1 John 5:7, the Comma Johanneum, Examined

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White. Today we are going to be going in-depth into a discussion of the history of the New Testament. I hope you are ready for that. I want this particular program to be a resource that we can utilize, direct people to, and so I will avoid any of the discussions of current weather conditions or other things going on, so that it can have a more useful long-term life in that way.

What Textual Variants Are and Why Manuscripts Matter

When we talk about differences between Bibles, when we talk about what are known as textual variants, which come about due to the fact that all works of antiquity, up until the invention of the printing press in the West, were transmitted by handwriting, leaving out things chiseled in rocks or on metal.

There were some metal plate experiments and transmission of things. The vast majority of written literature from the ancient world through the medieval period is written upon forms of paper or parchment, either made from plants or from animal skins, and they are done with the human hand and with the human eye and the human mind.

If you want perfection of transmission of anything, you have to wait to 1949 and the invention of the photocopier, though I can assure you, being the old guy that I am, photocopiers in the ancient days were not all that great either.

But it should be exact if it's actually working right. The old Gestetner stuff and things like that, they're different. But anyway, so any work of antiquity, any work somewhat contemporaneous with the New Testament, and obviously anything preceding that has to come down to us in a written form.

And in the vast majority of instances, that means we are reading manuscripts that were copied from preceding manuscripts, because paper, parchment, has to have particular conditions to be able to exist for long, long, long periods of time.

Anyone who, for example, in my library, I have books that I purchased. For example, if I look at the Mormon books that I purchased, back when I first started studying Mormonism, their pages, page edges are yellowed.

In Arizona, dusty, but very different than what you would buy at the bookstore today, because especially in these days, we use very low quality paper, which has a very high content of acids and things like that, that cause the degradation of the paper over time.

And so if that's true today, then it certainly was true in the past as well. And so we are looking at written documents that have been passed down to us through handwriting. And when human beings write things, they make mistakes, they make spelling errors, their eyes skip from one line to another, sometimes forward, sometimes back.

There's all sorts of things that can happen. And of course, on this program, over the years, we have discussed many textual variants. In the last program, we spent quite some time talking about Luke 23 -34, Jesus' words, Father, forgive them if they don't know what they do, the manuscripts that do and do not contain this.

And we're very open about these things. There isn't any, there are some Christians that wish we wouldn't talk about such things, but the reality is, this is how God gave us his word. If it's true, it will remain true no matter how it is examined, as long as it is examined truthfully.

The Major Textual Variants and the Comma Johanneum

Now, when you talk about textual variants, the two largest textual variants, largest as in the amount of data, the amount of words, the amount of letters that are contained, are two 12-verse blocks. And that is the long writing of Mark, Mark 16, 9 -20, and what's called the Pericope Adulterae, the Latin for the story of the woman taken in adultery, the adulterous woman story, in John 7 -53 -8 -11.

And those are well known. One has significantly earlier and better evidence than the other, that is the long writing of Mark has much better evidence than the Pericope Adulterae does, which does not appear until the 5th century in any manuscripts we possess today.

And so they might be considered the most famous because they're the largest, but it would seem to me that, especially in talking with people outside the Christian faith, what is known as the Kamiohonium, which is a relatively short phrase, that's not a phrase, couple of phrases, found at the end of John's first epistle in what would be numbered in the King James Version of the Bible as 1 John 5 -7, may be the most famous.

I certainly know that in my own experience, I have probably had more people tell me I'm going to hell because of this particular passage than almost any other. I remember the man who was, Alberto Rivera, who was behind the Alberto comics and the Jack Chick stuff about Roman Catholicism, he looked me right in the eye and told me I was going to hell because I was carrying that, that one right there, that New American Standard Bible right over there, can't reach it from here, but anyway, I had that one with me that night and it doesn't have the Kamiohonium.

