HOME ARTICLES BIBLES LINKS the HERETIC

Is 1 John 5:7-8 an Interpolation?
The Johannine Comma

Bible Commentries and Notes.

The Johannine Comma (Latin: Comma Johanneum)
Iis an interpolated phrase (comma) in verses 5:7–8 of the First Epistle of John. 
The text [with the comma in italics and enclosed by brackets] in the 1611 King James Version of the Bible reads:

7 For there are three that beare record [in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.] 
8 [And there are three that beare witnesse in earth], the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agree in one.
~  King James Version

In the Greek Textus Receptus (TR), the verse reads thus:

ὅτι τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες εν τῷ οὐρανῷ, ὁ πατήρ, ὁ λόγος, καὶ τὸ Ἅγιον Πνεῦμα· καὶ οὗτοι οἱ τρεῖς ἕν εἰσι.

Interlinear Scripture Analyzer 1 John 5:7

Interlinear Scripture Analyzer 1 John 5:8

It became a touchpoint for the Christian theological debate over the doctrine of the Trinity from the early church councils to the Catholic and Protestant disputes in the early modern period.

It may first be noted that the words "in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one" (KJV) found in older translations at 1 John 5:7 are thought by some to be spurious additions to the original text. A footnote in the Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation, says that these words are "not in any of the early Greek MSS [manuscripts], or any of the early translations, or in the best MSS of the Vulg[ate] itself." In A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, Bruce Metzger (1975, pp. 716–718) traces in detail the history of the passage, asserting its first mention in the 4th-century treatise Liber Apologeticus, and that it appears in Vetus Latina and Vulgate manuscripts beginning in the 6th century. Modern translations as a whole (both Catholic and Protestant, such as the Revised Standard Version, New English Bible, and New American Bible) do not include them in the main body of the text due to their ostensibly spurious nature.

The comma is mainly only attested in the Latin manuscripts of the New Testament, being absent from the vast majority of Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, the earliest Greek manuscript being 14th century. It is also totally absent in the Geʽez, Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Arabic and from the early pre-12th century Armenian witnesses to the New Testament. Despite its absence from these manuscripts, it was contained in many printed editions of the New Testament in the past, including the Complutensian Polyglot (1517ad), the different editions of the Textus Receptus (1516-1894ad), the London Polyglot (1655) and the Patriarchal text (1904ad). And it is contained in many Reformation-era vernacular translations of the Bible due to the inclusion of the verse within the Textus Receptus. In spite of its late date, members of the King James Only movement and those who advocate for the superiority for the Textus Receptus have argued for its authenticity.

English translations based on a modern critical text have omitted the comma from the main text since the English Revised Version (1881), including the New American Standard Bible (NASB), English Standard Version (ESV), and New Revised Standard Version (NRSV).

Origin
Several early sources that might be expected to include the Comma Johanneum in fact omit it.
For example, Clement of Alexandria's (c. 200) quotation of 1 John 5:8 does not include the Comma.

Among the earliest possible references to the Comma appears by the 3rd-century Church Father Cyprian (died 258), who in Unity of the Church 1.6 quoted John 10:30: "Again it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, 'And these three are one.'" However, some believe that he was giving an interpretation of the three elements mentioned in the uncontested part of the verse.

The first undisputed work to quote the Comma Johanneum as an actual part of the Epistle's text appears to be the 4th-century Latin homily Liber Apologeticus, probably written by Priscillian of Ávila (died 385), or his close follower Bishop Instantius

Manuscripts
The Comma is not in two of the oldest extant Vulgate manuscripts, 
Codex Fuldensis and the Codex Amiatinus, although it is referenced in the Prologue to the Canonical Epistles of Fuldensis, and appears in Old Latin manuscripts of similar antiquity.

The earliest extant Latin manuscripts supporting the Comma are dated from the 5th to 7th century.
The Freisinger fragment, León palimpsest, besides the younger Codex Speculum, New Testament quotations extant in an 8th- or 9th-century manuscript.

The comma does not appear in the older Greek manuscripts. Nestle-Aland is aware of eight Greek manuscripts that contain the Comma. The date of the addition is late, probably dating to the time of Erasmus. In one manuscript, back-translated into Greek from the Vulgate, the phrase "and these three are one" is absent.

