Does the Trinity Depend on 1 John 5:7?

The King James sentence about the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost in 1 John 5:7“Show the words of 1 John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.King James Version is not the verse the early Greek copies have. Christians should say that plainly. The Trinity is older than that sentence, and it does not use it.

The question

Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims often point at 1 John 5:7“Show the words of 1 John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.King James Version. In the King James Version the verse names the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and says these three are one. The objection is that the sentence was added later, and that the Trinity depends on an addition.

The first half of the objection is right. The sentence is a late addition. It is called the Johannine Comma, or the Comma Johanneum: a short clause that grew into the Latin text and, much later, into a few Greek copies and into the printed text behind the King James Version. The second half does not follow. The confession that the one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was taught from other texts, and it was confessed in the fourth century, long before this clause stood in the Greek text the King James translators used.

A Christian who quotes 1 John 5:7“Show the words of 1 John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.King James Version as the proof of the Trinity is using a sentence the early manuscripts do not contain. This page will not do that.

What the King James Version prints

1 John 5:7–8“Show the words of 1 John 5:7–8^5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. ^5:8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.King James Version (1), King James Version:

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.

The longer wording is the heavenly witnesses: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and the claim that these three are one. Then the earthly witnesses: the Spirit, the water, and the blood. The verse before, 1 John 5:6“Show the words of 1 John 5:6This 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.King James Version, has already said that Jesus Christ came by water and blood, and that the Spirit bears witness. The shorter text continues that thought. The longer text inserts a Trinity sentence between the Spirit’s witness and the three that agree.

The King James Version prints the insertion because it translated the Greek text received in the churches of its day, the Textus Receptus. That printed text included the comma. Honesty about the King James Version includes both facts: it is the public-domain English Bible this site publishes, and this one sentence in it is not original.

What the early text prints

The New World Translation of 1 John 5:7–8“Show the words of New World Translation of 1 John 5:7–8⁷ For there are three witness bearers: ⁸ the spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.New World Translation (2013)Open on jw.org ↗ (2) prints the shorter text:

[7] For there are three witness bearers: [8] the spirit and the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.

On this verse the New World Translation agrees with the critical Greek text. There is no reason to quarrel with it here. The three witnesses are the spirit, the water, and the blood. There is no “Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost” in the sentence.

Bruce M. Metzger’s A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, the companion to the United Bible Societies’ Greek text, says of the longer words: “That these words are spurious and have no right to stand in the New Testament is certain in the light of the following considerations.” (3) Those considerations are the ones textual critics still give. The sentence is absent from the early Greek manuscripts. The few Greek copies that include it are late, and the wording matches a late form of the Latin. Rodrigo Galiza and John W. Reeve, surveying that history for Andrews University Seminary Studies, state the point English scholarship treats as settled: the comma is not in the early Greek manuscripts. (4)

The Codex Sinaiticus Project publishes the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus at 1 John 5. The folio is British Library folio 324, covering 1 John 5:5“Show the words of 1 John 5:5Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?King James Version through 2 John 1:7“Show the words of 2 John 1:7For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.King James Version. (6) Sinaiticus is one of the principal Greek Bibles from that century. With the other early Greek witnesses, it is part of the manuscript tradition Metzger describes as lacking the comma. A reader can open the project’s images. This page does not need a private transcription to repeat what the commentary and the Study Edition already show: the early text is the short one.

The ancient versions other than the Latin — Syriac, Coptic, and the rest of that early company — likewise do not carry the heavenly witnesses as part of the epistle. The comma’s trail is Latin, and then, late, a thin Greek trail. That is why a Witness who says “this Trinity verse was added” is describing the evidence, and why a Muslim who says the same is not exposing a secret Christians have to deny.

How the longer sentence entered the printed Greek text

Galiza and Reeve retell the sixteenth-century part without the legend that is often attached to it. Desiderius Erasmus’s first two editions of the Greek New Testament did not contain the comma in 1 John 5:7–8“Show the words of 1 John 5:7–8^5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. ^5:8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.King James Version. He wrote to Edward Lee that he had not found a Greek manuscript that differed from the text he had published. A story later claimed that Erasmus promised to insert the words if a single Greek copy could be produced. Galiza and Reeve say it is doubtful he ever made that promise. What is not doubtful is the sequence they report. A British manuscript containing the variant, Codex Montfortianus, also called Codex Britannicus, came to light around 1520. Erasmus included the comma in his next edition, published in 1522. (4)

From that printed Greek text the sentence passed into the Textus Receptus and into the King James Version. The path is Latin theology and Latin Bibles, then a late Greek manuscript, then a printed edition in 1522, then the English of 1611. It is not the path of the fourth-century Greek codices.

Cyprian, stated honestly

The early Latin trail is real, and it should not be flattened into “nobody mentioned this until the Middle Ages.” Cyprian of Carthage, in On the Unity of the Church 6, writes in the middle of the third century. Ernest Wallis’s translation (5):

The Lord says, I and the Father are one; and again it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, And these three are one.