So if you don't have that, you're going to hell. And that's just how it works. So given that, it would seem to me that most Christians who want to give a defense of their faith and defense of the veracity of their translation of the Bible and its underlying Greek and Hebrew texts would like to know what the facts are because there is a great deal of emotional and traditional fervor that is to be found in materials that you might find on the internet in regards to this particular subject.

And there are many individuals who will very strongly defend the Kamiohonium, but they do so primarily for the broader defense of the Texas Receptus or the King James Only position. You will not find those promoting the Majority Text or even the Byzantine Text defending the Kamiohonium.

This is important to understand, and I will lay out the reasons for this. So what are we looking at? Well, we are looking at, when you look at your Bible, if you have a modern translation that is not the King James or the New King James, then you have just a fragment of a verse in 1 John 5, 7, and it's about the three witnesses.

And who are the three witnesses? Well, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood. The Spirit, and the water, and the blood. And these are the ones who are testifying. But if you have a King James or New King James, then you would have, these are the ones witnessing in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit.

And these three are one, and there are three that are testifying upon earth, and then you have what you have in your other translation. So that phrase, in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one, is what's called the Kama Johannium.

This is the disputed text in the words of Dr. Metzger in his textual commentary, that these words are spurious and have no right to stand in the New Testament is certain in the light of the following considerations.

And given the widespread distribution of Metzger's commentary, I'll just go ahead and read it because that's what most people would be exposed to, but we'll be looking more closely. External evidence, the passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight, and these contain the passage, now this is from the, what was it, 70s, 80s, some people would say as many as 12.

We're gonna look at specifics about this, but let's just be very clear. This is a massively minority reading. It is found in, it's a massively late minority reading. There are some readings in the New Testament that are minority readings, that is, they are contained only in a minority of manuscripts.

But the reason they're found in the New Testament, that we translate our New Testaments from today, such as this, the Nestialon 28th edition of the Greek New Testament. I was gonna grab my ECM, I forgot to do that, apologize for that.

I just mean stack over there. But these eclectic texts, they are drawn from many different manuscripts, these printed editions from which we translate into other languages, including the English language, will have readings that are based upon a minority of the manuscripts.

But in almost every one of those instances, those minority of manuscripts are extremely early. So a clear example, this is John 118, where Jesus is described as hominogenes theos, the unique God, over against the majority of manuscripts, which say hominogenes huios, the unique Son, or only begotten Son.

So being a minority reading isn't necessarily bad if, if the minority of texts are super high quality manuscripts that are extremely early. Rather than what we have in the case, the Comma, all of the manuscripts that contain the Comma Johannium in the Greek tradition, in the Greek, which is the original language in the New Testament, are extremely late.

Many of them can be completely dismissed because they are produced after Erasmus's first edition of the Greek New Testament, after it's already being printed, because people continue to handwrite manuscripts.

It's not like a Kinko's or a FedEx showed up at every corner the day after the printing press was invented. But as far as having great weight, none of these have great weight. There is no reason to believe any of them are copies of extremely early manuscripts or anything of the like.

And in the majority of these manuscripts, no matter how you count them, the Comma appears in the margin of the manuscript. It's not a part of the original manuscript itself. It's been written in by much later hands, sometimes as late as the 17th or 18th centuries.

So obviously those manuscripts are irrelevant. So we are talking about maybe at most, at absolute most, four to five manuscripts that actually have this as the text reading, one of which we know is written in 1520.

We'll take a look at it in a moment. None of them are earlier than the 15th century. So we are talking a massive minority reading, and it is massively late in its testimony. It is quite honest. It's very accurate to say this is not a reading of the Greek manuscript tradition at all.

As we will see, it is a reading of the later Latin manuscripts. For example, some of these manuscripts, some of the Greek manuscripts, are diaglots. They're on one page you have Latin, on the other page Greek, and it came in from the Latin.

It simply isn't a Greek manuscript reading. So I go back to Metzger. The passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight, and these contain the passage of what appears to be a translation from a late recension of the Latin Vulgate.

