1 John 5:7: 8 facts about the verse that left the Bible

The passage in the King James Version runs over two verses: “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” (1 John 5:7–8).^[1]

The Greek text that modern translations follow reads, more simply: “For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.” The words “in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit عليه السلام, and these three are one; and there are three that testify on earth” are absent.^[2]

The difference goes well beyond spelling or word order. The longer text names the three persons of the Trinity and says that they “are one”, which is the only verse in the Bible that states the doctrine in something like the language of the later creeds. The shorter text speaks of three witnesses to Jesus on earth, the Spirit, the water and the blood, which most commentators take as references to his baptism, his death and the testimony of the Spirit in the church.

Of the several hundred Greek manuscripts that contain 1 John, the clause is found in the text of about eight, and in the margin of a few more. The earliest that has it in the text is a fourteenth-century manuscript, and the others date from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries or later. Several of them show signs of being translated back from the Latin.^[3] None of the great early codices, Sinaiticus, Vaticanus or Alexandrinus, contains it, and no papyrus does.

The silence of the Greek writers of the early church is just as telling. The great controversies over the Trinity in the fourth century were fought in Greek, and the defenders of Nicaea searched the scriptures for every text that could support the doctrine that Father, Son and Spirit are one God. Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa never cite this verse.^[4] Had it been in their Bibles, it would have been the first verse they quoted.

The common account says that the clause first appeared in Jerome’s Vulgate, the Latin translation made at the end of the fourth century. That account is mistaken in its main detail.

The oldest and best manuscripts of the Vulgate, such as the Codex Fuldensis of about 546 and the Codex Amiatinus of about 700, do not contain the clause in the text.^[5] It entered the Vulgate later, in the course of its copying, and became standard in the Latin Bible of the Middle Ages.

The clause itself is older than that, and Latin in origin. The first writer who clearly quotes it is Priscillian, a Spanish bishop executed for heresy in 385, whose Liber Apologeticus gives a form of it.^[6] Earlier still, Cyprian of Carthage, around 250, wrote that “it is written of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit: and these three are one”. Scholars disagree about whether he was quoting a Latin text that already had the clause or applying 1 John 5:8 to the Trinity by interpretation, as Augustine later did with the Spirit, the water and the blood.^[7] Either way, the history runs through Latin North Africa and Spain, and the Greek manuscripts play no part in it until the late Middle Ages.

A preface to the Catholic Epistles, written in the sixth century in Jerome’s name, complains that unfaithful translators had left out the testimony of the Father, the Word and the Spirit. The preface is not by Jerome, and its complaint is evidence that the clause was being added to Latin Bibles that lacked it.^[8]

The clause reached the King James Version through the printed Greek New Testament. In 1516 the Dutch scholar Erasmus published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, and he left the clause out because he found it in no Greek manuscript. Catholic critics, among them the Spanish scholar Diego López de Zúñiga and the English theologian Edward Lee, accused him of encouraging the Arian heresy.^[9]

A Greek manuscript containing the clause was then produced, the one now known as Codex Montfortianus, written in the early sixteenth century, very probably in England. Erasmus included the clause in his third edition of 1522, noting that he suspected the manuscript had been made to meet the demand.^[10] A popular story says that he had promised to include the words if a single Greek manuscript could be found. The scholar Henk Jan de Jonge has shown that the story is not supported by Erasmus’s own writings, and Bruce Metzger corrected his account of it in later editions of his textbook.^[11] The outcome is not disputed: the words entered the printed Greek, passed into the editions of Stephanus and Beza that the King James translators used, and so into the English Bible of 1611.

The clause stayed in use long after its history was known, and it was defended for more than three hundred years after Erasmus.

Isaac عليه السلام Newton wrote a detailed treatise around 1690, An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, arguing that 1 John 5:7 was an interpolation; he did not dare publish it in his lifetime, and it appeared in 1754.^[12] In 1790 the Cambridge classicist Richard Porson published his Letters to Archdeacon Travis, which answered a clergyman’s defence of the verse and settled the question for most Protestant scholars.^[13]

The Roman Catholic Church held out longer. On 13 January 1897, the Holy Office in Rome, with the approval of Pope Leo XIII, answered that the authenticity of the verse could not safely be denied or called into doubt. In 1927 the Holy Office issued a clarification allowing Catholic scholars to investigate the question and to hold a contrary opinion, provided they submitted to the Church’s judgment.^[14] Modern Catholic Bibles, like Protestant ones, omit the clause.

Newton’s treatise named two “notable corruptions”, and the second shows that the Johannine clause had company. In the King James Version, 1 Timothy 3:16 reads: “God was manifest in the flesh.” The oldest Greek manuscripts read “who was manifested in the flesh”, referring back to the mystery of godliness or to Christ, without the word God.^[15]

In the Greek capitals of the early manuscripts, “who” was written ΟΣ and “God”, abbreviated as a sacred name, ΘΣ with a line above. The difference is a small stroke inside the first letter and a line over the word. Codex Sinaiticus reads “who” in the original hand; a corrector later changed it to “God”. Codex Alexandrinus has been examined for centuries to decide whether its reading is “who” or “God”, because the stroke inside its letter may be original or may be ink showing through from the other side of the page.^[16] Most textual critics conclude that “who” is original and that “God” was introduced by later copyists, whether by misreading or by design.

A third passage, Acts 20:28, reads in some manuscripts “the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” and in others “the church of the Lord”. Here the oldest manuscripts are divided, and the editors of the standard Greek text prefer “of God”.^[17] The case is a reminder that changes ran in more than one direction and that each must be judged on its evidence.

The two cases Newton chose had one thing in common: in each, a later reading states the divinity of Christ or the unity of the Trinity more plainly than the earlier one.

The usual response to the clause’s removal is that it makes no difference, because the Trinity is taught throughout the New Testament and especially in the command to baptise “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19).

Matthew 28:19 names Father, Son and Spirit together, and Christians have rightly treated it as a foundation of their baptismal practice. What it lacks is the clause’s conclusion. It names three in one formula, and it stops short of saying that the three “are one” or of stating the equality of essence that the later creeds defined. The Didache, an early Christian manual, uses the same formula for baptism without drawing any doctrine of three persons from it.^[18] The sermons in Acts, for their part, baptise “in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38, 10:48).^[19]

The textual history of Matthew 28:19 is not in serious doubt: every Greek manuscript that contains the end of Matthew has the threefold formula. Some scholars have pointed out that Eusebius of Caesarea, before the Council of Nicaea, several times quotes the verse in a shorter form, “Go and make disciples of all nations in my name”, and have suggested that this was the form of his text. Most textual critics reply that Eusebius was paraphrasing.^[20] The question shows how much weight the formula has been made to bear, and why a later reader felt the need for a clearer statement.

That is the real significance of the clause. A copyist or reader who added “the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one” did so because the text as it stood did not say it.

The defenders of the Bible are right that modern translations follow the oldest Greek manuscripts, and that the removal of the clause shows textual criticism at work. That should be acknowledged. Christian scholars did the work, and they published it against the resistance of their own churches.

The same history also shows that words stating a central doctrine were added to the Bible in the Latin West, copied for a thousand years, printed in the Greek text in 1522, read in English churches from 1611, and defended by a papal decree in 1897. A Muslim who says that the scriptures of the People of the Book were altered in places points to cases of exactly this kind. The Quran says that some of them “write the Book with their own hands and then say, this is from God” (2:79).^[21] The clause leaves the rest of the Bible where it was, and no careful Muslim claims that the whole was rewritten. What it shows is that a doctrinal addition could pass for scripture for centuries before anyone could prove it was one.