Metzger on Acts 8:37

Acts 8:37 And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

Bruce Metzger provides an interesting comment on Acts 8:37 in his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament:

“Although the earliest known New Testament manuscript which contains the words dates from the sixth century (ms. E), the tradition of the Ethiopian’s confession of faith in Christ was current as early as the latter part of the second century, for Irenaeus quotes part of it (Against Heresies, III.xii.8). Although the passage does not appear in the late medieval manuscript on which Erasmus chiefly depended for his edition (ms. 2), it stands in the margin of another (ms. 4), from which he inserted it into his text because he ‘judged that it had been omitted by the carelessness of scribes (arbitror omissum librariorum incuria).’” (A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger, page 360)

Bruce Manning Metzger (1914–2007) was an American biblical scholar, translator, textual critic, and an instructor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. By denomination, he was Presbyterian. He served on the board of the American Bible Society and United Bible Societies, and was an editor of the UBS Greek New Testament. He wrote much on the Greek language, the New Testament, and New Testament textual criticism. Metzger is widely respected as a New Testament scholar, though those of us on the right side of the conservative-liberal spectrum consider his outlook liberal. Metzger himself apparently did not accept Acts 8:37 as authentic.