But in fact this is not a mere conjecture of my own.

It is the reason assigned by Augustine for the erasure of these twelve verses from many copies of the Gospel[611].

Ambrose, a quarter of a century earlier, had clearly intimated that danger was popularly apprehended from this quarter[612]: while Nicon, five centuries later, states plainly that the mischievous tendency of the narrative was the cause why it had been expunged from the Armenian version[613].
Accordingly, just a few Greek copies are still to be found mutilated in respect of those nine verses only.

But in fact the indications are not a few that all the twelve verses under discussion did not by any means labour under the same degree of disrepute.

The first three (as I shewed at the outset) clearly belong to a different category from the last nine,--a circumstance which has been too much overlooked.
The Church in the meantime for an obvious reason had made choice of St.
John vii.