Inclusion by Erasmus
Erasmus omitted the text of the Johannine Comma from his first and second editions of the Greek-Latin New Testament (the Novum Instrumentum omne) because it was not in his Greek manuscripts. He added the text to his Novum Testamentum omne in 1522 after being accused of reviving Arianism and after he was informed of a Greek manuscript that contained the verse, although he expressed doubt as to its authenticity in his Annotations.

Many subsequent early printed editions of the Bible include it, such as the Coverdale Bible (1535), the Geneva Bible (1560), the Douay-Rheims Bible (1610), and the King James Bible (1611). Later editions based on the Textus Receptus, such as Robert Young's Literal Translation (1862) and the New King James Version (1979), include the verse. In the 1500s it was not always included in Latin New Testament editions, though it was in the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate (1592). However, Martin Luther did not include it in his Luther Bible.

Catholic Church
The Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1546 defined the Biblical canon as "the entire books with all their parts, as these have been wont to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old Latin Vulgate". The Comma appeared in both the Sixtine (1590) and the Clementine (1592) editions of the Vulgate. Although the revised Vulgate contained the Comma, the earliest known copies did not, leaving the status of the Comma Johanneum unclear. On 13 January 1897, during a period of reaction in the Church, the Holy Office decreed that Catholic theologians could not "with safety" deny or call into doubt the Comma's authenticity. Pope Leo XIII approved this decision two days later, though his approval was not in forma specifica—that is, Leo XIII did not invest his full papal authority in the matter, leaving the decree with the ordinary authority possessed by the Holy Office.

Three decades later, on 2 June 1927, Pope Pius XI decreed that the Comma Johanneum was open to investigation. It was not included in the 1986 Nova Vulgata. ~ Wikipeadia.

Quotes
Scholar, Minister (Trinity Church), Professor (University of Glasgow and Marburg University), Author (The Daily Study Bible Series, etc.), and Bible translator Dr. William Barclay states the following about this passage:

Note on 1 John 5:7
- pp. 110-111, The Letters of John and Jude, The Daily Study Bible Series, Revised Edition, The Westminster Press, 1976.
"In the Authorized Version [KJV] there is a verse which we have altogether omitted [in Barclay's NT translation]. It reads, "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one."

"The Revised Version omits this verse, and does not even mention it in the margin, and none of the newer translations includes it. It is quite certain that it DOES NOT belong to the original text.

"The facts are as follows. First, it does not occur in any Greek manuscript earlier than the 14th century. The great manuscripts belong to the 3rd and 4th centuries, and it occurs in none of them. None of the great early fathers of the Church knew it. Jerome's original version of the Vulgate does not include it. The first person to quote it is a Spanish heretic called Priscillian who died in A. D. 385. Thereafter it crept gradually into the Latin texts of the New Testament although, as we have seen, it did not gain an entry to the Greek manuscripts.

"How then did it get into the text? Originally it must have been a scribal gloss or comment in the margin. Since it seemed to offer good scriptural evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity, through time it came to be accepted by theologians as part of the text, especially in those early days of scholarship before the great manuscripts were discovered.

"But how did it last, and how did it come to be in the Authorized Version? The first Greek testament to be published was that of Erasmus in 1516. Erasmus was a great scholar and, knowing that this verse was not in the original text, he did not include it in his first edition. By this time, however, theologians were using the verse. It had, for instance, been printed in the Latin Vulgate of 1514. Erasmus was therefore criticized for omitting it. His answer was that if anyone could show him a Greek manuscript which had the words in it, he would print them in his next edition. Someone did produce a very late and very bad text in which the verse did occur in Greek; and Erasmus, true to his word but very much against his judgment and his will, printed the verse in his 1522 edition.

"The next step was that in 1550 Stephanus printed his great edition of the Greek New Testament. This 1550 edition of Stephanus was called - he gave it that name himself - The Received Text, and it was the basis of the Authorized Version and of the Greek text for centuries to come. That is how this verse got into the Authorized Version. There is, of course, nothing wrong with it; but modern scholarship has made it quite certain that John did not write it and that it is a much later commentary on, and addition to, his words; and that is why all modern translations omit it."

