Readers who compare an older Bible with a newer one sometimes find that 1 John 5:7 has shrunk. The King James Version reads, across verses 7 and 8:
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.
Open Word Bible, like almost every translation made in the last hundred and fifty years, has a much shorter text:
For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood, and the three are in agreement.
The words missing from the modern text, “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth”, are known as the Johannine Comma. “Comma” here is an old word for a short clause, from the Greek for a piece cut off. It is the most famous addition to the New Testament text, and the most argued over, because it is the only verse in the Bible that names Father, Word and Spirit together and says that they are one.
This article traces how the words came to be written, how they reached the English Bible, and why their removal is not the threat to Christian belief that it can seem. For the method behind decisions like this one, see How textual criticism recovers the text and When the manuscripts disagree.
What John was saying
It helps to start with the passage as the oldest manuscripts have it. John has been writing about faith in Jesus as the Son of God. In verse 6 he says:
This is the one who came by water and blood: Jesus Christ. He came not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.
The record for 5:6 marks its reading of “water and blood” as uncertain, but takes them most likely as Jesus’s baptism and his death on the cross: the beginning and the end of his public work, both of them moments when God bore witness to him. Then verses 7 and 8 explain why that witness can be trusted. The Law of Moses said that a matter is settled by two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19:15). Here there are three: the Spirit, the water and the blood.
The last clause of verse 8 is οἱ τρεῖς εἰς τὸ ἕν εἰσιν, hoi treis eis to hen eisin, word for word “the three are into the one”. The record’s idiom decision explains it as convergence: the three point to one and the same truth, the single testimony about the Son in verses 9 to 11. It lists “the three are one being” as an alternative and rejects it. The phrase says that the witnesses agree, not that they are the same.
Each level says this in its own way. Literal keeps the shape of the Greek:
For there are three who testify, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and the three are for the one [thing].
Readable puts the idiom into everyday words, as a rendering decision records:
So there are three witnesses: the Spirit, the water and the blood. And all three say the same thing.
Notice that the whole passage is one sentence in Open Word Bible, with verse 8 beginning in the middle of it. In the Greek of the oldest manuscripts, verse 7 is only five words, ὅτι τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες: “for there are three that testify”. The verse division was made in the sixteenth century, around a text that had the longer wording. See Chapter and verse numbers.
Born in Latin
The longer wording does not begin in Greek. It begins in Latin, and probably not as Scripture at all.
Early Christian readers often looked for the Trinity in groups of three in the Bible. The three witnesses of 1 John 5:8 were an obvious place, and Latin writers came to read the Spirit, the water and the blood as pointing to the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Around AD 250, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, wrote that it is written of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, “and the three are one”. Scholars still debate whether Cyprian was quoting a Latin text that already had the longer wording, or reading verse 8 in this spiritual way.
The first writer who clearly quotes the longer words as part of 1 John is Priscillian, a Spanish bishop of the late fourth century. After him they appear in other Latin writers, especially in Spain and North Africa, and then in Latin Bible manuscripts. They are missing from the oldest surviving Latin Bible manuscripts, including the oldest copies of Jerome’s Vulgate. Over the Middle Ages they became common in Latin Bibles, though with the heavenly and earthly witnesses sometimes in a different order.
The most likely history, and the one the record gives, is that the words began as a comment explaining the three witnesses, written in the margin or between the lines, and were later copied into the text itself. A prologue to the Catholic Letters, falsely attributed to Jerome, even complains that unfaithful translators had left the words out. That complaint shows that by then some Latin readers expected the verse to have them.
Almost absent in Greek
In Greek the story is very different. The record states the evidence: the longer wording is not found in any Greek manuscript before the late Middle Ages. It appears in only a handful of late Greek manuscripts, some of them with the words added in the margin by a later hand. Where it does appear in Greek, it looks like a translation from the Latin.
Just as striking is the silence of the Greek church. In the fourth century, Greek-speaking bishops and theologians argued for decades about the relation of the Son and the Spirit to the Father. Those debates produced the Nicene Creed. Writers such as Athanasius and the Cappadocian fathers searched the Scriptures for every verse that could help them. None of them quotes these words. As the record puts it, this is where they would have been the most useful verse to cite.
The early translations into Syriac, Coptic and other languages do not have the words either.
How the words reached the printed Greek
When printing came to Europe, the Latin Bible was printed first. The first printed edition of the Greek New Testament to be published was prepared by the Dutch scholar Erasmus and appeared in 1516. See From manuscripts to printed Bibles. Erasmus worked from the Greek manuscripts he had, and none of them had the longer wording, so his first edition did not include it. Nor did his second, in 1519.
This caused an outcry. Critics accused him of removing a text that supported the Trinity. Erasmus answered that he had not removed anything: he had printed what the Greek manuscripts said. In his third edition of 1522 he included the words, on the evidence of a single Greek manuscript that had recently come to light in England. That manuscript, now in the library of Trinity College Dublin and known as Codex Montfortianus, was probably written not long before. It appears to have taken the words from the Latin.
