Today I’m gonna discuss a passage which looks very different in different bibles. And it’s not a minor, irrelevant passage; some Christians consider it an important proof text for how God is a trinity. Not that there aren’t other passages in the New Testament which reveal God’s a trinity, but this passage puts it all in one verse, and some Christians are enraged about how they find they can’t find this passage in every present-day translation.
I’ll start by comparing the King James Version with the American Standard Version and the New American Standard Bible. KJV first:
- 1 John 5.6-8 KJV
- 6This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. 7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
This matches what we find in the Textus Receptus, and the Geneva Bible. But once the Revised Version was produced—and its American edition, the ASV—in those bibles the passage now looked like this.
- 1 John 5.6-8 ASV
- 6This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. 7And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth. 8For there are three who bear witness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and the three agree in one.
Shorter. Y’notice verse 7 in the KJV is gone. It got replaced by the second sentence of verse 6. Now, when the RV was updated by the Revised Standard Version, and the ASV was updated by the NASB, the verses were reshuffled again: Verse 6 was restored, verse 7 was shortened to “For there are three that testify,” verse 8 was shortened to “the Spirit, water, and blood,” etc.
- 1 John 5.6-8 NASB
- 6This is the One who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. It is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. 7For there are three that testify: 8the Spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.
So what’s going on here? Why’d the “Father, Word, and Holy Ghost” get dropped from verse 7? Simply put, John didn’t write it. It was added to the text in the 900s. It’s a textual variant which can’t be supported by serious scholarship.
John didn’t write it, but it’s nonetheless named after him: Scholars call it the Comma Johanneum, or Johannine Comma. No, “comma” doesn’t refer to our punctuation mark; the ancient Greek word κόμμα/kómma means a short clause in a rhetorical argument.
And as I’ve said, it has its fans. Fans who have embraced many foolish theories about why it’s been “edited out of the bible”—complete with conspiracy theories involving liberal theologians, anti-trinitarian textual critics, Satanists, Catholics, and every other boogeyman they fear. I come across such preachers from time to time, and I’d have a little more respect for them if they bothered to quote any of the bible in context. Scholarship just ain’t their thing.
The comma’s history.
If the Johannine Comma had been written by John, if it were in the earliest copies of his first letter, I guarantee you ancient Christians would’ve quoted it extensively. They did not. The earliest church fathers—including the ones who were debating with non-trinitarians!—didn’t quote it. Ever. Because it wasn’t written yet.
The earliest bible translations don’t include it either. Ancient Christians wasted no time in translating the New Testament into other languages for the sake of non-Greek-speaking Christians. And when they converted the NT into Arabic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Slavonic, and Syriac, the comma wasn’t included in any of these translations. Again: Wasn’t written yet.
But it is found in the Latin translation, the Vulgate. Not in current editions of the Nova Vulgata, which removed it, but in the earliest copies, which were written at nearly the very same time the Johannine Comma was composed.
The comma seems to originate from a Latin sermon which dates from the 380s, titled Liber Apologeticus/“Book of Apologetics.” It was either written by the controversial bishop Priscillian of Ávila, or Priscillian’s disciple Instantius. Most historians refer to Priscillian as a heretic, because the local government executed him for heresy in 385. From the looks of it, it’s not clear the judge defined heresy properly; Priscillan was probably just a hypocrite, not a heretic. Which can be every bit as bad. But I digress.
In the sermon, the author quoted 1 John 4.8—then threw in a bit about the trinity. (My translation from Latin.)
As John says, there are three which testify on earth—water, flesh, and blood—and these three are one; and there are three which testify in heaven—the Father, the Word, and the Spirit—and these three are one in Christ Jesus.
You notice verses 7-8, when they include the comma, flip the order; the trinity gets mentioned first, then the Spirit (who got skipped in Liber Apologeticus), water, not flesh, and blood. Trinity takes priority, I guess.
