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1
JOHN 5:7
Does
Elimination of 1 John 5:7
Deny Christ's Deity?
“.
. . in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit,
and these three are one. And there are three that testify
on earth. . . .”
“This is the clearest
verse on the Trinity in the Bible. Liberals
have removed it from their Satan-inspired translations! It
is an effort to deny the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ!”
This is the charge that is sometimes leveled
against contemporary translations of the Bible. Promoters
of the King James Version of the Scriptures often use this
accusation when they note that modern translations do not
contain 1 John 5:7. Sometimes
the charge is made that “liberals” have removed part of the
Word of God and Revelation 22:18-19 is cited to show the
seriousness of this offense.
We do appreciate
the defense of God’s
Word by these KJV adherents. However,
this supposed loyalty to God’s inspired Word is only apparent
if we come to recognize that this verse was not part of the
inspired text of the apostle John. In
fact, the reverse argument could be made: It may be an “addition” to
God’s Word rather than a “subtraction” from God’s Word!
The portion
in question reads: “. . .
in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and
these three are one. And there are three that testify on
earth. . . .” This
reading is commonly called the Comma
Johanneum, and it is quite clear that it did not originate
from the pen of John. The
MacArthur Study Bible gives this short explanation:
External manuscript
evidence . . . is against them being in the original epistle. They
do not appear in any Gr. mss. dated before ca. tenth century
A.D. Only 8 very
late Gr. mss. contain the reading, and these contain the
passage in what appears to be a translation from a late recension
of the Latin Vulgate. Furthermore,
4 or those 8 mss. contain the passage as a variant reading
written in the margin as a later addition to the manuscript. No
Greek or Latin Father, even those involved in Trinitarian
controversies, quotes them; no ancient version except the
Latin records them (not the Old Latin in its early form or
the Vulgate).
Many reliable Bible study reference books
give at least some explanation for the removal of this text
from the modern translations. The
International Bible Commentary simply says, “Textual
criticism has done a service in excising 5:7 of the AV. The Three
Heavenly Witnesses appear in no Greek MS before the 15th century. The
latter part of v. 6 was moved up by the Revisers to make
the new v. 7.” The Net Bible has a short but quite helpful exposition of this issue. A.T.
Robertson, the renowned Greek scholar, gives this explanation:
The rest of the
verse is an addition found in older English versions with
the underlying Greek Textus Receptus. This
addition to the verse is found in no Greek MS. save two late
[i.e., very long after the first century] cursives (manuscript
162 in the Vatican Library of the fifteenth century, and
manuscript 34 of the sixteenth century in Trinity College,
Dublin). Jerome
did not have it. Cyprian
applies the language of the Trinity and Priscillian has it. Erasmus
did not have it in his first edition, but rashly offered
to insert it if a single Greek MS. had it and 34 were produced
with the insertion, as if made to order. The
fact and the doctrine of the Trinity do not depend on this
spurious addition. Some
Latin scribe caught up Cyprian’s exegesis and wrote it on
the margin of his text, and so it got into the Vulgate and
finally into the Textus Receptus by the stupidity of Erasmus.
(Word Pictures in the
New Testament)
We need not resort to using the words
supplied by a Catholic scribe in order to prove the deity
of Jesus Christ our Lord. There
are a number of inspired texts that do this sufficiently
well (cf. John 1:1, 18; 20:28; Titus 2:14; Isaiah 9:6; etc.).
Richard
Hollerman |
