Well, a large amount of my career has been spent studying this, but some of the sources which will validate my claim, which I also recommend you study, include, but are not limited to:
The Panarion, volume 1 and 2, by Epiphanius of Salamis, translated by Frank Williams, Brill, 2009 (vol. 1) and 2013 (vol. 2)
Valentinian Ethics and Paraenetic Discourse, by Philip L. Tite, Brill, 2009
Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, by G.R.S. Mead (public domain)
The Fount of Knowledge by St. John of Damascus, Translated by Frederic H. Chase, Jr., pub. Fathers of the Church, vol. 37, issued 1958
The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 1-9
Against All Heresies by St. Irenaeus
Also, some more accessible titles:
Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, translated by Fr. Seraphim Rose, 1978
Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, and Nihilism, both also by Fr. Seraphim Rose, the former circa 1976, the latter circa 1971
Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, Second Edition by Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick (avoid the first edition)
The Gnostic Society also has a very good online collection of public domain materials on Valentinism and other related sects which have been carefully digitized and uploaded.
Metzger, Bruce M., (1991). Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Palaeography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 76–78.
Aland, Kurt; Barbara Aland (1995). The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. p. 109.
St. Athanasius aside, and I do not by the way recall mention of the Comma Johanneum in De Incarnatione, so if you have a page number, that would be useful, these are all Latin writers who would have had access to the Vetus Latina, which was only slowly displaced by the Vulgate. It should be noted that initially the Vulgate was somewhat controversial both for using vulgar Latin rather than classical Latin, and because St. Jerome picked a fight with the pro-Origen faction, which was quite large; Origen and Theodore of Mopsuestia were extremely popular in the Latin church, to the extent that when Emperor Justinian anathematized them, it caused a 30 year schism known as the Three Chapters Controversy. In particular, St. Jerome had a very heated row with St. Lucifer the bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia, and also with the Patriarch of Jerusalem, whose name escapes me.
Indeed, it is widely known that the Comma Johanneum was added to the Vulgate at approximately 800, however, it was never a part of the Byzantine text and one of the chief differences between the Byzantine text and the Textus Receptus compiled by Erasmus is its inclusion (the other difference is of course the unwarranted replacement of the Septuagint, on which I agree with my Eastern Orthodox friends
@prodromos and
@GreekOrthodox is the standard Christian Old Testament, although I would add, and they might not concur, that the Ethiopic Ge’ez-language Old Testament, the Old Testament portion of the Syriac Peshitta, and the translation of the Hebraic Old Testament in the Vulgate are also good alternatives, and the KJV did make some needed changes to the Masoretic Text, but usually I am happiest with the Septuagint).
This position is of course untenable, as many of us have eloquently explained; to claim that a translation of the original scriptures is alone the sole authoritative Bible, and to propose that people who do not natively speak English either learn it, or be given translations of the Authorized Version rather than translations from the source materials from which the Authorized Version is translated makes no sense.
You also are making the very unfortunate mistake of lumping together all non-KJV translations as if they all had the liberal agenda and various flaws that afflict some of them, most notably the third edition of the New International Version, and you accused Westcott and Horst of various heresies which they were in fact innocent of, as I addressed earlier, and you maintain the narrative of people who work on new editions of the Bible losing their voice despite the fact that I demonstrated via statistics and via the fact that no one involved in the most egregious mistranslations of scripture was rendered mute, that this point was invalid, based on the prevalence of partial or complete loss of speech faculties (speech impairment and aphasia) in the US population.
I do appreciate you expurgating that reference, as it speaks to your honesty, integrity and moral conviction.
With all due respect, that’s not at all what happened with Bart Ehrman. His slide from grace, so to speak, is in fact almost completely unrelated to textual criticism; he is not particularly well known as an expert in the field of textual criticism except as someone who likes to selectively quote from textual critics whose analysis supports his agenda, while ignoring textual critics with a divergent perspective.
Rather, Bart Ehrman is all about selling books, and promoting atheism, using the extremely successful marketing tactic of supposedly offering new insights into “the historical Jesus.” He is by no means the only person engaged in this pursuit. John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, the late Episcopalian bishop John Shelby Spong, Elaine Pagels and Karen King, among others, not to mention the late Robert W. Funk and his Jesus Seminar, and more recently Hal Taussig and A New New Testament, have all made a career based on the idea of “the historical Jesus” whose actual narrative has been suppressed and is not to be found in the canonical Gospels. Instead, they turn to apocrypha and various wild theories. Then we have Dan Brown, who has printed money off of the phenomenon with his fictional Da Vinci Code novels, which are in my opinion just so much hot air (and I think much less of Tom Hanks than many people for his decision to act in the film adaptations thereof).
As a generic orthodox Christian, I don’t have one particular church whose perspective I follow exclusively. Rather, the sources I use span the entire range of Nicene Christianity, including traditional Lutheran, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, Methodist, Congregationalist, Calvinist, Arminian, Moravian and Assyrian sources.
You did not provide any evidence they believed in any actual heretical doctrines. You mentioned, for example, “Mariolatry” as an alleged heresy, without any further information or proof, and Mariolatry in particular is a challenging heresy to substantiate, because one has to differentiate it from the completely legitimate practice of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary as engaged in by Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Assyrians, Lutherans and other Protestants, and instead show that actual worship is occurring, such as has happened in cults such as the Collyridians of antiquity and the Palmerians of today.
If an actual heresy can be attributed to Westcott and Hort, that would be disturbing, but as far as I can tell, based on the biographical information I have, they were pious high church Anglicans.