Four of the manuscripts contain the passages of variant reading written in the margin as a later edition of the manuscript. The eight manuscripts are as follows. We'll look at these a little bit later on.

One of them he does mention is Codex Monfortianus, which dates from around 1520. I'll show you that specific reading. So the passage is quoted, but not by none of the Greek fathers who, had they known it, would most certainly have employed it in the Trinitarian controverses Sibelian and Arian.

We'll talk a little bit more about that later on. Some arguments have been raised against that, which I think are very easily dealt with. Its first appearance in Greek is in a Greek version of the Latin Acts of the Lateran Council in 1215, 1 ,200 years after the birth of Christ.

The passage is absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions. This is extremely important. You must remember that the New Testament was translated into other languages early on in its transmission history, and while there is a limitation to the value of translations, for example, there are some languages we can't tell what the original Greek was if there's a variant there because the receptor language is not specific enough to be able to reflect differences in the Greek, for example.

So there's a limited value. But what foreign language translations are very valuable in is telling you whether the original that they're translating contained a verse or didn't. And all ancient versions, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Slavonic, except the Latin, do not contain this text.

So all of those early... So when it is suggested, and there are people suggesting this, when it is suggested, this is a widespread reading, and it just simply hasn't come down to us, scholars working in the field see no reason to believe that.

See, no reason to believe that. Because if it was in the Greek manuscript tradition, it would appear in at least some of these translations, in some form. It does not. It is not found in the Old Latin, in the early form, Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustan, or in the Vulgate, as issued by Jerome.

Codex Holdensis, copied around 541 to 546, and Codex Aniatinus, copied before 8716, as revised by Alcuin, first king of Codex, from the 9th century. The earliest instance of the passage being quoted as a part of the actual text of the Epistle is in a 4th century Latin treatise, entitled Liber Apologeticus, chapter 4, attributed either to the Spanish heretic Priscillian, who died about 385, or to his follower, Bishop Instantius.

Apparently, the gloss arose, a gloss is a interpretation, normally written in the margin. It's an interpretation. Apparently, the gloss arose when the original passage was understood to symbolize the Trinity.

The original passage, spirit, blood, and water. Through the mention of the three witnesses, spirit, the water, and the blood, an interpretation that may have been written first is a marginal note that afterwards found its way into the text.

That wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened. John 5 -4 would be another example. In the 5th century, the gloss was quoted by Latin fathers in North Africa and Italy as part of the text of the Epistle, and from the 6th century onwards, it is found more and more frequently in the manuscripts of the Old Latin and of the Vulgate.

In these various witnesses, the wording of the passage differs in several particulars. That is quite true, there are a number of variants between these. That's always a telltale sign of a later edition moving into the text.

Then, so under internal probabilities, as regards transcriptional probability, if the passage were original, no good reason can be found to account for its omission, either accidentally or intentionally, by copyists of hundreds of Greek manuscripts and by translators of the ancient versions.

We will see that in seeking to overthrow this argument, the defenders of the Kamiohanium are actually, and they don't do this intentionally, well, okay, the majority do not do it intentionally, but they actually end up embracing the same viewpoint as the most radical critics of the New Testament text as to what scribes were attempting to do and what they were willing to do.

They will really, literally go so far as to say, well, this is just the Arians deleting stuff from the New Testament. Wow, they were really successful in doing so, weren't they? I mean, totally successful.

I mean, successful on the level that Dan Brown would ever even think of. That's what's necessary for their theories to work. They don't realize that. They don't realize that they are utterly undercutting the reliability of the text of the New Testament with their arguments.

Their traditions blind them to this. We're trying to point that out to them. Frequently, they respond with pure emotion when that's pointed out to them, but you do what you can. As regards intrinsic probability, the passage makes an awkward break in the sense for the story of how the spurious, and what he's saying there is, it is interesting to interpret what spirit, water, and blood means, but what it's not talking about specifically here is all of a sudden jumping into the doctrine of the Trinity.