William F. Beck, Lutheran scholar and Bible translator
- footnote for 1 John 5:7 in his The New Testament in the Language of Today, 1964 printing:
"Our oldest manuscripts do not have vv. 7b-8a: "in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three testifying on earth." Early in the 16th century an editor translated these words from Latin manuscripts and inserted them in his Greek New Testament. Erasmus took them from this Greek New Testament and inserted them in the third edition (1522) of his Greek New Testament. Luther used the text prepared by Erasmus. But even though the inserted words taught the Trinity, Luther ruled them out and never had them in his translation. In 1550 Bugenhagen objected to these words "on account of the truth." In 1574 [about 30 years after Luther's death] Feyerabend, a printer, added them to Luther's text, and in 1596 [in spite of the fact that scholars knew it was spurious] they appeared in the Wittenberg copies. They were not in Tyndale's or Coverdale's Bible or in the Great Bible [which were used by the KJV translators, and often copied nearly verbatim by them]."

Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, IV, Edward Gibbon, p. 418.
"Of all the manuscripts now extant, above fourscore in number, some of which are more than 1200 years old, the orthodox copies of the Vatican, of the Complutensian editors, of Robert Stephens are becoming invisible; and the two manuscripts of Dublin and Berlin are unworthy to form an exception...In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Bibles were corrected by LanFrank, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by Nicholas, a cardinal and librarian of the Roman church, secundum Ortodoxam fidem. Notwithstanding these corrections, the passage is still wanting in twenty-five Latin manuscripts, the oldest and fairest; two qualities seldom united, except in manuscripts....The three witnesses have been established in our Greek Testaments by the prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors; the typographical fraud, or error, of Robert Stephens in the placing of a crotchet and the deliberate falsehood, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza."

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,
Edited by F. L. Cross, Oxford University Press, reprint of 1990 - p. 741.
"JOHANNINE COMMA (also known as the 'Three Witnesses'). An interpolation in the text of 1 John 5. 7 f., viz. the words in italics in the following passage from the AV: 'For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these Three are One. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agree in one.' They occur in Latin MSS. from about A.D. 800 onwards and so became established in the official Latin text of the Bible, but they are certainly not part of the original Epistle and are omitted from the RV and other scholarly modern translations. The origin of the interpolation is obscure. Traces of a mystical interpretation of the phrase about the Spirit, the Water, and the Blood, applying it to the Trinity, are to be found in Cyprian and Augustine; but the earliest evidence for the insertion of a gloss in the text of the Epistle comes from a MS. of Priscillianist provenance discovered by G. Schepss at Wurzburg in 1885. Later the insertion is found in quotations in African authors. It would thus seem to have originated in N. Africa or Spain and to have found its way into the Latin Bibles used in those districts (both Old Latin and Vulgate), possibly under the stress of Arian persecution."

United Bible Societies commentary on the New Testament text of 1 John 5:5-7.
- pp. 716-718, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, United Bible Societies, 1971.
"After marturountes "bearing witness"] the Textus Receptus [Received Text] adds the following: 
en to ourano, o Pater, o Logos, kai to Agion Pneuma kai outoi oi treis en eisi. (8) kai treis eisin oi marturountes en te ge. 
That these words are spurious and have no right to stand in the New Testament is certain in the light of the following considerations.

"(A) EXTERNAL EVIDENCE.
(1) The passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except four, and these contain the passage in what appears to be a translation from a late recension of the Latin Vulgate. These four manuscripts are ms. 61 [this is ms. 34 in the earlier numbering system used by Robertson above], a sixteenth century manuscript formerly at Oxford, now at Dublin; ms. 88, a twelfth century manuscript at Naples, which has the passage written in the margin by a modern hand; ms. 629 [ms. 162, Robertson], a fourteenth or fifteenth century manuscript in the Vatican; and ms. 635, an eleventh century manuscript which has the passage written in the margin by a seventeenth century hand.

"(2) The passage is quoted by none of the Greek Fathers, who, had they known it, would most certainly have employed it in the Trinitarian controversies (Sabellian and Arian [certainly at the Nicene Council of 325]). Its first appearance in Greek is in a Greek version of the (Latin) Acts of the Lateran Council in 1215.

"(3) The passage is absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Slavonic), except the Latin; and it is not found (a) in the Old Latin in its early form (Tertullian Cyprian Augustine), or in the Vulgate (b) as issued by Jerome (codex Fuldensis [copied A. D. 541-46] and codex Amiatinus [copied before A. D. 716]) or (c) as revised by Alcuin (first hand of codex Vercellensis [ninth century]).

