Stunica vs Erasmus on the Johannine Comma?

In a recent video, Nick Sayers points out that my recent post on the Complutensian Polyglot and the Johannine Comma does not interact with arguments related to Stunica (aka Diego López de Zúñiga). and his interaction with Erasmus.  I certainly agree that my recent post does not interact with statements from Stunica.  However, I must acknowledge that I am not aware of what statements from Stunica Nick Sayers has in mind.  Obviously, it's very hard for me to evaluate arguments that are merely alluded to, so this post should not be taken as a rebuttal to Nick Sayers' argument, which I still haven't heard in its substance.

You may recall that my observation was that although the Complutensian Polyglot is an early (presumably the first) printed Greek example of a version of the Johannine Comma, there are good reasons to believe that the "heavenly witnesses" portion of 1 John 5:7-8 in the CP is the product of translation from Latin to Greek, not the result of transcribing a Greek manuscript.  The two or three main clues are (1) the non-inclusion of the "these three agree in one" after the earthly witnesses, (2) the placement of the "these three agree in one" after the heavenly witnesses (i.e. combining (1) and (2), the Greek phrase found in the exemplar has been moved to try to conform to the Latin), and (3) the presence of the phrase "ἐπὶ τῆς γης," which is a better Greek translation of "in terra" than the usual "ἐν [τῇ] γῇ." 

Reaching to the shelves of secondary literature on the subject, I noticed the following paragraph in Erasmus and the Johannine Comma (1 John 5.7-8), by Grantley McDonald (Universität Wien)(pp. 48-49)

Soon after Lee’s book appeared, another set of criticisms appeared from a more substantial critic, Jacobus Stunica. Stunica’s opposition to Erasmus may have been motivated in part by personal animus, since he was one of the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot edition of the Bible. When Erasmus published his diglot New Testament in 1516, he narrowly snatched the honour of publishing the first Greek New Testament from the Spanish editors, and they never forgot it. Stunica asserted that the text  of 1 John 5.7-8 as transmitted in the Greek manuscripts was corrupt, but that the “true” reading was transmitted in the Latin Vulgate.  ... Stunica’s comments seem to admit that the editors, dismissing their Greek manuscripts as corrupt at this point, had simply made good the lack by translating the Comma from Latin into Greek.

In the next paragraph, McDonald continues:

Erasmus wrote a reply to Stunica’s book between June and September 1521.10 Erasmus taunted Stunica with the fact that he could not produce any Greek manuscript in support of the Comma. He also pointed out that the Greek fathers who cited the immediate context of 1 John 5 in their writings against the Arians all failed to mention the Comma. Although absence of evidence does not necessarily amount to evidence of absence, this is still a remarkable circumstance. Erasmus also reported the absence of the Comma from a number of old manuscripts he had seen in Bruges, and from the Codex Vaticanus.

In the following paragraph, McDonald explains:

Erasmus kept his last surprise until the end. He announced to Stunica that a Greek manuscript had been found in England which contained the Comma, and lacked the phrase “these three are one” in 1 John 5.8. He used this manuscript to restore the Comma to his text, splicing it into the reading he had established for his 1516 edition. However, he expressed his reservations about this manuscript, suggesting that it had been adapted to agree with the Latin Vulgate.

The most interesting paragraph, however, comes from page 50:

Erasmus’s suspicions about this “British codex”—housed since the seventeenth century in the library of Trinity College Dublin (ms 30)—were well founded. One of its parent manuscripts was copied in England in the late fifteenth century. This fact gives an earliest possible date for the creation of the codex, and suggests that it was probably written in England. The watermark in its paper indicates that it was manufactured in the decades around 1500. One of the first owners of the manuscript was Francis Frowyk, minister general of the Observant Franciscans in England. It later belonged to John Clement, foster-son of Thomas More, who arrived in Leuven in the late summer of 1520. At Leuven, Clement spent time with Erasmus and studied with Erasmus’s friend Juan Luis Vives. Erasmus did not mention the manuscript in his response to Lee, published in early 1520, but had evidently seen it before publishing his first response to Stunica in October 1521. It is likely that Clement brought the manuscript with him from England, and showed it to Erasmus some time over the coming year. Despite his suspicions about the textual value of the manuscript, Erasmus recognized it as a way out of the dispute with Lee and Stunica. He adapted its reading of the Comma for the third edition of his New Testament (1522), and inserted a long discussion of the Comma, lifted primarily from his first response to Stunica, in the accompanying annotations. Erasmus had thrown a sop to those readers who believed that the Comma was a genuine part of Scripture, but had also provided critical readers with further evidence of its spuriousness. The ambivalence of this decision caused considerable disagreement amongst those who read his work.

Likewise, H. J. de Jonge has provided Four unpublished letters on Erasmus from J. L. Stunica to pope Leo X (1520), (p. 147-160 of Colloque érasmien de Liège), in which Stunica tattles to Pope Leo X about a lot of things Erasmus has said that Stunica believes Leo X will find objectionable.  The non-inclusion of the JC is not explicitly mentioned in the letters, although in letter 4 he writes: "Furthermore, those ancient orthodox men—what an abominable thing to believe—he says added certain things of their own into the Sacred Scriptures in order either to exclude or to refute the errors of heretics." (Priscos praeterea illos orthodoxos, quod nepharium est credere, in Sacris Scripturis nonnulla ait de suo addidisse, aut excludendos aut refellendos haereticorum errores.)(source of Latin)

These letters seem to support the characterization offered by Richard Homer Graham in Erasmus and Stunica: A Chapter in the History of New Testament Scholarship (pp. 9-10):

Throughout this period, and particularly from 1520 until about 1524, no critic of Erasmus caused him more concern than the Spaniard Jacobus Stunica. Writing for the most part from Rome, Stunica functioned as a sort of professional anti-Erasmian, a man whose intention, as one of Erasmus' informers told him, was "to make Erasmus odious to the ecclesiastical orders." 

Stunica attacked especially the work of Erasmus on the New Testament, his text, translation, and notes, and he caused Erasmus enough anxiety to earn himself a place among those whom the Dutchman seems to have hated and feared. Erasmus himself described Stunica in August of 1522 as "very sneaky, stupid, and ignorant, " and a little later he told one of his correspondents bluntly, "I have always despised Stunica. " Until quite recently most Erasmus scholars have agreed in presenting Stunica either as a figure of no importance or else as an example of reactionary Catholicism at its worst. But lately other work has argued that Stunica was "the most competent critic Erasmus as a New Testament scholar was ever to have.... " And in a work subtitled "New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance," Jerry H. Bentley reached the conclusion that Stunica was "Erasmus' most formidable critic" in the realm of New Testament studies. Even a cursory reading of Stunica's work against Erasmus' New Testament shows that the Spaniard was a learned and serious man, driven to oppose Erasmus because of his scholarly and ecclesiastical interests and because of his own search for fame and recognition.

Graham goes on to recommend an introduction from volume IX/2 of Erasmus' works: Erasmus and His Catholic Critics: 1, 1515-1522 (Nieuwkoop, 1989), pp. 145-177.

In short, based on the secondary scholarship (as well as the primary source of four letters to Leo X), I'm not sure what Nick Sayers would like me to see in Stunica that would provide a different result to my previously set forth analysis. A thread over at the PureBibleForum (link thereto, with neither commendation nor condemnation thereof intended by my link) seems to be an example of the tertiary works out there being in agreement with the secondary sources.