The Johannine Comma as it appears in the Gutenberg Bible (1455).
The Johannine Comma (fl. 1200-1881), or Comma Johanneum in Latin, is the text you sometimes see added to 1 John 5:7-8 in the Bible, shown here in red using the King James translation:
7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.
Compare that to the ESV translation as of 2021, which leaves it out:
7 For there are three that testify: 8 the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree.
It is the Bible’s only clear statement of the Trinity – the idea that the Christian god is three persons – Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost – and yet still just one god.
Since 1881 it has been slowly disappearing from Bibles. I can see that even among my own Bibles:
- 1953: Catholic Family Edition Bible: bracketed
- 1972: The Way: omitted
- 1987: NAB (Catholic): omitted
- 1994: Biblia Sacra Vulgata (Latin, Catholic): in the footnotes
- 2001: ESV: omitted
- 2006: Ignatius Bible (Catholic): in the footnotes
- 2008: Orthodox Study Bible: present
- 2010: HCSB Study Bible: omitted
- 2015: Orthodox New Testament: bracketed
- 2016: NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: omitted
In 1979 the Catholic Church dropped it from the Vulgate. In 2013, the Gideons dropped it from their main English translation.
As of 2015 in the US, Liberal Protestants have removed it, Catholics have moved it to the footnotes, Orthodox Bibles are starting to bracket it – while most Bible readers, who read the King James Bible (1611), still saw it untouched.
As of 2021, only two of the top-selling English translations in the US still have the Johannine Comma: the KJV and the NKJV.
It does not appear in Coptic or Ethiopian Bibles.
It does not appear in Greek Bibles till the 1300s, and only in a few. Yet some of those few are extremely influential, like:
- Erasmus’s Greek New Testament of 1522 – the base text of what most Protestant Bibles translated, like the Geneva and King James Bibles.
- The Patriarchal Text of 1904, still the official Greek text of the Orthodox Church.
But, precisely because it does appear in so few Greek manuscripts, it did not appear in:
- The Critical Text of 1881 – Western scholars’s reconstruction of the original New Testament based on known manuscripts. It is still being constantly updated based on latest the findings. This is what Protestant Bibles translate, most Catholic ones since 1943. It is why the Johannine Comma has been disappearing.
The grammatical argument: Some argue that the Johannine Comma was removed from the Greek New Testament, maybe in the 300s (when the Trinity was highly controversial), because without it the grammar does not match up.
In Latin Bibles, the Johannine Commma goes back to at least the 700s, maybe even the 200s (Cyprian and Tertullian seem to know it). But it did not become the majority Latin reading till the 1200s. It appeared in the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 (pictured above), and the Sexto-Clementine Vulgate of 1592, the standard version of the Vulgate till 1979 – which nearly all Catholic Bibles translated till 1943 (when the pope, in “Divino Afflante Spiritu”, no longer required Catholics to translate the Vulgate).
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
- Bible
- English Bible translations
- Latin Bible translations
- Luke 4:4 – a brief history – the trials and tribulations of another Bible verse
- KJV Only – the Johannine Comma is used to argue both for and against KJV Onlyism.
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Abagond 
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