So while some people argue, well, it flows better, but the topics changed. The same with the insertion of the Prick of Pay adultery in John chapter 8. That is the commentary provided by Metzger, which has been widely read for the vast majority of pastors and things like that.

That's about as far as they want to get into it, and that's going to be the extent of it. We're And though, again, I don't want to date this, we're doing a debate in a little over a week from now where this is one of the texts that has been presented by the man I'll be debating as evidence that the entirety of the Bible is unreliable.

So it is an important thing to examine. So how do you know that we continue to possess what John wrote to us in his first epistle? Well, most Christians live and die without ever having knowledge of how many manuscripts do or do not contain 1 John.

You've probably heard that we have almost 5 ,800 Greek portions of the New Testament. Very frequently, people are confused by that, and they think that what that means is we have 5 ,800 manuscripts of Matthew through Revelation.

That's not true. Many of those manuscripts, for example, are—the earlier they are, the more partial they are, because the older they are. So all the papyri are partial. The early manuscripts, the earliest, earliest fragments we have in the New Testament are all written upon papyri.

The vast majority of them were discovered—time period of 1930s, 1960s, which we're still cataloging new papyri, just had a couple new papyri added to the list within the past year. But the vast majority were found during that particular time period.

Not found in the sense of dug up, but just happened to be located in libraries, mainly from the British having stolen them from other places in the world and dragged them back to England during the colonial period.

The papyri are extremely important and have shed a tremendous amount of light on the history of the New Testament text, and especially when they are able to help us to look at the earliest major unsealed texts—Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Rodentonianus—manuscripts, Alexandrinus, like these.

They're extremely, extremely important, and so we've talked on this program many times before about when you have P75, Papyrus 75, a Gospels manuscript that lines up with Codex Vaticanus. They're both related somewhere, up-lined one another in their genealogy.

When they both have the same reading, that's a reading that goes back very, very close to the origination of those Gospel writings within 30 to 60 years. And there's no other work of antiquity that can even come close to this.

All of this should, for a Christian, thrill our souls. We today can make arguments about the antiquity of the text of the New Testament that even men like Constantin von Tischendorf only a century and a half ago could wish to have been made, let alone going back to the Reformation or periods of time before that.

So at the very time when we have the greatest attacks upon the New Testament, we also have the greatest amount of information to us, and that's a great blessing from God, and that's one of the reasons we deal with this, is because we want people to understand that information.

It's not something that's normally talked about in churches. It should be, but it's not. And sadly, there are brothers and sisters in the Lord that, for various reasons, want us to avoid these things and to hold to traditional perspectives that are really indefensible, apologetically speaking.

So we want to deal with those things as well. So when it comes to 1 John, we do not have 5 ,800 manuscripts of 1 John. Obviously, the Gospels are the books we have the most of, then the Pauline Epistles, and then the numbers go down from there.

But we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 grand total. But obviously, when you look at any New Testament book, what you're going to have is a small number back in the early centuries, and then the numbers could go up and up and up in the number of manuscripts you have as centuries go by, just simply because the closer you get to now, the more likely something can survive that particular period of time.

The Gospels were more popular, they were more widely distributed, and so you have a larger number of them. We do not have any papyri that are directly relevant to our subject of inquiry here in regards to 1 John chapter 5.

As with most works, the earlier portions and mid portions of a book are more widely represented. Sometimes the beginning of a book and the end of a book are less widely represented. The reason for that is damage to the book, if the book existed as a single work.

1 John would almost never be existing as a single work. So that doesn't apply as much here. But we do not, we can't go back to it. In this situation, we can't go back to like what we can in the Gospels and be looking at P66 or P75 or P45 and looking at very early manuscripts, papyri manuscripts of these texts.

