BCEME - 303
The controversy in France created unrest elsewhere as well. In a lecture delivered before the General conference of the Silesian Lutheran Union at Liegnitz on 12 October 1892, Wilhelm Kölling eulogised the comma as ‘a precious and genuine pearl of the canon’ and a ‘masterpiece of the heavenly inspirer’, which had been removed from the text in the interests of promoting heresy.100 The lecture went down badly. Emil Schürer lamented that Kölling’s lecture threatened a retrograde reformation back to the seventeenth century.101 Eberhard Nestle characterised such attempted defences of the comma by Protestants as of ‘pathological interest’.102
100 Kölling 1893, 3, 17.
101 Schürer 1894, 110; cf. C. R. Gregory 1907, 131.
102 Nestle 1899, 260.
Kölling, Wilhelm. Die Echtheit von 1. Joh. 5, 7. Breslau: Dülfer, 1893.
RGA
Kölling, Wilhelm. Die Echtheit von 1. Joh. 5, 7. Breslau: Dülfer, 1893.