Theopedia

Johannine Comma

Definition

The Johannine Comma is a short clause found in some manuscripts and translations of 1 John 5:7-8, naming the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit as three heavenly witnesses who “are one.” It stands in the King James Version but is absent from nearly all Greek manuscripts and from most modern English translations, which instead read the verse as a single sentence naming three earthly witnesses: the Spirit, the water, and the blood. Whether the clause belongs to the original text of 1 John, or entered it later, has been argued since at least the sixteenth century.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter addressing this or any other specific textual variant. Its general doctrine of Scripture holds that the Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament, “being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and Providence kept pure in all Ages, are therefore authentical.”1 That commits Reformed Baptists to a text providentially preserved as a whole, not to any one printed edition or to every individual reading transmitted in the manuscript tradition, and it gives no direct verdict on whether the Comma’s longer reading belongs to that preserved text.

Historical Development

The two readings can be compared directly. The King James Version gives the longer reading: “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, KJV). The ESV, representative of most modern translations, gives the shorter reading: “For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree” (1 John 5:7-8, ESV).

Patristic citation and Gill’s defense

Writing against a resurgent eighteenth-century Trinitarian controversy in his Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769), John Gill defended 1 John 5:7 as authentic Scripture and treated it as proof of “a Trinity of persons in the Godhead.”2 He read “these three are one” as a claim about shared nature rather than mere agreement of testimony, noting that of the three earthly witnesses “it is not said… that they agree in one; but that they are one,” and argued that reading the Father, Word, and Spirit as one speaker under three names, rather than three distinct witnesses, would leave “but one testifier, and not three, as the apostle asserts.”3

Gill acknowledged the verse’s absence from the Syriac and Latin manuscripts and from most Greek copies, but argued it had been quoted by patristic authors reaching back to Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century, through Tertullian, Cyprian, Athanasius, and Jerome, to Fulgentius of Ruspe in the sixth, and judged “textual evidence of its use up to one hundred years” sufficient evidence of authenticity.2 He further noted that the clause appeared in a later edition of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament and even in a Socinian translation, despite Socinian antitrinitarian sympathies.4 Even so, Gill did not rest the doctrine of the Trinity on this one verse: its real basis, he wrote, lay “on the whole current and universal consent of scripture, where it is written as with a sunbeam.”4

The printed Greek text and the King James Version

The Comma’s route into English Bibles runs through the earliest printed Greek New Testaments. Erasmus produced his first edition at Basel in 1516 from a handful of manuscripts, revising it across four further editions through 1535; Robert Stephens’s editions of 1546-1550 and Theodore Beza’s of 1565-1589 followed closely behind Erasmus’s text, and the 1624 Elzevir edition, copied mainly from Beza, became known as the Textus Receptus, “copied, with a few exceptions, from the text of Beza,” which in turn “closely followed Stephens,” whose own text “copied solely from the fifth edition of Erasmus.”5 This Erasmus-to-Beza lineage of Greek editions, all of which include 1 John 5:7’s longer reading, underlies the King James Version’s New Testament. By the mid-nineteenth century, a conservative Presbyterian introduction to Scripture already reported the matter as settled: the Comma “is generally rejected on the testimony of the manuscripts.”6

Modern critical assessment

Twentieth-century textual scholarship reached the same verdict from fuller manuscript evidence. Bruce Metzger’s standard critical commentary on the Greek New Testament states that the verse is “absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Slavonic), except the Latin,” and concludes from this and further internal evidence that it is not part of the original text of 1 John.7 Nearly all modern English translations follow this earlier manuscript evidence and omit the clause, as the ESV does above; the King James Version and the printed Greek editions behind it remain the main line of transmission by which the reading still reaches English readers.

Objections and Responses

Gill’s citation of early patristic authors is sometimes read as settling the passage’s antiquity. Modern textual scholarship reaches the opposite conclusion from much the same body of evidence. Metzger’s verdict, that the verse is missing from every ancient version except the Latin, treats the wider manuscript and patristic record as showing the reading was absent from the Greek text known to the fathers Gill cites and entered a handful of late Greek manuscripts only after already circulating in Latin.7

If the doctrine of the Trinity depended on a single, textually disputed verse, its case would look fragile. It does not, on the argument of the Comma’s own most determined confessional defender. Gill himself refused to rest the doctrine on 1 John 5:7 and pointed instead to a wide range of other evidence: the three persons named together as agents of creation (Ps. 33:6), of Israel’s deliverance (Isa. 63:7-14), and of salvation (1 Pet. 1:2; Eph. 1:3-14), and the baptismal and benedictory formulas that invoke Father, Son, and Spirit together (Matt. 28:19; 2 Cor. 13:14).8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 8, text as transcribed by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (the1689confession.com was unreachable from this session). ↩

  2. Steven Tshombe Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” in “The Trinitarian Theology of John Gill (1697-1771): Context, Sources, and Controversy” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2015), 178-179. ↩ ↩2

  3. Jonathan Elliot Swan, “‘Nothing Else Than Generation’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship,” in “’The Fountain of Life’: John Gill’s Doctrine of Christ’s Eternal Sonship” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2021), 98-99. ↩

  4. Swan, “‘Nothing Else Than Generation,’” 99. ↩ ↩2

  5. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 389-390, quoting Bishop Herbert Marsh, Divinity Lectures, part 1, 111. ↩

  6. Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 390. ↩

  7. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament: A Companion Volume to the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, 4th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1994), 647-649, quoted in Godet, “John Gill: Patristic Scholar,” 179. ↩ ↩2

  8. Swan, “‘Nothing Else Than Generation,’” 100-101. ↩