By the 400s, Latin-speaking Christians were quoting this statement as if it were legitimately found in 1 John. And when scribes were making copies of the Vulgate, they started transcribing 1 John from their own faulty memories, not from the previous text in front of them. Some of ’em legitimately thought they were correcting a faulty text—as we can see in some of the medieval copies of the bible, where some monk-copyist “corrected” the text whenever it was missing the comma.
From there, the comma wormed its way back into the Greek New Testament. People who knew both Latin and Greek were wondering why the comma wasn’t in their bibles… so they translated it into Greek, and “fixed” ’em. That’s why it’s in the medieval Majority Text, and ultimately the Textus Receptus.
Bruce Metzger, in his Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, states the comma “is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight, and these contain the passage in what appears to be a translation from a late recension of the Latin Vulgate.” Metzger 647 All of them date from the medieval period. The oldest of them, which scholars call Miniscule 221, dates from the 900s, and the comma is provided as a side note—a textual variant, not the actual text of 1 John. The next oldest—Codex Regis, called Miniscule 88—dates from the 1100s, and the comma was added to the margin some centuries later. The oldest of these manuscripts which actually has the comma within the text is Miniscule 629, which dates from the 1300s. Maybe there were New Testaments before the 1300s which included it in the text, but we don’t have them—the rest of them don’t include the comma.
And it wasn’t even in the first two editions of the Textus Receptus. Craig S. Keener, in The IVP Bible Background Commentary, said editor Desiderus Erasmus put it in the third edition to win a bet. It was taken back out of the fourth edition. And of course the edition of the Textus which the Scots used to produce the Geneva Bible, and the Anglicans used to produce the King James Version, would have to be the third one. So that’s why the comma is in the KJV.
Those who don’t care.
My first bible was a KJV, and since I was a little kid I found it hard to read, and came to replace it with a Good News Bible. That was the translation I used throughout junior high, and my first few years of high school, till I got my first NIV. This was when I discovered the Johannine Comma was missing from current bible translations: Some preacher quoted it, I flipped to the passage to read how the GNB translated it… and lo and behold it wasn’t there. Wasn’t even in the footnotes.
I found it odd, but at the time I just assumed the preacher was mistaken, and gave the wrong address. Preachers make mistakes! I caught their errors from time to time; they’re only human. I thought nothing more of it, till I came across a Chick tract which quoted that passage and made a point of highlighting you gotta read it in the KJV. And only the KJV. Can’t trust other bible translations. Chick surely didn’t.
Those bibliolaters who uphold the KJV above all other bibles, largely do so because the old-timey language of the KJV lets ’em get away with their favorite misinterpretations of scripture. Plus they get to indulge their most paranoid ideas about what the devil, and the rest of “liberal” Christendom, are doing to undermine the “true faith” which only they imagine they have. They got issues. I won’t delve into them today; it’s a depressing rabbit hole to explore.
In reality, the KJV is full of textual variants which shouldn’t be in the New Testament. Erasmus made a point of finding every textual variant he could, and inserting it in his Textus Receptus so it’d include every variant there was. It’d be “complete,” as he understood completeness. But it meant the Textus, and the bibles translated from it, would be plagued with errors. None which undermine Christianity; Erasmus had enough sense to keep the heretic variants out. (God truly is a trinity, folks!) But if we’re going to be an honest religion, as the followers of the Way, Truth, and Life Jn 14.6 absolutely should be, we have to honestly recognize some of these well-beloved passages Erasmus added to the bible, aren’t what the authors of the New Testament legitimately wrote. These variants were rightly removed from later scholarly Greek New Testaments, and rightly removed from present-day bibles.
Ironically a lot of these KJV-only fans claim they totally believe in biblical inerrancy… all while they revere a bible which incorporates errors. All while they deny these variants are even errors. All while they preach from these erroneous passages, and base doctrines on ’em when there are much more reliable passages to do that with. (Or there aren’t, and these doctrines really shouldn’t be doctrines.)
As for what this 1 John passage is even about—and why the Johannine Comma actually doesn’t fit the context of this passage at all—I’ll get to that in another article.
