Comma Johanneum
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The Comma Johanneum is a comma (a short clause) known since the 4th century[1] and contained in most translations of the First Epistle of John published from 1522 until the latter part of the nineteenth century, owing to the widespread use of the third edition of the Textus Receptus (TR) as the sole source for translation. In translations containing the clause, such as the King James Version, 1 John 5:7–8 reads as follows (with the Comma in bold print):
- 5:7 "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
- 5:8 And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."
The resulting passage is an explicit reference to the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and for this reason some Christians are resistant to the elimination of the Comma from modern Biblical translations. Nonetheless, nearly all recent translations have removed this clause, as it does not appear in older copies of the Epistle and it is not present in the passage as quoted by any of the early Church Fathers, who would have had plenty of reason to quote it in their Trinitarian debates (for example, with the Arians), had it existed then. Most Churches now agree that the theology contained in the Comma is true, but that the Comma is not an original part of the Epistle of John.
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[edit] Origins
Several early sources which one might expect to include the Comma Johanneum in fact omit it. For example, although Clement of Alexandria's writings around the year 200 place a strong emphasis on the Trinity, his quotation of 1 John 5:8 does not include the Comma.[2]
Tertullian, in his Against Praxeas (circa 210), also supports a Trinitarian view by quoting John 10:30, even though the Comma would have provided stronger support. Likewise, St. Jerome's writings of the fourth century give no evidence that he was aware of the Comma's existence.[3](The Codex Fuldensis, a copy of the Vulgate made around 546, contains a copy of Jerome's Prologue to the Canonical Gospels which seems to reference the Comma. However, the Codex's version of 1 John omits the Comma, which has led many to believe that the Prologue's reference is spurious.[4]) In the 6th century, St. Fulgentius referred to Cyprian's remark (in "Responsio contra Arianos", "Reply against the Arians"). Many figures in the African Church of the period quoted the Comma, but they did so inconsistently; the most notable and prolific writer of the African Church, St. Augustine, is completely silent on the matter.[3]
The first work to use the Comma Johanneum as an actual part of the Epistle's text appears to be the 4th century Latin book Liber Apologeticus, probably written by Priscillian of Ávila (died 385), or his close follower Bishop Instantius.[1]
One account of its origins suggests that the Comma originated in a Latin homily elaborating on this passage in the Vulgate. The 3rd-century Church father Cyprian quoted John 10:30 and added, :"Et iterum de Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto scriptum est—Et hi tres unum sunt" (De Unitate Ecclesiæ, "On the Unity of the Church", vi).[3]
- ("And again it is written of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—and these three are one.")
This part of the homily, possibly originating from Cyprian, then became worked into copies of the Vulgate, roughly around the year 800; the passage in the Vulgate was then back-translated into the Greek. Out of the thousands of manuscripts currently extant which contain the New Testament in Greek, the Comma only appears in eight. The oldest known occurrence appears to be a later addition to a 10th century manuscript now in the Bodleian Library, the exact date of the addition not known; in this manuscript, the Comma is a variant reading offered as an alternative to the main text. The other seven sources date to the sixteenth century or later, and four of the seven are hand-written in the manuscript margins. In one manuscript, back-translated into Greek from the Vulgate, the phrase "and these three are one" is not present.[5]
No Syriac manuscripts include the Comma, and its presence in some printed Syriac Bibles is due to back-translation from the Latin Vulgate. Coptic manuscripts and those from Ethiopian churches also do not include it. Of the surviving "Itala" or "Old Latin" translations, only two support the Textus Receptus reading, namely the Codex Monacensis (6th or 7th century) and the Speculum, an 9th- or 9th-century collection of New Testament quotations.[3]
[edit] Early modern translations
The central figure in the sixteenth-century history of the Comma Johanneum is the humanist Erasmus, who entered the field of Biblical translations thanks largely to a rivalry between publishers.
In 1502, Cardinal Cisneros sponsored a polyglot edition of the Bible, inviting a large group of religious scholars to create a multi-volume set containing parallel translations in all the Biblical languages: Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The result, now known as the Complutensian Polyglot, took fifteen years of dedicated effort. The New Testament translations were completed and printed in 1514, but their publication was delayed so that they could be released at the same time as the Old Testament.
Meanwhile, word of the Complutensian project reached Johann Froben of Basel, who decided to commission his own translation and beat the Complutensian to market. He contacted Erasmus, who began a systematic examination of New Testament manuscripts and rapidly produced a Greek edition and Latin translation, which Froben published in 1516.[6] Also, in the same year Erasmus published a critical edition of the Greek New Testament—Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. Recognitum et Emendatum—which included a Latin translation and annotations. The second edition used the more familiar term Testamentum instead of Instrumentum, and eventually became a major source for Luther's German translation.