And so as far as I know, these are the two earliest manuscripts that we have of this particular text. And so this would be the relevant portion from Codex Sinaiticus containing, you can see here, and even if you can't read Greek, you can see this.

What are we talking about? We're talking about the testimony. What is that term in Greek is martyr. And you can actually see right here, martyr. You can see the word martyr right there. Martyr rune right here, the one testifying.

And here's what's called a nomena sacra. That's a pi and a nun. So pneuma, the spirit. That line over top is indicating this is the abbreviation for the word the spirit. You can see the word three right here.

Here's testifying again down here. So pretty clear. And it does not contain the comma johanim. As I said, it's not till the 15th century till you will find any manuscript that does, but this is probably the earliest copy we have.

And then there's a second reading. And this is Codex Vaticanus. Now Vaticanus is normally very clear and very easy to see and to read and stuff like that. This unfortunately isn't. This particular sheet, and this happens, you know, I don't know if it was because a monk spilled his early morning coffee hundreds of years ago or just what it is, but this is not nearly as easy to see.

But here you can see martyr right here. Three and martyr. And should note that up here and I cut it off too tight on the screen grab. Sorry about that. But you'll see two dots. There's actually three dots and three dots in the margin normally refers to a variant.

Problem is we don't know when that was added. We don't know when that was put there. Why? Well, you can sort of see it with this. But one of the major problems with Codex Vaticanus is that at some point in its history, fairly recent history, at least after the second half of its life put that way, someone, maybe the ink that had originally been used was not as dark or not as long lasting.

But you can sort of sort of see this for yourself. You look at it. Some lines get a little thicker and that's because somebody went back through and retraced with new ink the entirety of this manuscript.

That must and given this is the Old New Testament. Can you imagine taking a printed Bible and retracing every letter in it that I'm sort of thinking this was penance for some monk that had done something got himself into trouble personally, but can't prove that.

Anyway, so the point is, especially when it comes to things like the dots and things like that, we don't know when those were put there, whether that was there originally. There's really no reason to believe that, though some people would suggest it.

In all probability, that's a fairly modern addition. But these, we don't know which came first. We don't know whether it was Sinaiticus Vaticanus that was copied first. They're both probably from around 350.

They could be as early as 330. We just don't know. There's no date on it. They could be some of the ones that were copied with imperial monies that Eusebius tells us about after the Council of Nicaea where Constantine gave money to the church to copy Bibles.

He didn't tell them what to copy, but because the Roman Empire, only 12 years earlier, had been burning and destroying scriptures, he gave money to the church to copy those scriptures. They could be from that.

They could be from a couple of decades later. But this is probably the earliest manuscript evidence we have for that particular text, and it reads as the modern eclectic text. That is, it does not contain the Kamiohonium.

The Latin Tradition, Patristic Allusions, and the Rise of the Comma

So what we have is a reading that first begins to appear in Latin manuscripts of the 7th and 8th centuries, primarily. Now, there are some who argue that early church writers made reference to this text.

For example, they will point us specifically to the words of Cyprian, and Cyprian is the great martyr bishop of Carthage. He dies right at the beginning of the great imperial persecution. It's going to last for about 60 years.

It was the worst part of the persecution, and it ends in 313. And he was beheaded. And in a rather important book that we have made reference to numerous times before in our debates with Roman Catholics on the subject of the papacy, and that is on the unity of the Catholic Church, and there seems to have been more than one version of this book put out, probably by Cyprian, and probably because of his encounters with a rather imperious Roman bishop by the name of Stephen, but we don't have time to get into that today.

He says these words, the Lord says, I, you don't need to put this up, I and the Father are one, and again it is written of the Father and of the Son of the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. Now, what we have with all of the texts that Defenders of the Comma have pointed to is at best an allusion, not I-L-L, A-L-L, allusion to something, alluding to it.

