The Authenticity of the New Testament Part 2: Acts, the Epistles and Revelation by Bill Cooper

Author:Bill Cooper
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Christian
Published: 2014-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Seven: 1 John 5:7 - and a man named Richard Porson

“Gurney (the Baron) had chambers in Essex Court, Temple, under Porson’s. One night (or rather, morning) Gurney was awakened by a tremendous thump in the chambers above. Porson had just come home dead drunk, and had fallen on the floor. Having extinguished his candle in the fall, he presently staggered downstairs to relight it; and Gurney heard him keep dodging and poking with the candle at the stair-case lamp for about five minutes, and all the while very lustily cursing the nature of things.”1

This very sad passage introduces us to a man named Richard Porson (1759-1808). He had begun well enough, becoming a brilliant Greek classicist. He so far outran his peers in the classics that he was very soon famous for his learning and became the toast of polite society. The Greek classics were all the rage in late 18th-century London and Porson’s wit and company were avidly sought after by the wigged and powdered gentry – for a while.

But alcoholism was his undoing. From the beginning he was addicted to drink to such an extent that it often rendered him helpless. Even as a young graduate, he was sacked from his first post as a private tutor when he was discovered lying drunk in the ditch of a turnip field. It was not a promising start. Porson’s habitual drunkenness soon became intolerable even by the standards of the late 18th century. He once drank down a sick friend’s medication as well as one household’s entire supply of lamp oil which contained ‘spirits-of-wine.’ He thought it was gin. It’s a wonder he survived. These and many other such incidents are mentioned not by his enemies, but by his friends, sympathisers and admirers. His enemies – if he had any - didn’t have to say a word.2

The intelligentsia (especially his fellow alcoholic, the deist Gibbon) held him in the highest regard, but only for his secularist views and his obvious contempt for Christianity and the Bible. Porson’s real tragedy was that he had sought refuge in the false assurance that was fast becoming popular back then that the Bible was just another piece of classical literature, and just as he had made the documentary criticism of the classics his profession, he thought that he could add to his fame by applying the same approach and methodology to the Scriptures.

It is a dangerous enough enterprise to approach the Scriptures with anything like a presumptuous and unbelieving heart. But to approach them through an alcoholic haze with the intention of altering them, denigrating them, removing verses here and there is positively suicidal. What had spurred him on to pursue such a reckless course was the defence put up by George Travis, Archdeacon of Chester, of the verse 1 John 5:7, “For there are Three that bear record in Heaven: the Father; the Word; and the Holy Ghost, and these Three are One.”3 It was Travis’s response to Gibbon’s claim that the verse was a late interpolation and not original to John’s first epistle.

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