Question 3

Why does the King James Version mention the Trinity in 1 John 5:8 and the newer translations don’t?

Once the canon of Scripture had been set, the history of the text seemingly should have ended. But that’s not the case. The continuing history of the biblical text comes through the pens of generations of copyists, men who laboriously hand-copied the Scriptures.

The Chinese developed moveable type in the eleventh century, but it wasn’t until the fifteenth century that it was discovered in Europe. In 1454, or thereabouts, Johann Gutenberg used his “new” invention to print the first Bible that wasn’t handwritten. Before that time, making a book was a costly, time-consuming process with immeasurable opportunity for copyists to make mistakes.

Even the Bible, which was copied carefully and reverently over the centuries, had thousands of copyists’ errors that crept into the text. Not every copyist was as accurate as the next. Some were terrible spellers. Some were inclined to drop words. Others would repeat whole lines without realizing it.

These tiny variations have given rise to a class of scholarship called textual criticism. The work of the textual critic is to compare all the existing ancient copies of the Bible and attempt to eliminate the copyists’ errors. Most of this work has had little bearing on the meaning of the text, but occasionally they have to deal with the kind of thing that happened in 1 John 5.

Modern Christians are not the first people to write notes in the margins of their Bibles. Apparently copyists through the centuries made notes of a devotional or explanatory nature in the margins of texts they were copying. The evidence of the ancient manuscripts suggests strongly that this is what happened with 1 John 5:8. Of the approximately 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, only eight contain the words “testify in heaven: the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth.”

Of those eight manuscripts, only four contain the passage in the text itself. The other four show it as a note in the margin. What’s more, none of these can be dated earlier than A.D. 1500. Moving closer to the time the letter was written, we find that some Old Latin texts from as early as the 600s have the Trinitarian statement. Most of these texts came from North Africa, where the church was very large but was also torn by controversies over the Trinity! Perhaps the words were in the original but were deleted by someone who didn’t agree with the doctrine of the Trinity. We can never eliminate that possibility entirely, but the available evidence points in the other direction. This is the most convincing argument that this passage was a late addition to the text.

The absence of the passage from ancient Greek texts may not prove anything. But the absence of the passage from the writings of the ancient church fathers lends powerful evidence against the existence of this sentence in the original autograph. Even when the early church writers quoted 1 John 5:7–8, they quoted it without the addition. And the post-apostolic fathers who quote the verse could have used the addition to strengthen their Trinitarian position, had it existed.

The phrase does appear in several non-biblical Latin manuscripts, but even there it doesn’t make its appearance until after A.D. 600. Probably written originally as a meditation on the text of 1 John 5:7–8, it found its way into the margins of Old Latin manuscripts and eventually into the text itself.

The text used in the translation of the King James Version was one influenced by this line of Old Latin texts. More recent translations, aware of the history of the phrase, have either left it out altogether or made a note of it in the margin.

I think that’s appropriate. What began as a devotional commentary on the puzzling statement about the Spirit, the water, and the blood, has been returned to its rightful place in the margin.

David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 50–52.