The Comma Johanneum

Eight Months in Basel

Erasmus of Rotterdam had come to Basel in 1514; by the summer of 1515 he and the printer Johann Froben had an agreement, the presses started in August, and by March 1516 the book was out: the Novum Instrumentum omne, a New Testament in two parallel columns, Greek on one side and a fresh Latin translation on the other, with a body of Annotationes, printed on their own pages, explaining the translation. His own verdict on it was praecipitatum verius quam aeditum — in Combs's rendering, "thrown together rather than edited". To a friend in June he wrote that he had escaped the workhouse at Basel, where he had got through "six years work in eight months".

It matters what the book was for, because it is almost always described backwards. H. J. de Jonge's study of the project argues that Erasmus and his contemporaries saw it first as a new Latin New Testament, not as an edition of the Greek; the Greek was printed to show that the Latin had not been invented. He never issued the Greek on its own, though he was urged to. And the Greek he printed came from what happened to be in Basel: seven manuscripts, none of them earlier than the eleventh century and most of them twelfth, of which two — the copies now numbered 2e and 2ap — went to the compositors as printer's copy with his corrections written between their lines.

For Revelation he had one manuscript, and it had lost its last page. So he translated the last six verses back into Greek out of the Latin Vulgate, and said so in the Annotationes. W. W. Combs, writing in the Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, counted the result: twenty readings in those six verses that stand in the Textus Receptus to this day and have, in his words, "no Greek manuscript support whatsoever". A phrase at Acts 9:6 came into the Greek the same way. None of this was concealed; Erasmus wrote down what he had done. The name Textus Receptus is later still, and comes from a printer's advertisement — the preface to the Elzevir press's edition of 1633, which told the reader that he had "the text now received by all". Two details usually go wrong with that sentence, and Combs corrects both: the edition was edited by J. Hoelzlin, and the two Elzevirs whose names are on it were not, as H. J. de Jonge showed, brothers.

Where the Verse Is, and Where It Is Not

Open 1 John 5 in the King James Bible and verse 7 reads: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." Open the same passage in this app's default translation, the World English Bible, and verse 7 is six words long, "For there are three who testify", running straight on into the Spirit, the water and the blood. Both readings are in front of you here: switch the translation to the King James in the Bible panel and the sentence appears. That difference is the whole subject, and it is one of the few places in the New Testament where the choice of text changes a sentence a reader would notice.

The clause is Latin before it is anything else. The first unambiguous citation of it is in the Liber apologeticus of Priscillian, a Spanish bishop executed in 385, and the form he cites is not the familiar one: he puts the heavenly witnesses second rather than first, says that they are one "in Christ Jesus", and lists the earthly three as water, flesh and blood — a reading, as G. McDonald notes in his study of the passage, "found in no extant Greek bible". From there it spreads through the Latin west, into the later Vulgate manuscripts, and eventually into the Latin liturgy.

In Greek it is very late. The earliest Greek Bible containing it was copied in 1362-1363 and is now Vatican Library Ottob. gr. 298; it gives Greek and Latin in parallel columns, with the Greek bent to fit the Latin. Before that, the earliest occurrence of the clause in Greek at all is not in a Bible but in a Greek translation of the Latin acts of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Counts differ, and the difference does not matter. D. B. Wallace's is the shortest: "The Comma occurs only in about 8 MSS, mostly in the margins, and all of them quite late." G. McDonald's list is longer, and he added to it himself — the Munich codex Wallace reported in 2010 is, on McDonald's reckoning, the fifth manuscript to carry the clause in its margin. What every list agrees on is the thing that settles it: not one of these manuscripts is early, and every one of them can be traced to a Latin exemplar or to a printed edition. The oldest argument against it is still the strongest one, and it is not about manuscripts at all: no Greek father quotes the clause, including the fathers who spent the fourth century arguing about the Trinity and would have reached for it if they had it.

