1 John 5:7-8

1 John 5:7 

For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement. 

Readers of modern translations will realize that the extraordinary shortness of verse 7 is due to an omission from the text of several lines, found in the Textus Receptus and translated in the Authorized Version of 1611. The NIV footnote addition would give the following reading: ‘For there are three that testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement’ (verses 7–8). They are completely ignored by the RSV and NEB since they do not occur in any of the Greek manuscripts of 1 John before the fourteenth century, and then in only six, all of them late and so of very little value. The words came from a fifth-century Old Latin version and were incorporated into the Vulgate about AD 800, where they remained. F. F. Bruce, in a lucid discussion of the matter, tells how Erasmus was attacked for omitting the ‘three heavenly witnesses’ in his first printed edition of the Greek New Testament (1516). He replied that he would include them only if a Greek manuscript could be produced in which they were contained. Such a manuscript was eventually produced, written about 1520! Erasmus duly kept his word, although he realized that this was no evidence at all, and incorporated the extra text in his third edition (1522). Luther translated this into German and Tyndale into English. Other printed editions of the Greek New Testament also included it and by this route it was incorporated into the Textus Receptus and the Authorized Version of 1611.5 Perhaps the strongest evidence against the reading is that it is not quoted by any of the early church fathers, who, in their battles with the heretics, would only too gladly have seized on the text as a clear biblical testimony to the Trinity, had it existed.6

5 Bruce, pp. 129–130.

6 Marshall, p. 236.

David Jackman, The Message of John’s Letters: Living in the Love of God, The Bible Speaks Today (Leicester, England; Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 151.