“In Bishop Horesely’s edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, several manuscripts on theological subjects were cautiously withheld from publication. The article known as Christ’s Descent into Hell, which is found in the later Apostles’ Creed, is not to be found in the manuscripts of either the fourth or sixth centuries. It was an evident interpolation copied from the fables of Bacchus and Hercules and enforced upon Christendom as an article of faith. Concerning it, the author of the preface to the Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the King’s Library, (preface, p. 21), remarks: “I wish that the insertion of the article of Christ’s Descent into Hell into the Apostles’ Creed could be as well accounted for as the insertion of the said verse”, (First Epistle of John 5:7).
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 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. 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.
There are twenty-eight Greek authors – Irenaeus, 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.” 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 5), the Greeks have done to that of St. Paul, (Timothy 3:16). For by changing OS into QS, the abbreviation of Qeo”, (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.””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 