Erasmus left it out of 1516 and out of 1519, and printed it in 1522. The story usually told at this point — that he had rashly promised to include it if a single Greek manuscript could be produced, and kept his word against his judgement — was examined by de Jonge in 1980 and does not survive. "The current view that Erasmus promised to insert the Comma Johanneum if it could be shown to him in a single Greek manuscript," he concluded, "has no foundation in Erasmus' works." Erasmus gave his own reason more than once: ne cui sit ansa calumniandi, so that nobody should have a handle for slander. Edward Lee had accused him of reviving Arianism, and a charge of heresy would have killed the book. He printed the clause and recorded in the Annotationes that he did not think it belonged there. The Greek manuscript that reached him is the Codex Montfortianus, numbered 61 and now in Dublin. J. Rendel Harris argued in 1887 that it was written for the occasion — in W. W. Combs's summary of him, that it was "probably produced at the time of the controversy for the purpose of refuting Erasmus". Harris went further and named a scribe, the Franciscan William Roy, and was careful about how much that could carry: it was, he wrote, "the best speculation we can make". De Jonge's second finding is the one usually left out: it cannot be shown that Erasmus suspected any such thing. He thought it was an ordinary Greek manuscript that had been conformed to the Vulgate, which was his standing theory about Greek copies that agreed with the Latin. That second finding is not agreed. G. McDonald, who accepts the first, notes in his own study that Erasmus described the manuscript as recent, and adds: "I am less confident than de Jonge, 1980, 389, that Erasmus had no suspicion that Montfortianus had been prepared with the intention of deceiving him." B. M. Metzger's handbook printed the older version of the story and then corrected it, citing de Jonge, in an appendix to its third edition.

What the Argument Is Actually About

The Comma is still defended — by churches and societies committed to the Textus Receptus, and by the King James Only movement, which G. McDonald names as the argument's main modern carrier — and the case for it deserves to be read in its defenders' own words rather than in a summary by people who disagree with them. The Trinitarian Bible Society, a British publisher of the King James Version, gives the floor to three defenders — M. Henry, R. L. Dabney and E. F. Hills — and five arguments come out of it. One thing belongs in front of them, because the Society's extract leaves it out and Dabney's own page does not. He is not claiming the clause is genuine. On the page before the grammatical argument he writes: "Neither do we absolutely assert its genuineness, but we present the arguments in favor of its claim for the purpose of showing that they do carry a good degree of probability... Our object is to keep it an open question." His own editor makes the same point in the volume's preface, and adds the thing that keeps happening to him: the disclaimer "is overlooked in the mass of reasoning which is gathered around the assertion of its probable genuineness." The first argument is grammatical, and it is the serious one. R. L. Dabney put it this way: strike verse 7, and "the masculine article, numeral, and participle" of verse 8 — οἱ τρεῖς μαρτυροῦντες — "are made to agree directly with three neuters", which he called "an insuperable and very bald grammatical difficulty". Leave the disputed words in and they agree with two masculine nouns and one neuter, and by an ordinary rule of Greek the masculines govern. The obvious objection is that verse 8's masculines still sit over three neuters even with the clause in, and both men answer it rather than leave it standing. Dabney's answer is that those masculines "may be accounted for by the power of attraction, so well known in Greek syntax", the Spirit having just stood in a masculine group and carried something of it over. Hills makes the repair differently: retain the clause and the masculine forms of verse 8 are "due to the influence of the nouns Father and Word, which are masculine". Hills also answers in advance the reply this article makes below — that the three are personified — on the ground that personification cannot be what changes the gender, since the Spirit of verse 6 is plainly a person and is neuter there all the same. The second argument is that a forger would not have invented this particular wording: Hills asks why an interpolation would read "the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit" rather than the usual Father, Son and Holy Spirit — "the singular combination, never met with elsewhere". The third is Hills's larger claim, that the reading was preserved in the Latin-speaking church's usage and that behind that usage "was the guiding providence of God". The fourth is M. Henry's, and it turns on verse 8 rather than verse 7: many copies say the three bear record "upon the earth", and that distinctive phrase, he argues, "bears a visible opposition to some witness or witnesses elsewhere" — witnesses the shorter text never supplies. The fifth is Dabney's again. Cut verse 7 and the clause that closes verse 8, καὶ οἱ τρεῖς εἰς τὸ ἕν εἰσιν, "and these three agree in one", loses the thing it points at: the definite article marks a unity the reader has already been shown, and without the heavenly witnesses, Dabney says, "there is none". M. Maynard, whom McDonald lists among the King James Only writers, set out the case at book length in 1995.

