User:Jpacobb/Comma Johanneum
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The Comma Johanneum is a clause of the type known technically as a comma found as part of 1 John 5:6–8 in most handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament which predate the invention of printing but is missing from the majority of early Greek copies and was apparently unknown to a significant group of early Christian writers. It is also known as the Johannine Comma, the Heavenly Witnesses. The longer and shorter versions of the passage are as follows:
Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:6–8)[n 1] | |
Longer Form (KJV) | Shorter Form (RV) |
6This 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. | 6This is he who came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. 7And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth. |
7For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. | |
8And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one. | 8For there are three who bear witness, the Spirit and the water and the blood: and the three agree in one. |
The Comma does not appear in the older Greek manuscripts, nor in the passage as quoted by many of the early Church Fathers. The fundamental problem is one of textual criticism: Did the words drop out of a very early copy of the Epistle and were preserved in only one strand of the transmission of the text, or were they inserted later on the basis of a marginal gloss or comment? The words might have found their way into the Latin text of the New Testament during the Middle Ages, "as one of those medieval glosses but were then written into the text itself by a careless copyist."[1]
The inclusion or omission of the Comma has been a major subject of debate from the 1550s down to the present day. Its implications for the doctrine of the Trinity fueled debate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and currently it is a factor in the discussions the Bible version debate. Erasmus omitted it from his first edition of the Greek New Testament; but when a storm of protest arose because the omission seemed to threaten the doctrine of the Trinity, he restored the words in the third and later editions, from where they entered the Textus Receptus, 'the received text' (TR).[1] and so the words are found in older translations based on the TR such as the Authorized or King James Version (KJV), contain the insertion as do those modern ones produced by supporters of the Textus Receptus and the Majority Text typified by the King James Only movement. However, modern Bible translations based on modern critical Greek texts such as the New International Version (NIV), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the English Standard Version (ESV), the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and others either omit the Comma entirely, or relegate it to the footnotes. The official Latin text of the Catholic Church (a revision of the Vulgate) also excludes it.[2]