It is not a quotation. It is not a citation, and you would think that especially on something this important that if the comma existed in the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament in the primitive days, that this would be a well-known text and it would be quoted repeatedly by many people.

For example, the first heresy that had to be dealt with in the Church in regards to Christ was not Arianism. It was not the denial of the deity of Christ that you deal with at the Council of Nicaea, no.

A hundred years before that, you're dealing with Sabellianism, Modalism, Patrapassionism, Dynamic Monarchianism. You're dealing with people who are denying the distinction of the persons and are basically saying that there is one God who acts like the Father or acts like the Son or acts like the Holy Spirit.

The modern version of this is the United Pentecostal Church International, though they have their own spin to it, which isn't necessarily identical to what you have in some of the early Church situations.

But especially the Church in the East had to deal a lot with that particular problem, and in fact, some of the problems at the Council of Nicaea was that Eastern Christians were very uncomfortable with some of the, like, the very term, homoousios, of one substance.

They're like, the Patrapassionists, the Sabellians, they'll think we're saying what we've said was wrong. They'll think that we're agreeing with them now. That was one of the problems was how to affirm the full deity of the Son without, at the same time, giving unnecessary ammunition to the heretics over on the other side who are saying, oh yeah, yeah, he's God.

In fact, there's only one person who's God, and Jesus is the Father, and so on and so forth. So when you keep that in mind, then you realize that this text, in the second century, if it had been available to the Patrapassionists, to the Sabellians, everything would have talked about it, because they would have been using it constantly.

See? Father, Son, Holy Spirit, they're one! They're one! They're one! And there would have had to have been constant explanations of what the nature of that oneness was, just as we have to have constant conversations of the text in John 14.

If you've seen me, you've seen the Father. I and the Father were one, John chapter 10. Well, Kai Eszman, we are one, plural. It's not saying we are one person. We have to talk about that all the time.

Not a word. And people will say, well, this is all arguments in silence. Remember, if you're going to assert that this is an original part of the New Testament that was lost from its original language component, the Greek manuscript tradition, and had to be restored from a later version of one foreign language translation, not all the other translations, it would be one thing if it was gone from the Greek, but it's found in all translations.

No, it's not found in any of the early translations. It's only found in the later versions of the Latin manuscripts. If you're going to argue that, then the weight is upon your shoulders to establish its originality.

And since you have no evidence of in the early period, then this isn't an argument from silence, this is a confirmation of what the manuscript tradition actually says. The manuscript tradition says it wasn't there, and the patristic sources say it wasn't there, because if it had been there, then it would have been in this conversation, in this conversation, in that conversation.

But they say, oh, but there are allusions to it. Well, any discussion of the Trinity as a whole is going to have the language of three and one. Any discussion of the Trinity's got Father, Son, Spirit, and one.

So, without specificity saying, as John said in his first epistle quotation, then none of these can be demonstrated as having any meaningful validity at all. And it's interesting, I will try to blow this up so that it's visible.

One of the nice things about the UBS 5th edition, and I hope someday I'll have something called the ECM in accordance when it's finally available, is they give much more attention to patristic citations.

And so, down here at the bottom of the page here, here's the text along with the comma, and then you have references. So, for example, 61 here is Codex Monforteanus, we're going to look at that in a second, and the variants and stuff.

And then once you get past those small number of manuscripts, and giving the Latin here, you have some names. You have Cyprian, Pseudo-Cyprian, Priscillian, Speculum, Varimatum, Pseudo-Vigilius, and Fulgentius.

But you will notice that Cyprian is listed but has parentheses around him. That is the editor's way of saying, maybe, maybe not. It is certainly not certain that he did this. And so, you only end up with non-parenthesed names when you get to the period of time where it's very clear that this had now become a part of some of the Latin manuscripts.

Around the time of Fulgentius, you get into that time period later on. But when we talk about Augustine or Tertullian or Cyprian, Jerome, for example, some of the defenders will say, well, there was this introduction to some of the letters in Jerome that makes mention of it, except the text doesn't have it.