The answers are not new either. On the grammar: the three witnesses of verse 8 are being personified — put in the witness box, in what the passage plainly treats as a courtroom — and Greek regularly takes the gender from the sense in that situation. Erasmus made exactly this reply in his own Annotationes, in G. McDonald's rendering: the apostle "pays more regard to the sense than to the words", and "you use the same construction if you say: 'The building is a witness to the kind of builder you are.'" Hills's rejoinder — that the Spirit of verse 6 is a person and neuter — has an answer in what the personification is actually attached to on this reading: not personhood as such, but the forensic role of three witnesses standing together before what McDonald calls "the tribunal of our belief", which is not what verse 6 is doing. And the awkwardness cuts the other way as well. A reading that is slightly rough is the kind a copyist smooths out, not the kind he invents. On Dabney's closing phrase, McDonald answers him by name: εἰς τὸ ἕν εἰσιν does not announce the unity of the Trinity but says that the evidence of the water, the blood and the Spirit "is directed towards the same end", "that it is unanimous, and thus legally compelling" — which is what a passage arguing a case before a tribunal needs the sentence to do, and a sudden declaration of the shared essence of Father, Son and Spirit would, on McDonald's reading, sit strangely in it. On Henry's "upon the earth", the answer is that the phrase is not in the shorter text either: the copies that omit verse 7 omit "on earth" from verse 8 as well, McDonald notes, "since there is no need to contrast the witness of the water, the Spirit and the blood with three witnesses in heaven". The opposition Henry hears is real; both halves of it entered the text together. As for Hills's second question, McDonald's reconstruction is that the clause began not as a forgery but as a marginal note — a reader's Trinitarian gloss on three witnesses who "are one", of the sort Tertullian and Cyprian had already made — which a later copyist could not tell from the text he was copying. That would explain the unusual wording rather than leave it unexplained.

One argument on the defenders' side is genuinely open and should be named as such. Cyprian, writing about 250, quotes John 10:30 and then adds that "it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, 'And these three are one.'" W. Thiele argued in 1959 that this is evidence the clause already stood in Cyprian's Latin Bible; McDonald sets Thiele's case out at length and disagrees with it, holding that Cyprian is interpreting the ordinary text of verse 8 rather than quoting a longer one. Wallace's reading is the same, and rests on a point worth weighing: Cyprian quotes only the one clause that is in every text — "and these three are one" — and does not quote the wording that would have settled his argument outright. This is a real disagreement between scholars about a real piece of evidence — W. Thiele was a Vetus Latina editor, not a defender of the King James Version, and the two arguments should not be filed together. It is also not the same thing as the manuscript question, which is not close.

What is worth saying last is the thing a reader most needs and is least often told. Losing this verse costs the doctrine of the Trinity nothing, and the reason is the same fact that tells against the verse. Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 settled the Trinitarian confession without it, and no Greek father who fought those arguments ever quotes it. The doctrine was drawn instead from the texts it is still drawn from: the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19, the Word who was with God and was God in John 1:1, "I and the Father are one" in John 10:30, the Spirit of truth whom the Son sends from the Father in John 15:26, and Paul's threefold blessing in 2 Corinthians 13:14. Erasmus, who never believed it belonged there, was blunt about this: he never discussed the passage, he wrote, "without testifying to the truth of what people gather from that passage: that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit share the very same essence". The Catholic Church reached the same place by a road worth recording, since it was not a straight one — the Holy Office ruled in 1897 that the authenticity of the verse could not safely be denied, clarified in 1927 that this had not been meant to stop Catholic scholars from concluding against it, and the Nova Vulgata of 1979 does not print it. This app's position is the ordinary Protestant and evangelical one, and it is Erasmus's: the clause is no part of the letter as the apostle wrote it, and the confession it states is true.