New Advent’s margin labels the second clause as 1 John 5:7“Show the words of 1 John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.King James Version. That label assumes the comma. The words Cyprian quotes are “these three are one,” and he says they are written of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He does not quote the longer King James sentence about witnesses in heaven and witnesses on earth.

Scholars divide on what he had in front of him. Galiza and Reeve place the probable origin in third-century Latin Christianity, and they set two readings side by side. One, following Walter Thiele, is that a form of the comma was already in a Latin Bible of Cyprian’s time. The other is that Cyprian took “these three are one,” the line about the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and applied it to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. On that reading the comma began as a theological use of the short text. Commentators who hold it say the words were later written in the margin of Latin copies and only afterward entered the text. Galiza and Reeve treat that second reading as the simpler one. (4) Either way, Cyprian can say “it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, And these three are one” without the Greek copies of the epistle containing the heavenly witnesses.

Both readings can be stated. Cyprian’s sentence is genuine third-century Latin. It does not put the King James wording into Codex Sinaiticus, and it does not make the comma the foundation of a confession the Greek churches were already teaching from other texts. The earliest clear quotation of the comma as part of the epistle’s text, in Metzger’s account, is a fourth-century Latin treatise, the Liber Apologeticus, associated with Priscillian or with Instantius. That is Latin evidence about a Latin expansion. It is not a Greek Bible of the apostolic period.

Why the confession does not need this verse

The Trinity is the claim that the one God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and that Jesus is God. The texts Christians actually rely on do not include the comma.

Matthew 28:19“Show the words of Matthew 28:19Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:King James Version (7): “baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” One name, three persons. 2 Corinthians 13:14“Show the words of 2 Corinthians 13:14The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.King James Version (8): “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.” John 1:1“Show the words of John 1:1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.King James Version (9): “the Word was God.” John 20:28“Show the words of John 20:28And Thomas answered and said unto him, My LORD and my God.King James Version (9): “My Lord and my God.” The Trinity and the deity of Christ walk through those lines. None of them is 1 John 5:7“Show the words of 1 John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.King James Version in the King James wording.

The Nicene confession was argued in the fourth century. The creed associated with Constantinople in 381 names the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as the faith of the church. (10) That century is when Sinaiticus was copied, without the comma. The creed does not quote the comma, because the Greek text the bishops had did not contain it. The doctrine was not invented to match a sentence that entered the printed Greek New Testament in 1522.

So the concession is the whole first half of the objection, given without a struggle. Do not cite 1 John 5:7“Show the words of 1 John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.King James Version in the King James Version as a proof of the Trinity. Tell a Witness or a Muslim neighbor that the New World Translation is right to print the shorter text. Then open Matthew 28:19“Show the words of Matthew 28:19Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:King James Version and John 1:1“Show the words of John 1:1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.King James Version. The argument begins there. It does not begin with a clause the early Greek copies do not have.

Common objections

If you admit the verse was added, you admit the Bible was corrupted. Christians admit this sentence was added to the Latin tradition and later to the printed Greek text. They do not admit that the books of the New Testament were replaced. Textual criticism is how an addition is found. The shorter reading is witnessed by the early Greek manuscripts, and modern editions print it. An addition that is identified, footnoted, and dropped from the text Christians now argue from is the opposite of a hidden original. Was the Bible corrupted? is the wider claim. This verse is a case where Christians and their critics should start from the same Greek.

The Trinity was invented at Nicaea, and this verse was written to match it. Nicaea and Constantinople confess the Trinity without this sentence. The Greek manuscript tradition of 1 John did not have the sentence for those bishops to quote. The Latin expansion is a later reflection on three witnesses, not the source of the creed. If the councils had needed 1 John 5:7“Show the words of 1 John 5:7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.King James Version in the King James form, they would have needed a text they did not possess.

Cyprian proves the verse is original. He proves that a third-century Latin writer applied “these three are one” to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Quote him. Then say what he does not show: a second-century Greek manuscript, or the wording “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost.” The Greek evidence Metzger assembles still lacks the comma. Early Latin theology and the Greek text of the epistle are not the same fact.

Only the King James Version is the Bible, so the comma stands. This site publishes the King James Version, including this verse, because that English text is in the public domain and because readers should see what the 1611 tradition printed. Publishing it is not a claim that every clause in it was in the autograph. The translators worked from the Greek they were given. Erasmus’s 1522 edition had already put the clause there. A reader who wants the verse the early Greek copies support reads the shorter text the New World Translation prints at this one place, and then reads Matthew 28 and John 1 for the doctrine.

Keep reading

• The Trinity
• The deity of Christ
• Was the Bible corrupted?
• How reliable is the New World Translation?
• John 1 and the Word