Untitled Post

title: Is 1 John 5:7 in the Bible? The Comma Johanneum
description: The King James Version includes "the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one" at 1 John 5:7. No Greek manuscript from the first thousand years includes that sentence. How it reached the King James, and why the Anselm Project Bible prints verse 7 without the heavenly witnesses.
date: 2026-10-10
author: Paul Miller
keywords: 1 John 5:7, Comma Johanneum, is 1 John 5:7 in the Bible, 1 John 5:7 missing, Johannine Comma, three that bear record in heaven, 1 John 5:7 KJV, Erasmus 1 John 5:7, Trinity verse removed, 1 John 5:7-8, heavenly witnesses, Textus Receptus
categories:
- Biblical Studies
- Theology
sidebar: false
featured_image: /blog/images/2026/20261010.webp
featured_image_alt: A wooden hymn board on the paneled wall of a small church holds brass numbers 23, 108, 251 and 340, and a yellow sticky note with a handwritten 7 is taped beneath them; pews and the altar are soft in the background.
reading_time: 7
key_terms:
- term: Comma Johanneum
definition: The scholarly name for the sentence in 1 John 5:7 of the King James Version, "the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one." Comma here means a short clause, not a punctuation mark.
- term: Textus Receptus
definition: The printed Greek New Testament of the sixteenth century behind the King James Version. Erasmus's third edition of 1522 was the first printed Greek text to carry the Comma.
- term: Codex Montfortianus
definition: A Greek manuscript of the early sixteenth century, now in Dublin, that contains the Comma in Greek. Erasmus was sent its reading of the verse in 1520 or 1521, and its Greek wording appears to be translated from Latin.
- term: Vulgate
definition: The Latin Bible of the Western church. The Comma entered Latin copies of 1 John over several centuries and was standard in them by the High Middle Ages, which is why Erasmus was pressed to include it.
- term: Base text
definition: The Greek text the APB starts from before deciding disputed readings. At 1 John 5:7 the base text has no heavenly witnesses, and the translators kept it that way.
related_links:
- title: Read 1 John 5:1-12 in the Anselm Project Bible
url: /bible/1 john/1 John 5:1-12
external: false
- title: 1 John 5:7 in the Crux Registry, witness by witness
url: /bible/crux/1-john-5-7-comma-johanneum
external: false
- title: Why is Acts 8:37 missing from my Bible?
url: /blog/why-is-acts-8-37-missing
external: false
- title: How the APB is made
url: /bible/about
external: false

Open a King James Bible to 1 John 5:7 and you read this: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." Open almost any Bible translated since 1880 and verse 7 is a fragment: "For there are three that testify," followed in verse 8 by the Spirit, the water, and the blood. The heavenly witnesses are gone, or moved to a footnote that says the words are found in no early manuscript.

The sentence names the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit together and says the three are one. It is probably the single most direct passage concerning the Trinity. Unless you're a KJV-Only enthusiast, an Arian heretic, or a Bible student who likes variants, you never notice the sentence is gone. Because modern Bibles don't include it, knowledge of the sentence in the KJV is slowly falling off.

Modern Bibles didn't cut it. The sentence first appears in Latin writers of the fourth century, and no Greek manuscript has it for a thousand years after that. The editors who removed it followed the Greek. The Latin side of the history is documented; the Greek side is an absence.

What the Greek manuscripts say

Not one Greek manuscript copied in the first thousand years after Christ has the heavenly witnesses, and there are several hundred Greek manuscripts of 1 John. That is an awful lot of evidence right off the bat. The sentence appears in about eight Greek manuscripts in all, the earliest from the fourteenth century, and in several of those a later hand wrote the sentence in the margin rather than in the text. Where the sentence does stand in the text, its Greek reads like a translation from Latin.

No Greek church father quotes the sentence, including Athanasius, Basil, and Gregory, who wrote at length on the Trinity against the Arians. Greek Bibles do not have the sentence today.

Where the sentence likely came from

The sentence grew up in Latin. In the third century Cyprian of Carthage wrote that "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit" are one, and some scholars read that line as a quotation of the Comma, though Cyprian is just as likely giving his own interpretation of the Spirit, the water, and the blood. The first certain quotation is from Priscillian, a Spanish bishop, around the year 380. From there the sentence spread slowly through Latin copies of 1 John. Early Vulgate manuscripts lack the sentence and later ones have it. By the time of Charlemagne the sentence was common, and by the twelfth century every Latin Bible had it.

No one knows who wrote the sentence or when, but it isn't hard to imagine how it came around. Verse 8 says that three things testify and that the three agree: the Spirit, the water, and the blood. A Latin reader took the three as a figure of the Trinity and wrote that reading in the margin, and a later copyist took the note for a correction and copied it into the text. That is how many additions to the New Testament are thought to have happened.

How it got into the King James

Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516. His Greek manuscripts did not have the Comma, so he did not print the Comma. The Latin Bible everyone knew did have the Comma, and critics attacked Erasmus for leaving the Trinity out of the Bible. His second edition of 1519 still left the sentence out.

Then Erasmus was sent a copy of the passage from a Greek manuscript in England that had the sentence, the one now called Codex Montfortianus, written in the early sixteenth century. He printed the sentence in his third edition of 1522 and recorded his doubt in the note on the verse: "Tametsi suspicor codicem illum ad nostros esse correctum," "although I suspect that manuscript has been corrected to agree with ours," meaning the Latin (Annotationes on 1 John 5:7, in Opera omnia, ed. Clericus, Leiden 1705, vol. VI, col. 1080D; H. J. de Jonge, "Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum," Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56 (1980), 381-389, at 388). That edition became the ancestor of the Textus Receptus, the Greek text Stephanus numbered in 1551 and the King James translators used in 1611. The sentence had traveled from a Latin margin to a Latin text to one late Greek manuscript to a printed Greek Bible to the English Bible, and at every step it arrived too late to be John's.

Luther left the sentence out of his German Bible. The Catholic Church defended the sentence until 1927, when the Holy Office said scholars were free to question it. Every critical Greek edition of the last two centuries omits the sentence, and so does the Byzantine majority text, which otherwise keeps most longer readings. The KJV and the New King James are the only major English Bibles that still print the sentence as text.

What the Anselm Project Bible does

The Anselm Project Bible prints 1 John 5:7 without the heavenly witnesses. The translators were shown the longer wording as a later majority tradition and kept the shorter; their note says only that the evidence is strong. The APB prints:

This is the one who came through water and blood, Jesus Christ, not by the water alone but by the water and by the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three who testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and the three agree.

The record is public in the Crux Registry.

Does the Trinity depend on this verse?

The Trinity does not depend on this verse and never did. The doctrine was defined at Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381 by bishops who were overwhelmingly likely to have never even heard about the Comma. The bishops argued from the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19, the blessing of 2 Corinthians 13:14, the opening of John's Gospel, and the way the whole New Testament speaks of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

Whether it should be in the Bible or not, though, the sentence still is a true statement of the faith, likely written by a Latin Christian who believed it and set it beside the verse he thought it explained.

The witness list for the verse is in the Crux Registry, and the passage reads in the APB without the Comma.