Comma Johanneum ( 1 John 5:7 –8)
Summary of the Textual Evidence
Background
The Comma Johanneum refers to the additional words found in 1 John 5:7 –8 in the King James Version: “in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth.” These words do not appear in the standard critical Greek New Testament text used by scholars today, and the weight of external and internal evidence against their authenticity is, in the judgment of the scholarly community, conclusive.
This study is also a supplement to =>
Greek Manuscript Evidence
The Comma is absent from the overwhelming majority of Greek New Testament manuscripts. Of the thousands of extant Greek manuscripts, it appears in only ten, and only eight of these are indexed by the standard critical apparatus; four of those eight contain it solely as a marginal notation — that is, added by a later hand, not as part of the original text of the manuscript.¹ The manuscripts in question (GA 61, 88, 221, 429, 629, 636, 918, 2318) originate predominantly from the 16th century. The earliest manuscript to include the Comma anywhere in its text is GA 629, dated 1362–1363, and even this represents an isolated Latin-influenced intrusion approximately twelve centuries after John wrote.² Crucially, there is no sure evidence of this reading in any Greek manuscript tradition until the 1500s, and each instance of the reading appears to derive from translation back into Greek from the Latin rather than from any independent Greek source.³
The significance of this silence is amplified by a striking historical fact: not one Greek Church Father — including those actively engaged in the Trinitarian controversies against Sabellianism and Arianism — ever cites this passage. Had such a text existed in their Greek copies, these writers would have employed it readily and repeatedly.⁴
Origin of the Reading
The Comma appears to have originated in a fourth-century Latin homily in which the text of 1 John 5:7 –8 was allegorized to refer to the persons of the Trinity. From there it passed into marginal annotations in copies of the Old Latin Bible, and subsequently into the body text of certain manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate — not through deliberate theological insertion, but through the common scribal error of incorporating a marginal exegetical gloss into the running text being copied.⁵ It is entirely absent from the Vulgate as originally issued by Jerome (as confirmed by Codex Fuldensis, copied A.D. 541–546, and Codex Amiatinus, copied before A.D. 716), and absent from the Vulgate as revised by Alcuin.⁶ A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture concedes the point directly: “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.”⁷
Erasmus and the Entry into the Textus Receptus
Erasmus excluded the Comma from his first (1516) and second (1519) editions of the Greek New Testament, stating that he could not include what he found in no Greek manuscript. Following intense pressure from Catholic critics after 1516, and upon being presented with Codex Montfortianus (GA 61) — a manuscript now dated to c. 1520 and widely regarded as having been produced specifically to resolve the dispute — Erasmus included the Comma in his third edition (1522).⁸ He did so not out of conviction in its genuineness, but, as he states in his own Annotationes, to defend himself from charges of negligence.⁹ It is important to note that Erasmus made no formal promise to include the Comma if a manuscript were produced; this characterization has been specifically refuted by H.J. de Jonge, the recognized specialist in Erasmian studies at the University of Leiden.¹⁰ The reading passed from Erasmus’s 1522 edition into the Textus Receptus tradition and ultimately into the KJV of 1611.
Conclusion
The words of 1 John 5:7 –8 as rendered in the KJV represent a late Latin gloss that entered the Greek manuscript tradition no earlier than the 14th century and the printed Greek New Testament no earlier than 1522. They carry no weight as independent documentary evidence for any doctrine, since their origin lies not in apostolic text but in later theological commentary absorbed into the transmission stream of the Latin Bible. Modern critical editions — Protestant and Catholic alike — do not include them in the body of the text.
Research for this article was conducted with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), an AI language model. I find it to be consistent with my previous study, but with more detail and authoritative citations. -Sid
Footnotes
¹ Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1994), 647–649; Kurt Aland et al., eds., The Greek New Testament, 4th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1993), apparatus at 1 John 5:7 .
² Elijah Hixson, “The Greek Manuscripts of the *Comma Johanneum* ( 1 John 5:7 –8),” Evangelical Textual Criticism (blog), January 7, 2020, https://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-greek-manuscripts-of-comma.html.
³ Daniel B. Wallace, “The Textual Problem in 1 John 5:7 –8,” Bible.org, https://bible.org/article/textual-problem-1-john-57-8.
⁴ Metzger, Textual Commentary, 648; Wallace, “Textual Problem.”
⁵ Wallace, “Textual Problem”; Metzger, Textual Commentary, 648.
⁶ Metzger, Textual Commentary, 648.
⁷ Reginald C. Fuller, Leonard Johnston, and Conleth Kearns, eds., A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1951), 1186.
⁸ Grantley McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe: Erasmus, the Johannine Comma and Trinitarian Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), passim; Wallace, “Textual Problem.”
⁹ McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe; Wallace, “Textual Problem.”
¹⁰ H.J. de Jonge, as cited in Michael Maynard, A History of the Debate over 1 John 5:7 –8 (Tempe, AZ: Comma Publications, 1995); see also Wallace, “Textual Problem,” n. 4.
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