Johannine Comma

The Johannine Comma (Latin: Comma Johanneum) is an interpolated phrase (comma) in verses 5:7–8 of the First Epistle of John.^[2]

The text (with the comma in italics and enclosed by square brackets) in the King James Bible reads:

⁷For 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 (1611)

In the Greek Textus Receptus (TR), the verse reads thus:^[3]

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

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.^[4]

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." A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, by Bruce Metzger (1975, pp. 716-718), traces in detail the history of the passage. It states that the passage is first found in a treatise entitled Liber Apologeticus, of the fourth century, and that it appears in Old Latin and Vulgate manuscripts of the Scriptures, beginning in the sixth century. Modern translations as a whole, both Catholic and Protestant, do not include them in the main body of the text, because of their ostensibly spurious nature.—RS, NE, NAB. ^[5][6]

The comma is mainly only attested in the Latin manuscripts of the New Testament, being absent from almost all Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, the earliest Greek manuscript being 14th century.^[7] It is also totally absent in the Ethiopic, Aramaic, Syriac, Slavic, Georgian, Arabic and from the early pre-12th century Armenian^[8] witnesses to the Greek New Testament. It appears in some English translations of the Bible among other European languages via its inclusion in the first printed New Testament, Novum Instrumentum omne by Erasmus, where it first appeared in the 1522 third edition. 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.

The Comma Johanneum is among the most noteworthy variants found within the Textus Receptus in addition to the confession of the Ethiopian eunuch , the long ending of Mark, the Pericope Adulterae, the reading "God" in 1 Timothy 3:16 and the "book of life" in Revelation 22:19.^[9]