A popular story says that Erasmus had promised to include the words if anyone could show him a Greek manuscript that had them, and kept his promise. The historian Henk Jan de Jonge showed in 1980 that no such promise is found in Erasmus’s writings. Erasmus said rather that he included the words so as not to give his critics an excuse to attack the edition, and he said openly in his notes that he suspected the manuscript had been corrected to agree with the Latin.
Around the same time, the Complutensian Polyglot, a great Spanish Bible printed in several languages, also printed the words in Greek. Its Greek here seems to have been translated from the Latin.
From Erasmus the words passed into the later printed editions of Robert Estienne and Theodore Beza, which came to be called the Textus Receptus, the “received text”. That text was the basis of the King James Version in 1611. See The King James Version and The Greek texts behind New Testaments.
The long argument
Doubts about the verse never went away. In 1690 Isaac Newton wrote a careful study of it, later published as An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, arguing that it had entered the text from the Latin. In 1790 the classical scholar Richard Porson published letters answering a defender of the verse, and his case was widely judged decisive among scholars.
The question was also argued in the Roman Catholic Church, whose Latin Bible had the words. In 1897 a decree from Rome said that their authenticity could not safely be denied. In 1927 a further statement allowed scholars to study the question freely and reach their own conclusions. The modern official Latin Bible of the Catholic Church, the Nova Vulgata, does not include the words.
When the English Revised Version appeared in 1881, it left them out. Since then nearly every English translation has done the same, either without comment or with a footnote. A few, such as the New King James Version, keep them in the text and add a note.
What Open Word Bible does
Open Word Bible translates the SBL Greek New Testament, which does not print the longer wording. The record for 1 John 5:7–8 has a text variant decision with a footnote. Its choice is the short text, as in the SBL edition. Its alternative is the long text, quoted in full. Its reason sets out the history above in brief: no Greek manuscript before the late Middle Ages, a handful of late ones, some with the words added in the margin; no quotation by any Greek writer of the early church; a first appearance in Latin writers and then in Latin Bible copies; a likely origin as a comment copied into the text; entry into the printed Greek in the sixteenth century, and so into the Textus Receptus and the King James Version.
No level of the translation includes the longer words, and no reader setting can bring them back. That is deliberate. In Open Word Bible, settings change wording, never meaning: they let a reader choose “Messiah” or “Christ”, “Yahweh” or “the LORD”. Whether a sentence belongs in the text is not a matter of wording. It is a decision about the text, so it is made once, stated with its reasons, and shown in a footnote. See Settings change wording, never meaning.
Like every record in the project, this one is a draft. Its reason ends by saying that a reviewer must check the account against the SBL edition’s apparatus and the manuscript evidence before it is approved.
What it means for the Trinity
The record ends with a sentence a worried reader needs: “The doctrine of the Trinity does not rest on this passage.”
That is a historical fact as well as a theological one. The church’s teaching about the Trinity was worked out in the fourth century, at the Councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, by Greek-speaking theologians whose Bibles did not contain these words. They drew it from the whole witness of the New Testament: from the command to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19); from the blessing that closes 2 Corinthians, with the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit; from John’s Gospel, where the Word was with God and was God (John 1:1), and where Jesus speaks of the Father sending the Spirit in his name (John 14:26). See The Word was God.
If anything, the Comma is a weak support for the doctrine as the creeds state it. “These three are one” could be read to mean one person in three names, which the church rejected. The creeds speak with more care than the gloss does.
So two things are true together. The longer words are not part of what John wrote. And the faith they were meant to express does not depend on them. A reader can let the verse go and keep everything the creeds confess.
The verse as John wrote it
Without the Comma, 1 John 5:7–8 is not a statement about the inner life of God. It is an argument about evidence. John’s readers needed to know that their faith in Jesus as the Son of God rested on good testimony. He points to three witnesses, the Spirit at work among them now, and the water and the blood of Jesus’s baptism and death, and says that all three tell the same story. The record’s theology decision, marked uncertain, notes that the verbs are now present: what happened at Jesus’s baptism and death still bears witness, together with the Spirit. Some see a reference to baptism and the Lord’s Supper in the church; the record says the text does not say so.
That is a different point from the one the Comma makes, and in its own way a stronger one. It is about how a person comes to trust that Jesus is who he said he was. Verse 9 draws the conclusion: we accept human testimony, and the testimony of God is greater.
For other passages where older and newer Bibles differ, see Verses missing from modern Bibles, How does Mark end? and The woman caught in adultery.
Open 1 John 5 to read the passage and the reasoning behind it.
Sources
- Michael W. Holmes, ed., The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition (Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software, 2010).
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994).
- Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005).
- Henk Jan de Jonge, “Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum”, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56 (1980).
- Grantley McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe: Erasmus, the Johannine Comma and Trinitarian Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- King James Version quotations are public domain.