"The earliest instance of the passage is in a fourth century Latin treatise entitled Liber Apologeticus (chap. 4), attributed either to the Spanish heretic Priscillian (died about 385) or to his follower Bishop Instantius. ....

"(B) INTERNAL PROBABILITIES. (1) As regards transcriptional probability, if the passage were original, no good reason can be found to account for its omission, either accidentally or intentionally, by copyists of hundreds of Greek manuscripts, and by translators of ancient versions.

"(2) As regards intrinsic probability, the passage makes an awkward break in the sense."

The Expositor's Greek Testament - p. 195, Vol. 5, Eerdmans Publishing Co.
"A Latin interpolation, certainly spurious. 
(I) Found in no Gk. MS. [Greek Manuscript] except two late minuscules - 162 (Vatican), 15th c., the Lat. Vg. [Latin Vulgate] Version with a Gk. text adapted thereto; 34 (Trin. Coll., Dublin), 16th c.
(2) Quoted by none of the Gk Fathers. Had they known it, they would have employed it in the Trinitarian controversies (Sabellian and Arian [325 A.D.]).
(3) Found in none of the early versions - in Vg. but not as it [originally] left the hands of St. Jerome."

Scholar Robert Young Concise Critical Commentary
Note for 1 John 5:7, Baker Book House, 1977.
"These words are wanting [lacking] in all the Greek MSS except two, in all the oldest Ancient Versions, and in all the quotations of v. 6-8 in the ancient Fathers before A.D. 475"

Peake's Commentary on the Bible:
- p. 1038, Peake's Commentary on the Bible, editors M. Black and H. H. Rowley, reprint of 1964.
"[v]8. The famous interpolation after 'three witnesses' is not printed even in RSVn, and rightly. It cites the heavenly testimony of the Father, the logos, and the Holy Spirit, but is never used in the early trinitarian controversies. No respectable Greek MS contains it. Appearing first in a late 4th cent. Latin text, it entered the Vulgate and finally the NT of Erasmus."

Seventh Day Adventist Bible Commentary - 1 John 5:7
“The passage as given in the KJV is in no Greek MS earlier than the 15th and 16th centuries. The disputed words found their way into the KJV by way of the Greek text of Erasmus (see Vol. V, p. 141). It is said that Erasmus offered to include the disputed words in his Greek Testament if he were shown even one Greek MS that contained them. A library in Dublin produced such a MS (known as 34), and Erasmus included the passage in his text. It is now believed that the later editions of the Vulgate acquired the passage by the mistake of a scribe who included an exegetical marginal comment in the Bible text that he was copying. The disputed words have been widely used in support of the doctrine of the Trinity, but, in view of such overwhelming evidence against their authenticity, their support is valueless and should not be used. In spite of their appearance in the Vulgate A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture freely admits regarding these words: “It is now generally held that this passage, called the Comma Johanneum, is a gloss that crept into the text of the Old Latin and Vulgate at an early date, but found its way into the Greek text only in the 15th and 16th centuries” (Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951, p. 1186).” — (The Seventh-day Adventist Bible Commentary, vol. 7, p. 675)

An Accurate Rendering of the Verse.
Hebraic Roots Bible
1Jn 5:6 This is the One coming through water and blood, Yahshua Messiah; not by the water only, but by the water and the blood.
1Jn 5:7 And the Spirit is the One witnessing, because the Spirit is the truth.
1Jn 5:8 And there are three who bear witness: The Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three are united†.

HRB Notes 1 John 5:8
The later Latin manuscripts erroneously adds a verse that states there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the word and the Spirit. This verse is not in the Aramaic and is also not in any early Greek manuscript, but clearly a forgery that was added later. The point of the verse is that John is dealing with Gnostics who did not believe Yahshua was born in the flesh and John was showing that at conception it was the water and blood to make the fetus, at His birth since Miriam was a virgin her hymen was broken and Yahshua was born through water and blood and at His death the soldier stabbed Him in the side and water and blood came out. Also, the spirit is the third witness of His human birth as He was conceived by the Holy Spirit (Mat_1:18), at His baptism the spirit came upon Him (Mat_3:16) and at His death He gave up the Spirit (Mat_27:50).

Return to top

HOME ARTICLES BIBLES LINKS the HERETIC