Scripture references

• 1 John 5:7-8 — Six words in the World English Bible; a sentence about the Trinity in the King James
• 1 John 5:6 — The water, the blood and the Spirit, which the disputed clause interrupts
• Matthew 28:19 — The baptismal formula — Father, Son and Holy Spirit
• John 10:30 — "I and the Father are one" — the text Cyprian quotes beside 1 John 5
• 2 Corinthians 13:14 — Paul's threefold blessing

Sources

• ScholarshipH. J. de Jonge, "Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum" — Henk Jan de Jonge · Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56 (1980), fasc. 4, 381-389; open access at Leiden University and read in full here. Source of both quoted conclusions, of the Latin ne cui sit ansa calumniandi, and of the Responsio ad Annotationes Eduardi Lei passage the promise story grew out of. The English gloss "a handle for slander" is this article's; de Jonge's own rendering is "so that no one would have occasion to criticise me out of malice". He gives the manuscript as Trinity College, Dublin (A 4.21); the "MS gr. 30" form used here is G. McDonald'sSupports: That there was no promise, and that Erasmus is not on record suspecting the manuscript was made to trap him
• Primary textJ. Rendel Harris, The Origin of the Leicester Codex of the New Testament — James Rendel Harris · London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1887; public domain and read at the Internet Archive. Pages 46-53 carry the argument about the Codex Montfortianus, and the hedge quoted with it is on p. 48: the Franciscan William Roy was, "according to the best speculation we can make", the man who wrote the codex "or at all events was its owner at a time extremely close to that when it must have been written". Harris is firmer about the clause than about the scribe: in his introduction the codex is a manuscript that "contained a passage fabricated to order", and 1 John 5:7 in it is "the forgery"Supports: What Harris argued about the Codex Montfortianus, and how firmly he argued it
• Primary textR. L. Dabney's own disclaimer, Discussions, vol. 1, p. 377 — Robert Lewis Dabney; the volume's preface and biographical sketch are by his editor C. R. Vaughan · Read from the same Internet Archive scan as the grammatical argument on p. 378. The disclaimer quoted in the third section stands on the page before that argument, between the running heads for 376 and 378, and Vaughan's biographical sketch at the front of the volume says the same thing of it: Dabney "expressly disclaims doing more than keeping this an open question; but the disclaimer is overlooked in the mass of reasoning which is gathered around the assertion of its probable genuineness"Supports: That Dabney argues for the clause without asserting it, in his own words and his editor's
• ScholarshipG. McDonald, Raising the Ghost of Arius (doctoral dissertation, Leiden University, 2011) — Grantley Robert McDonald · Open access and read in full here. Source of the Priscillian citation and its unusual form, the manuscript list with shelfmarks and Gregory-Aland numbers, the 1362-1363 date for Ottob. gr. 298, the Fourth Lateran Council as the first Greek occurrence, the Cyprian passage in Latin, W. Thiele's contrary argument, Erasmus's Annotationes on personification, the answers to Dabney (p. 21) and to Henry (p. 68) given above, and the Latin of the 1897 and 1927 Holy Office decrees. One caution for a future editor: McDonald's prose on p. 292 calls the body that ruled on 13 January 1897 "the Vatican's Biblical Commission", but the Denzinger text he himself quotes at §3681 reads "S. Officium ad hoc dubium 13. Ian. 1897 Responsum dederat: Negative", and the Pontifical Biblical Commission was not constituted until Leo XIII's Vigilantiae studiique of 30 October 1902. The article says Holy Office on purpose. It is not an error to be corrected against the loose phrase in the sourceSupports: The manuscript evidence, the Latin patristic evidence, and both sides of the Cyprian question
