early-sixteenth-century MS. at Trinity College, Dublin.4This codex was copied from an earlier Lincoln (Oxford) Codex (326) that did not have the Comma. Insertions elsewhere in Montfortianus have been retroverted from the Latin.
• 629: the Codex Ottobonianus at the Vatican. It is of the fourteenth or fifteenth century and has a Latin text alongside the Greek, which has been revised according to the Vulgate.
• 918: an Escorial (Spain) MS. of the sixteenth century.
• 2318: a Bucharest (Rumania) MS. of the eighteenth century influenced by the Clementine Vulgate.
• 88vl: a variant reading of the sixteenth century added to the twelfth-century Codex Regius at Naples.
• 22lvl: a variant reading added to a tenth-century MS. in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
• 429vl: a variant reading added to a sixteenth-century MS. at Wolfenbüttel
• 636vl: a variant reading added to a fifteenth-century MS. at Naples.
(3) I am indebted to Professor B. M. Metzger for information about these MSS. (see also his TCGNT 716—18), all of which are listed in the apparatus of the 26th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek NT (1979). I have omitted Codex Ravianus (Tischendorf w110), preserved in the Royal Library of Berlin. It is of the sixteenth century and has merely copied from the printed Complutensian Polyglot of 1514.
(4) Seemingly the scribe was a Franciscan monk named Froy(e) or Frater Roy (d. 1531). As we shall see, this was the codex that forced Erasmus to change his Greek text of the NT, and perhaps the Comma was translated from Latin to Greek and inserted into a Greek codex in order to bring about that change.
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