Johannine Comma

The Johannine Comma (Comma Johanneum) is an interpolated phrase (comma) in verses of the First Epistle of John. The text (with the comma in italics and enclosed by square brackets) in the King James Bible reads: ^7For there are three that beare record [] ^8[], the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood, and these three agree in one. It became a touchpoint for the Christian theological debate over the doctrine of the Trinity from the early church councils to the Catholic and Protestant disputes in the early modern period. The passage appears to have originated as a gloss in a Latin manuscript around the end of the 4th century, and was subsequently incorporated into the text of the Old Latin Bible during the 5th century, though not the earliest Vulgate manuscripts. It began to appear in manuscripts of the Vulgate starting after 800, and subsequently entered the Greek manuscript tradition in the 15th century (see Inclusion by Erasmus). The comma is absent from the Ethiopic, Aramaic, Syriac, Slavic, Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic translations of the Greek New Testament. It appears in some English translations of the Bible via its inclusion in the first printed New Testament, Novum Instrumentum omne by Erasmus, where it first appeared in the 1522 third edition. In spite of its late date, some members of the King James Only movement have argued for its authenticity. The "Johannine Comma" is a short clause found in 1 John 5:7–8. Erasmus omitted the text of the Johannine Comma from his first and second editions of the Greek-Latin New Testament (the Novum Instrumentum omne) because it was not in his Greek manuscripts. He added the text to his Novum Testamentum omne in 1522 after being accused of reviving Arianism and after he was informed of a Greek manuscript that contained the verse, although he expressed doubt as to its authenticity in his Annotations. Many subsequent early printed editions of the Bible include it, such as the Coverdale Bible (1535), the Geneva Bible (1560), the Douay-Rheims Bible (1610), and the King James Bible (1611).