So, the vast majority, again, of people who don't have an axe to grind on this subject recognize that that introduction was added at a later period of time. It's far more likely that the introduction is added at a later period of time by somebody else than it was that the text itself was changed.

One of the things you've got to keep in mind is that the defenders of the comma are more than willing to say that there has been massive editing of the text of the New Testament at this point by heretics, and they were successful.

They were successful. So, if we've caught the heretics only by the use of one translation in later versions, how many places have we missed? How many places have we missed? Now, they would have a theological response to that.

They would not have a historical response to that. In reality, I would suggest that if you're going to defend this, you should simply say, I believe this as a pure matter of faith. I do not make a historical argument whatsoever, because once you start getting into the historical argument, you end up utterly undercutting the reliability of the text of the New Testament.

You don't intend to, but that's exactly what you do, and we're going to give an example of it later on. So, during the Arian controversy, this would have been a key text. Doesn't come up. Sibelianism, key text, doesn't come up.

It's simply not a part of the patristic material. There are allusions to the oneness of three persons, but that doesn't mean they're quoting from 1 John 5 -7. If they had wanted to quote from it, they could have very clearly.

If it was a part of their manuscripts traditions, they didn't. So, the scholar who wants to look at the material, the scholar who, and this is why I've said many times that holding to the comma destroys all apologetic methodology.

When I am critiquing the ethmonic revision of the Quran, I have to be as fair and accurate as I can be. I actually have to try to be unbiased in my analysis of the data for my criticism to carry appropriate weight.

I cannot use unequal scales. I'm constantly criticizing my Muslim debate opponents in using unequal scales. They will use one standard for the New Testament, a different standard for the Quran. I'm not going to do that.

They may continue to do that, and you might say it puts you at a disadvantage. Well, not in God's eyes, it doesn't. But we have to use equal scales, and when we use even scales, then we sit back and we go, okay, here is a reading unknown in the Greek manuscript tradition until the 1400s.

It's not a part of any of the early translations of the New Testament. It comes into the Latin at a later period of time, only slowly moving to a position of predominance in the later editions of the Latin Vulgate.

It is fairly clear it was, well, it is clear it was not a part of Jerome's original translation of the Vulgate. Of course, the Vulgate, by the time of the Reformation, was a different thing. So, upon what basis, then?

Anybody who holds to—well, there are different schools of textual critical methodology. The vast majority of Christian scholars, say, believing Christian scholars, believe in what's called reasoned eclecticism.

There continues to be arguments about how you weigh external evidence versus internal evidence and things like that. Today, there is something I've talked about in the program in the past, we don't have time to go into it today, called CBGM, coherence-based genealogical method.

CBGM doesn't give any place whatsoever to the Kamiohanium. It can't. There aren't enough manuscripts. It's not even really a part of the manuscript tradition to even look at it. So, it can't even enter into the analysis that we do with serious textual variants.

This is not, in the understanding of the vast majority of textual critical scholars, this is not a serious textual variant. It has no probability of being original. And so, it doesn't get discussed all that much on that side of things.

For people holding that perspective, the late dates of the few manuscripts, all the early translations, early Church Fathers, not a chance. It is one of the—it is the clearest example of a text that pollutes the New Testament from outside because it becomes popular in common use.

It is one of the best examples of why we need textual critical analysis, and that we have to determine what it is that we want. Do we want to know what John wrote, or do we get to determine what John wrote?

We want John to write what we want. I mean, it would be very convenient to have 1 John 5 -7, but John didn't write 1 John 5 -7, so if you love the truth, you don't love that which is not true. So, then you have other folks.

Now, see, what's interesting is, there are certain people—I'm not going to name names—but there are certain people. There's one particular gentleman I can think of who simply—if I said the sky was blue, he'd find a way to argue about it and write a lengthy article about it.