In his haste, Erasmus made a considerable number of translation mistakes. He was unable to find a manuscript containing the entire Greek New Testament, so he compiled several different sources. After comparing what writings he could find, Erasmus wrote corrections between the lines and sent the documents to Froben. Erasmus said the resulting work was "thrown headlong rather than edited" ("prœcipitatum fuit verius quam editum").[7] He fixed many but not all of the resulting mistakes in the second edition, published in 1519.[5]
The Comma does not appear until the third edition, published in 1522.[6] Its absence in the first two editions provoked considerable animosity, chiefly led by Lopez de Zúñiga, one of the Complutensian editors. Erasmus replied that the Comma did not occur in any of the Greek manuscripts he could find; he eventually compromised with his critics, saying that he would add the Comma to future editions if it appeared in a Greek manuscript.[5]
Such a manuscript was subsequently produced with "Codex 61"[6] Erasmus added the Comma to his 1522 edition, "but he indicates in a lengthy footnote his suspicions that the manuscript had been prepared expressly in order to confute him." Indeed the manuscript was written after Erasmus's request by a Franciscan from Oxford.[8] It was this third edition which became a chief source for the King James Version, thereby fixing the Comma firmly in the English-language scriptures for centuries.[5]
The term Textus Receptus generally refers to one of Erasmus's later editions or one of the works derived from them. The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, a Protestant reference published in 1914, comments:
- "The textus receptus, slavishly followed, with slight diversities, in hundreds of editions, and substantially represented in all the principal modern Protestant translations prior to the nineteenth century, thus resolves itself essentially into that of the last edition of Erasmus, framed from a few modern and inferior manuscripts and the Complutensian Polyglot, in the infancy of Biblical criticism. In more than twenty places its reading is supported by the authority of no known Greek manuscript."[7]
The English scholar Isaac Newton, best known today for his many contributions to mathematics and physics, also wrote extensively on Biblical matters. In a 1690 treatise entitled An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, Newton observed:
- "In all the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the Trinity in Jerome's time and both before and long enough after it, this text of the 'three in heaven' was never once thought of. It is now in everybody’s mouth and accounted the main text for the business and would assuredly have been so too with them, had it been in their books."[9]
Newton's history of the Comma Johanneum reflects his belief that Church history was one of progressive decay from a pure original and that the Comma was introduced, intentionally or by accident, into a Latin text during the fourth or fifth century, a time when he believed the Church to be ripe with corruption.[10]
[edit] Modern views
Nearly all modern major Christian denominations are Trinitarian, with their beliefs reflected in three ancient creeds: The Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. Denominations whose beliefs follow these creeds accept the underlying theology of the Johannine Comma, whether or not they hold it to be a part of the First Epistle of John. Contrastingly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, widely known as the Mormon Church, disputes the Comma as part of their arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity. For example, officially sanctioned LDS translations of the New Testament into French and German omit the Comma entirely. Mormons view the Comma as an example of how spurious additions change the meaning of holy texts, calling the Comma an affirmation of the attitude that the Bible should only be considered valid where it is in accord with "modern revelation".[11]
The Council of Trent in 1546 definitely ratified the Biblical canon for the Roman Catholic Church, confirming all books traditionally accepted as canonical and therefore inspired. The fathers decided to canonize "the entire books with all their parts, as these have been wont to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old Latin Vulgate". Though the revised Vulgate contained the Comma, the earliest known copies of the Vulgate did not. Therefore the Council's decrees do not necessarily confirm Comma Johanneum as canonical.[3]
An edition of the King James Version called the Cambridge Paragraph Bible was published in 1873, edited by F.H.A. Scrivener, one of the translators of the English Revised Version and a noted textual scholar. Scrivener set the Comma in italics to reflect its disputed authenticity, though not all later editions retain this formatting.
On 13 January 1897, the Holy Office decreed that Catholic theologians could not "with safety" deny or call into doubt the Comma's authenticity. Pope Leo XIII approved this decision two days later, though his approval was not in forma specifica;[3] that is, Leo XIII did not invest his full papal authority in the matter, leaving the decree with the ordinary authority possessed by the Holy Office. Three decades later, on 2 June 1927, Pope Pius XI decreed that the Comma Johanneum was open to dispute. The updated Nova Vulgata edition of the Vulgate, published in 1979 as a result of the Second Vatican Council, does not include the Comma,[12] nor does the English-language New American Bible.
In more recent years, the Comma has become relevant to the King-James-Only Movement, a largely Protestant development most prevalent within the fundamentalist and Independent Baptist branch of the Baptist churches. Proponents view the Comma as an important Trinitarian text and assert that those who doubt its authenticity are threatening the biblical basis for Trinitarian belief.[13]
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b Daniel B. Wallace, "The Comma Johanneum and Cyprian".
- ^ "Fragments of Clemens Alexandrius", translated by Rev. William Wilson, section 3.
- ^ a b c d e f "Epistles of Saint John", Catholic Encyclopedia.
- ^ Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., Stuttgart, 1993.
- ^ a b c d Theodore H. Mann, "Textual problems in the KJV New Testament", in: Journal of Biblical Studies 1 (January–March 2001).
- ^ a b c Robert Waltz, Textus Receptus.
- ^ a b "History of the Printed Text", in: New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. II: Basilica – Chambers, p. 106 ff.
- ^ Bruce M. Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 2d ed. Oxford University 1968, p. 101.
- ^ A. Zahoor, Sir Isaac Newton on the Bible.
- ^ Newton Project, Newton's Views on the Corruptions of Scripture and the Church.
- ^ Marc A. Schindler, "The Johannine Comma: Bad Translation, Bad Theology", in: Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, 3 (Fall 1996).
- ^ Nova Vulgata, "Epistula I Ioannis".
- ^ Thomas M. Strouse, "Fundamentalism and the Authorized Version".
