Skip to content
Home » 1 John 5:7-8 The Most Famous Forgery of All

1 John 5:7-8 The Most Famous Forgery of All

1 John 5:7-8 The Most Famous Forgery of All

As far as corrupted Bible scriptures go, 1 John 5:7-8 is infamous. It is a forgery that is so well known it has its own name: The Johannine Gloss or Johannine Comma (“Comma” meaning: short clause).

This verse has been removed from most modern bibles because everyone (except Babylon) has accepted that this verse is not authentic to the original manuscripts. In other words, it’s another blatant corruption.

This verse first showed up in manuscripts (or copies) hundreds of years after the original authors were long dead and buried. Per Bible scholar and expert Dr. Bart Ehrman, this verse does not show up in any ancient manuscripts until the ‘fourteenth, fifteenth, and eighteenth centuries’.

The Comma is absent in all the ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament with the exception of four rather recent manuscripts that date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

Both the Old Latin and the Vulgate versions, lack it. The earliest manuscript in which it appears dates from the ninth century.

The Fathers of the East do not quote or refer to the Johannine Comma in their Christological controversies. This omission indicates that the Comma was not part of the biblical text of their time, for they surely would have used it had it been in the text. Some fourth-century Latin writers, while referring to 1 John 5:8b and giving this a Trinitarian interpretation, failed to give any indication that they knew of the existence of the Comma as a scriptural passage.

The forgery of 1 John 5:7 was specifically added to strengthen the Trinity argument. Without the forged verse there is no clear evidence of the Trinity concept anywhere in the Bible. But it remained in the bible and deceived people for hundreds of years until there was so much proof that even the Catholic church could no longer deny the late forged addition.

Finally, very few Bibles now include this verse in the main text, those that do cater to a fundamentalist sector of the population who would rather hang onto a Bible that supports their doctrine rather than one that tells the truth.

“The authenticity of [this verse] will, perhaps, no longer be maintained by anyone whose judgment ought to have weight ..”

Because it was a late forgery and not present during the early church years, Early Church Fathers did not mention this verse, even when eagerly scraping together verses to support the Doctrine of the Trinity. This verse first appears, not in a New Testament manuscript, but in a fifth-century Confession of Faith, and after that, it was assimilated into mss of the Latin Vulgate.

Stephanus, in his influential Editio Regia of 1550 (which was the model edition of the Textus Receptus in England), was the first to provide an apparatus showing variant readings and showed this verse was lacking in seven Greek manuscripts…. Martin Luther rejected this verse as a forgery and excluded it from his German translation of the Bible while he lived – it was inserted into the text by other hands after his death. The first appearance of the Comma in a Greek New Testament manuscript is no earlier than the 15th century.

Doubts about its genuineness were indicated in printed Greek New Testaments as early as that of the first two editions (1515 & 1519) of Erasmus of Rotterdam, who simply left the verse out — because he could not find a Greek ms containing it – and provided a comment stating, “this is all I find in the Greek manuscripts”.…

The Roman Catholic Church was a bit more resistant about yielding up this verse; an 1897 decision of the Holy Inquisition forbade a Catholic “to deny or even express doubt about the authenticity of” the Johannine Comma, but this was effectively reversed by a declaration of the Holy Office on June 2, 1927, which allows scholars to express doubts and even denials of the genuineness of the Comma, tempered by the fact that the Vatican would have the final authority. and, e.g., the 1966 Jerusalem Bible omits the Comma without a footnote. The spurious nature of this verse is so notorious that even the Revised Version of 1881 did not bother to include nor provide a footnote for this verse, and many other modern versions do likewise.

Ezra Abbot wrote, “It may be said that the question [of excluding this verse] is obsolete; that the spuriousness of the disputed passage had long been conceded by all intelligent and fair-minded scholars. [6]

Bibles everywhere have either removed the forged 1 John 5 verses completely or, those that kept them (gasp), have footnotes mentioning that these verses were not in the original documents.

Conclusion: Babylon added a verse into the Bible to support a doctrine that is not supported by early Bible manuscripts.

Quick Links to Corrupted Verses

List of Forged Bible Verses

Luke 3:22 – Major Critical Corruption of Jesus’ Adoption

1 John 5:7-8 – A corruption so famous that it has a name!

Revelation 1:11 – Criminal Corruption of the Alpha and Omega

Jump to Chapter