Bart D. Ehrman chairs the Department of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an authority on the history of the New Testament, the early church, and the life of Jesus. And I will be quoting from his book Misquoting Jesus concerning 1st John 5:7, pages 80-83 (I have a recommendation of a few of his books on my Homepage):
There was one key passage of scripture that Erasmuss source manuscripts did not contain, however. This is the account of 1 John 5:7-8, which scholars have called the Johannine Comma, found in the manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate but not in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts, a passage that had long been a favorite among Christian theologians, since it is the only passage in the entire Bible that explicitly delineates the doctrine of the Trinity, that there are three persons in the godhead, but that the three all constitute just one God. In the Vulgate, the passage reads:
There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one; and there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one.
It is a mysterious passage, but unequivocal in its support of the traditional teachings of the church on the triune God who is one. Without this verse, the doctrine of the Trinity must be inferred from a range of passages combined to show that Christ is God, as is the Spirit and the Father, and that there is, nonetheless, only one God. This passage, in contrast, states the doctrine directly and succinctly. But Erasmus did not find it in his Greek manuscripts, which instead simply read: There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one. Where did the Father, the Word, and the Spirit go? They were not in Erasmuss primary manuscript, or in any of the others that he consulted, and so, naturally, he left them out of his first edition of the Greek text. More than anything else, it was this that outraged the theologians of his day, who accused Erasmus of tampering with the text in an attempt to eliminate the doctrine of the Trinity and to devalue its corollary, the doctrine of the full divinity of Christ. [Anti-Bible rant from an Atheist with NO, ZERO, NONE evidence!] In particular, Stunica, one of the chief editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, went public with his defamation of Erasmus and insisted that in the future editions he return the verse to its rightful place. [Where?]As the story goes, Erasmuspossibly in an unguarded momentagreed that he would insert the verse in a future edition of his Greek New Testament on one condition: that his opponents produce a Greek manuscript in which the verse could be found (finding it in Latin manuscripts was not enough). And so a Greek manuscript was produced. In fact, it was produced for the occasion. It appears that someone copied out the Greek text of the Epistles, and when he came to the passage in question, he translated the Latin text into the Greek, giving the Johannine Comma in its familiar, theologically useful form. The manuscript provided to Erasmus, in other words, was a sixteenth-century production, made to order. [A base false accusation passed on for years and years exposed by H.J. De Jonge in 1980!] Despite his misgivings, Erasmus was true to his word and included the Johannine Comma in his next edition, and in all his subsequent editions. These editions, as I have already noted, became the basis for the editions of the Greek New Testament that were reproduced time and again by the likes of Stephanus, Beza, and the Elzevirs. These editions provided the form of the text that the translators of the King James Bible eventually used. And so familiar the passages to readers of the English Biblefrom the King James in 1611 onward, up until modern editions of the twentieth centuryinclude the woman taken in adultery, the last twelve verse of Mark, and the Johannine Comma, even through none of these passages can be found in the oldest and superior manuscripts of the Greek New Testament. They entered into the English stream of consciousness merely by a chance of history, based on manuscripts that Erasmus just happened to have handy to him, and one that was manufactured for his benefit. The various Greek editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were so much alike that eventually printers could claim that they were the text that was universally accepted by all scholars and readers of the Greek New Testamentas indeed they were, since there were no competitors! The most-quoted claim is found in an edition produced in 1633 by Abraham and Bonaventure Elzevir (who were uncle and nephew), in which they told their readers, in words since become famous among scholars, that You now have the text that is received by all, in which we have given nothing changed or corrupted. The phrasing of this line, especially the words text that is received by all, provides us with the common phrase Textus Receptus (abbreviated T.R.), a term used by textual critics to refer to that form of the Greek text that is based, not on the oldest and best manuscripts, but on the form of text originally published by Erasmus and handed down to printers for more than three hundred years, until textual scholars began insisting that the Greek New Testament should be established on scientific principles based on our oldest and best manuscripts, not simply reprinted according to custom. It was the inferior textual form of the Textus Receptus that stood at the base of the earliest English translations, including the King James Bible, and other editions until the near end of the nineteenth century.
Thanks Bart D. Ehrman, you have done me a wonder by explaining this for me. Such awesome evidence against the wording of 1st John 5:7 that the KJV has. I highly recommend that everyone buys Misquoting Jesus for his/her bookshelf. His book is full of evidence against the godman doctrine and so much more.
