The Bible’s text
How 1 John 5:7 entered the King James Bible
For centuries English readers found the clearest statement of the Trinity in 1 John 5:7: “the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”. These words are not in the early Greek manuscripts, and most modern Bibles no longer print them. This topic follows their path from Latin margins to the King James Bible of 1611, and asks why they disappeared.
1The question
Where did the King James wording of 1 John 5:7 come from, and why do most modern Bibles drop it?
2What Christians believe
Most Christian scholars today agree that the words were not written by John. Modern translations such as the NIV, ESV and NASB leave them out or put them in a footnote. A small number of Christians who hold to the King James Bible alone still defend them, pointing to the third-century writer Cyprian, who wrote that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit “are one”.
Christians stress that the doctrine of the Trinity does not depend on this verse. They point to passages such as the baptism formula in Matthew 28:19 and the blessing in 2 Corinthians 13:14, which name the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit together. For most Christians the story is a lesson in honest scholarship: the verse was questioned by Christian scholars, removed from the Greek text by Christian editors, and is footnoted in modern Christian Bibles.
3What the texts say
The verse and its neighbours
This 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.
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.
Verses Christians use instead
Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.
4What scholars say
Bruce M. Metzger (A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., 1994) reports that the words are absent from every known Greek manuscript except a handful of very late ones, several with the words added in the margin. They are not quoted by any of the Greek church fathers, who would surely have used them in the fourth-century debates about the Trinity.
The wording first appears clearly in Latin, in a fourth-century work known as the Liber Apologeticus, linked to the Spanish teacher Priscillian or his followers. Over the following centuries it spread into Latin Bibles, often first as a note on verse 8.
Erasmus left the words out of his Greek New Testament in 1516 and 1519 and was criticised for doing so. He added them in his third edition of 1522, after a Greek manuscript containing them was produced, now known as Codex Montfortianus and kept in Dublin. Henk Jan de Jonge (“Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum”, 1980) showed that the popular story of Erasmus promising to add them if one manuscript were found is a later legend. From Erasmus the words passed into the printed Greek texts used by the King James translators.
Grantley McDonald (Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe, 2016) traces the whole debate, and Bart D. Ehrman tells the story for general readers in Misquoting Jesus (2005). On this case scholars of all backgrounds agree: the words are a later addition.
5The Islamic perspective
The Qur’an speaks of people who added to scripture with their own hands and attributed it to God, and it addresses the very idea the added words express, calling Christians back to one God:
Therefore woe be unto those who write the Scripture with their hands and then say, "This is from Allah," that they may purchase a small gain therewith. Woe unto them for that their hands have written, and woe unto them for that they earn thereby.
O People of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion nor utter aught concerning Allah save the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a messenger of Allah, and His word which He conveyed unto Mary, and a spirit from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers, and say not "Three" - Cease! (it is) better for you! - Allah is only One Allah. Far is it removed from His Transcendent Majesty that He should have a son. His is all that is in the heavens and all that is in the earth. And Allah is sufficient as Defender.
They surely disbelieve who say: Lo! Allah is the third of three; when there is no Allah save the One Allah. If they desist not from so saying a painful doom will fall on those of them who disbelieve.
Muslims do not claim every change in the Bible was made on purpose, or that this one was. The lesson they draw is that a sentence teaching three in one was written in the margins of Latin Bibles, moved into the text, and printed as the word of God for centuries. The Qur’an’s warning, “say not ‘Three’”, speaks to exactly that belief, and the story shows why a revelation preserved word for word from the prophet who received it matters.
6Objections and responses
“No Christian doctrine depends on this verse, so it makes no difference.”
Response: For Christians reading the whole Bible, that is a fair point. But for about four hundred years this was the plainest Trinity verse in the English Bible, quoted in sermons and debates. A verse can matter a great deal without being the only support for a belief.
“Cyprian quoted these words in the third century, so they must be old.”
Response: Cyprian may have been giving his own Trinitarian reading of verse 8, where “the spirit, and the water, and the blood” agree in one. The words are missing from every early Greek manuscript, and the Greek writers who argued about the Trinity in the fourth century never quote them, though they would have been the clearest verse to use.
“Christians found the problem themselves and corrected it.”
Response: Muslims welcome that honesty, and this site relies on the same scholarship. The correction came more than a thousand years after the words entered the Latin Bible, which shows how long an addition can be accepted before it is noticed.
7Conclusion
Both sides agree on the history: the words appear first in Latin, enter printed Greek through Erasmus in 1522, reach English through the King James Bible, and are absent from the early Greek manuscripts. Christians see a later addition that scholars rightly removed, and hold that the Trinity stands on other verses. Muslims see an example of later belief shaping the text of scripture.
Read 1 John 5:6–8 in the King James Version and in a modern translation side by side, and notice what is missing.
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Related topics
Sources
- Bible, King James Version:1 John 5:61 John 5:71 John 5:8Matthew 28:192 Corinthians 13:14
- Qur’an, translated by M. Pickthall:Qur’an 2:79Qur’an 4:171Qur’an 5:73
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (1994)
- Grantley McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe: Erasmus, the Johannine Comma and Trinitarian Debate (2016)
- Henk Jan de Jonge, “Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum”, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56 (1980)
- Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (2005)
- Isaac Newton, An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture (written 1690)