A Verse Added Later, and What It Changed

1 John supplies one of the clearest and best documented cases of a textual addition in the entire New Testament: the Comma Johanneum, a phrase explicitly naming the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit as three heavenly witnesses, is absent from every Greek manuscript earlier than the late medieval period and from every translation made directly from early Greek texts, appearing first in Latin theological writing and only later inserted into some Latin Vulgate manuscripts and, through them, into the Greek Textus Receptus that underlies the King James Version. Its absence from the early manuscript record is not seriously disputed by textual scholars of any theological position, Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant alike, and modern translations based on critical Greek editions omit it or mark it as a later addition, though it remains printed without comment in Bibles that follow the King James or the Textus Receptus tradition.

Because the verse offered a uniquely explicit trinitarian formula, its removal from modern critical texts has occasionally been treated in popular discussion as an attack on trinitarian doctrine itself, though the doctrine rests on the cumulative witness of many other New Testament passages and does not depend on this one contested verse, a point textual scholars across denominational lines make consistently.