• ReferenceTrinitarian Bible Society, "Why 1 John 5.7-8 is in the Bible" — Trinitarian Bible Society, London · The Society's own statement of its position, quoting M. Henry, R. L. Dabney and E. F. Hills at length. Read in full in a browser; the site refuses scripted requests. Every quotation attributed to the defenders in the third section above is taken from here rather than from a critic's summary of it, with one deliberate exception and one correction. The exception: the Society's Dabney extract elides his answer about "the power of attraction", which is quoted above from Dabney's own Discussions 1:378. The correction: the Society's text prints "the masculine article, numeral, and particle", but Dabney, Discussions 1:378, reads "participle" — which is what οἱ τρεῖς μαρτυροῦντες requires, there being no particle in the phrase. The article prints Dabney's word, not the Society's typoSupports: The grammatical argument, Henry's "upon the earth" argument, Dabney's argument from the definite article, the "why this wording" argument, and the providential-preservation argument, in their advocates' own words
• ScholarshipW. W. Combs, "Erasmus and the Textus Receptus" — William W. Combs, Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary · Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal 1 (Spring 1996), 35-53; free PDF, read in full. Source of the seven manuscripts and their identities, the printer's-copy detail, the count of twenty unsupported readings in the last six verses of Revelation, the Acts 9:6 insertion, the Elzevir 1633 preface, and the note that Metzger corrected the promise story in an appendix to his third edition after de JongeSupports: What Erasmus actually had to work with, and what the Textus Receptus inherited from it
• Holding institutionCenter for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts: the Comma Johanneum in an overlooked manuscript — Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts · The 2010 report of a ninth Greek manuscript with the clause in the margin — Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod. graec. 211, Gregory-Aland 177, an eleventh-century codex whose marginal addition is dated to the seventeenth or eighteenth century. The page carries no byline; G. McDonald's dissertation attributes the find to D. B. Wallace and cites the same reportSupports: The manuscript count, and that it is still moving
• Primary textR. L. Dabney, "The Doctrinal Various Readings of the New Testament Greek", in Discussions, vol. 1: Theological and Evangelical — Robert Lewis Dabney · Edited by C. R. Vaughan; Richmond, Va.: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1890. Public domain and freely readable at the Internet Archive, digitised from the Princeton Theological Seminary copy. Consulted because the Trinitarian Bible Society quotes this essay and prints "particle" where Dabney, p. 378, wrote "participle". Also the source of the sentence the Society's extract elides — that the masculines of verse 8 "may be accounted for by the power of attraction, so well known in Greek syntax" — and of Dabney's third argument, that without verse 7 the τὸ ἓν of verse 8 "has no antecedent presence in the passage"Supports: Dabney's grammatical argument in his own words, and the two parts of it the Society's extract leaves out
• Primary textO. T. Dobbin, The Codex Montfortianus: a collation of this celebrated ms. in the library of Trinity college, Dublin — Orlando T. Dobbin · S. Bagster and Sons, London, 1854; public domain and freely readable at the Internet Archive. The nineteenth-century collation of the manuscript Erasmus was shown, cited so that a reader can look at the evidence rather than take a description of itSupports: That Codex Montfortianus is at Trinity College Dublin and has been collated in public
• ReferenceD. B. Wallace, "The Comma Johanneum and Cyprian" — Daniel B. Wallace · Read in full in a browser; bible.org refuses scripted requests. Daniel B. Wallace is bylined on the page, which carries his biography and a "More from this author" link and is dated 25 June 2004. Cited for the argument about what Cyprian does and does not quoteSupports: The evangelical text-critical answer to the Cyprian argument
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Johannine Comma

Further reading

• H. J. de Jonge, "Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum" (Leiden open access)
• G. McDonald, Raising the Ghost of Arius (Leiden dissertation, open access)
• Trinitarian Bible Society: Why 1 John 5.7-8 is in the Bible
• R. L. Dabney, Discussions, vol. 1 (1890) — the grammatical argument at pp. 377-379 (Internet Archive)
• W. W. Combs, "Erasmus and the Textus Receptus" (Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal)

Reflect

Erasmus printed a sentence he did not believe was scripture to protect his good name and, with it, the book he had staked everything on. What have you gone along with because holding the line would have cost more than just you?