2004. “10. And though, ‘notwithstanding those twelve known infallible and faithful judges of controversy, (the twelve apostles,) there were as many and as damnable heresies crept in, even in the apostolic age, as in any other age, perhaps, during the same space of time.’—Reeve’s Preliminary Discourse to the Commonitory of Vincentius Lirinensis, p. 190.
2005. “11. And though there were in the manuscripts of the New Testament, at the time of editing the last printed copies of the Greek text, upward of ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY THOUSAND various readings.”—Unitarian New Version, p. 22.
2006. “12. And though ‘the confusion unavoidable in these versions (the ancient Latin, from which all our European versions are derived) had arisen to such a height, that St. Jerome, in his Preface to the Gospels, complains that no one copy resembled another.’—Michaelis, vol. ii. p. 119.
2007. “13. And though the Gospels fatally contradict each other; that is, in several important particulars, they do so to such an extent as no ingenuity of supposition has yet been able to reconcile: after Marsh, Michaelis, and the most learned critics, have stuck, and owned the conquest.
2008. “14. And though the difference of character between the three first Gospels and that ascribed to St. John is so flagrantly egregious, that the most learned Christian divines and profoundest scholars have frankly avowed that the Jesus Christ of St. John is a wholly different character from the Jesus Christ of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; and that their account and his should both be true is flatly impossible.[51]
2009. “15. And though such was the idolatrous adulation paid to the authority of Origen, that emendations of the text which were but suggested by him were taken in as part of the New Testament; though he himself acknowledged that they were supported by the authority of no manuscript whatever.—Marsh, in loco.
2010. “16. And though, even so late as the period of the Reformation, we have whole passages which have been thrust into the text, and thrust out, just as it served the turn which the Protestant tricksters had to serve.
2011. “17. And though we have on record the most indubitable historical evidence of a general censure and correction of the Gospels having been made at Constantinople, in the year 506, by order of the Emperor Anastasius.[52]
2012. “18. And though we have like unquestionable historical evidence of measureless and inappreciable alterations of the same having been made by our own Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, for the avowed purpose of accommodating them to the faith of the orthodox.”[53]