Open the fifth chapter of the First Letter of John in the Douay-Rheims and you read: “And there are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one. And there are three that give testimony on earth: the spirit, and the water, and the blood.” Put the World English Bible beside it and the same place reads: “For there are three who testify: the Spirit, the water, and the blood.”
The words about the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost are missing. They are known as the Johannine Comma, from the Latin comma, a short clause, and they are the longest disputed passage in the New Testament that turns on a point of doctrine.
What the columns show
Line up the editions on Collatio and they fall into three groups.
Some print the words as part of the text with no mark at all: the Clementine Vulgate, the Douay-Rheims, Martini’s Italian Bible, the German Allioli-Arndt, the Catholic Public Domain Version, and, on the Greek side, the Textus Receptus.
Some print them but set them apart. Crampon and Straubinger put them in square brackets, and the Dutch Petrus Canisius Bible puts them in parentheses. Each is telling the reader the same thing: these words are in our Bible, but we have doubts about them.
And some leave them out: the World English Bible and, perhaps more surprisingly, Matos Soares, whose Portuguese text was made from the Vulgate and still goes straight from “three who testify” to “the Spirit, the water and the blood”.
Missing from the Greek
The letter was written in Greek, and that is where the trouble starts. Of the hundreds of Greek manuscripts of the First Letter of John, about ten have the Comma, and the evidence is late. The oldest that has the words in the text itself, known as minuscule 629, was copied in the fourteenth century. In several others the words were added in the margin by a much later hand: one of those, minuscule 221, is a tenth-century manuscript, but its note was written some five hundred years after the rest. The great early codices, the Sinaiticus, the Vaticanus and the Alexandrinus, do not have the words. Neither do the great majority of later Greek manuscripts, the Byzantine tradition that Greek copyists carried on through the Middle Ages, which is why the World English Bible, whose New Testament follows the Majority Text edited from those manuscripts, leaves them out.
The Greek Fathers are just as silent. In the fourth century, when the divinity of the Son and the Spirit was argued over at length, a verse naming the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit and adding “these three are one” would have been the obvious proof text. No Greek writer of that period quotes it.
Born in Latin
The Comma belongs to the Latin West. Around 250, in his treatise On the Unity of the Church, Saint Cyprian of Carthage wrote that “of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit it is written: and these three are one.” Whether he was quoting a Bible that had the longer reading, or reading the Spirit, the water and the blood as figures of the Trinity, is still debated.
The first clear quotation appears in the 380s, in a Latin work known as the Liber Apologeticus, written by the Spanish bishop Priscillian or by one of his followers, perhaps the bishop Instantius. After that it turns up more and more often, first in North Africa and Spain. A likely explanation is that a commentary on the earthly witnesses, reading them as a figure of the heavenly ones, was copied into the margin of a Latin Bible and then, by a later copyist, into the text.
Jerome’s Vulgate did not have it at first. The oldest Vulgate manuscripts, such as the Codex Fuldensis, copied in 546, leave it out. The Fuldensis does carry a preface to the Catholic letters, falsely attributed to Jerome, that complains of translators who dropped the testimony of the Father, the Word and the Spirit. The preface defends the Comma; the Bible it is bound with does not contain it. By the later Middle Ages, though, most Latin Bibles had it, and the Clementine Vulgate of 1592 printed it as part of the text.
Erasmus and the printed Greek
When Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516, he followed his Greek manuscripts and left the Comma out. He did the same in his second edition, in 1519. Critics, among them the English theologian Edward Lee and the Spanish scholar Diego López de Zúñiga, accused him of weakening the doctrine of the Trinity.
In answering Lee, Erasmus wrote that he would have printed the words if he had found them in a single Greek manuscript. Then one turned up, now in the library of Trinity College Dublin and known as the Codex Montfortianus. It had been copied only a few years earlier, and its Greek at this point reads like a translation from the Latin. In his third edition, in 1522, Erasmus put the Comma in, while saying in his notes that he suspected the manuscript had been corrected to agree with the Latin.
A popular story turns his remark to Lee into a promise: that he would add the Comma if anyone could show him one Greek manuscript that had it. The historian Henk Jan de Jonge, who went through the exchange, found no such promise. Erasmus had told his critics that they could not blame him for leaving out words his manuscripts did not have; he never undertook to print them on the evidence of one.
Later editors of the printed Greek, Robert Estienne, Theodore Beza and the Elzevir printers among them, kept the words, and so the Comma reached the Textus Receptus, the Greek text behind the King James Version and most Protestant translations for three centuries.
Rome and the verse
As scholars questioned the Comma more openly, Rome was asked whether its authenticity could be safely denied or called into doubt. On 13 January 1897, the Holy Office answered that it could not.
Thirty years later, on 2 June 1927, the Holy Office explained what that answer meant. It had been meant to restrain private scholars from rejecting the verse on their own authority, and Catholic scholars were free to study the question and to lean against the Comma, as long as they were ready to accept the Church’s judgment on it.
That explains the brackets. Crampon’s Bible and Straubinger’s, both made from the original languages, kept the words, because the 1897 answer stood, and marked them, because the manuscript evidence was hard to ignore. Translations made from the Vulgate, like the Douay-Rheims, Martini and Allioli-Arndt, kept them without comment, because the Vulgate had them. Today the Nova Vulgata, the revised Latin Bible the Church published in 1979, corrected against the Greek and Hebrew, leaves them out, and so do most modern Catholic translations.
Reading it side by side
None of this touches the doctrine itself. The Trinity was defined at Nicaea and Constantinople without this verse, and the Church goes on teaching it without needing it. What the Comma shows is something smaller and more interesting: how a sentence written in the margin of a Latin Bible became part of the Greek text, entered the Bibles of half of Europe, and is now slowly leaving them again.
On Collatio you can follow the whole story in one row: the Greek of the Textus Receptus, the Latin of the Clementine, the Douay-Rheims that translated it, Crampon’s brackets, and the World English Bible that leaves it out.
Sources
- Johannine Comma — Wikipedia, on the manuscript evidence, Cyprian and Priscillian, the Codex Fuldensis prologue, Erasmus’s editions and the Codex Montfortianus
- The Johannine Comma (1 John 5:7–8): The Status of Its Textual History and Theological Usage in English, Greek, and Latin — Rodrigo Galiza and John W. Reeve, Andrews University Seminary Studies 56 (2018), on the Latin origin of the Comma, Cyprian and Priscillian, and the Greek witnesses
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (1994), on 1 John 5:7–8 and the Greek manuscripts that carry the Comma
- Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, nos. 3681–3682, on the Holy Office’s answer of 13 January 1897 and its declaration of 2 June 1927
- Henk J. de Jonge, “Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56 (1980), on the story of Erasmus’s promise