1 John 5:7, the Comma Johanneum, Examined

And 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.

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 the, that all, 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 were 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 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, 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.

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 through 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 through 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.

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—well, that's not a phrase, a couple of phrases— found in—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. It 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.

I 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 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

Kama, 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 that phrase in heaven, the

Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one, is what's called the

Kamiohonium. 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 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 a taller stack over there, but these many, these eclectic texts, they are, they are drawn from many different manuscripts, these printed editions from which we translate into other languages, including the

English language. We'll 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 1 18, 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 Kama, all of the manuscripts that contain the

Kama Johanium 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 continued 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

Kama 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 diglottes. 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 eight manuscripts contain the passage as a 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 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 certain... there's a limited value. But what foreign language translations are very valuable in is telling you whether the original

Greek 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 was 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 hand 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 Aryans 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 never 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 in 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 thing with with the insertion of the Prick of Pei adultery in John chapter 8. And so 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 going to go a little bit more deeply into this because it is very important,

I think, 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 papyri are 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.

We 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, Juan Antonianus, 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, Papyri 75, a

Gospels manuscript that lines up with Codex Vaticanus. They're both related somewhere, uplined to 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 Constantine 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, you know, centuries.

And then the numbers could go up and up and up in the number of manuscripts you have as the 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 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 the, here's what's called a nomina 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 Johannium, 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 second version, not version, but 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, let's put it 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 see this for yourself if 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 we don't know which came first.

We don't know whether it was Sinaiticus Vaticanus. It 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. 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 illusion, 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 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. What is, well, Kai Esman, we are one.

Plural. It's not saying we are one person. We have to talk about that all the time.

Not a word. Not a, not a, and people will say, well, this is all our 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 the early 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, this conversation, 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 has 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 the text along with the comma, and then you have a references.

So, for example, 61 here is Codex Monfortianus. 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, Verumatum, 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 the 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.

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

They were successful. So if we've 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 the, 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. Sabellianism, 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

Kamiohonium. It can't. There just 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.

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.

Actually, there's lots of people like that, sadly. Though, on one hand, I'm sort of glad I give them a reason for living, getting up each morning, but other than that, but there are people who would hold to what would be called a majority text platform.

And from their perspective, the majority of the manuscripts determine what the proper reading is to be.

Now, what's interesting, a lot of people who will defend the comma will use majority arguments up to a point.

They never should. If you ever defend the comma as original, then you have to reject majority argumentation, because, you know, there's the

Hodges -Farstad text according to the majority text.

It does not contain the comma johannium. Anyone who holds to majority text theory, anyone who holds to the idea that the scribes purified the text over time—and

I know, I'm thinking of one person locally here who recently said that's exactly what the scribes did, and we'll be looking at a video he did defending the comma.

It's incoherent. It's a complete contradiction. If you're a majority text advocate, you do not believe in the comma johannium.

Because it's not a majority reading, by any stretch of the imagination. Even if you count the late, late, late, late, late manuscripts it's found in, still 99 % of all the manuscripts of 1

John don't contain it. Now, you might say, well, but then a lot of them don't contain 1 John 5, so they might have contained it, but you can't assume that.

See, that's one of the problems here. The weight of the assertion lies upon you.

You cannot assume they were a part of manuscripts that do not contain 1 John 5, because you have no evidence of it.

You have no foreign language translations of it. You don't have any basis for asserting that.

You're making an assertion that has no evidence behind it whatsoever. So, it's not majority text reading, and those people who hold to the

Byzantine priority position, like the Robinson Pierpont text, doesn't have the comma johannium.

It's not a Byzantine reading either. The Byzantine manuscript tradition does not contain the comma johannium.

So, the only people who have it are

Textus Receptus -only advocates or King James -onlyists. And then when you transfer

King James -onlyism off into whatever language that you want to send it off into.

These are the only people who are going to be defending the comma johannium.

Now, this is a point of tremendous inconsistency that I need to communicate to you.

If you hear anyone utilizing arguments about the antiquity of the

Byzantine text, or the idea, like I just said, of scribes correcting things over time that gives us the

Byzantine text, the Pickering model of using numbers to say, well, you know, the earliest readings are going to become the predominant readings over time, etc.,

etc. Anybody using that kind of argumentation who defends the comma is defending the comma at the cost of everything they said before.

They are contradicting themselves. It's an incoherent argument. It's not a

Byzantine reading. It's not a majority reading. So, if they ever use either the majority or Byzantine priority argumentation for anything else in the

New Testament, they then have to abandon that and contradict that for this one verse.

And here's something I'm just going to put it back out there because it is simple truth and those who deny it cannot refute it.

In fact, they just ignore that it exists. If you hold to a text and you cannot present a consistent methodology of examining the manuscripts that gives you that text, you are not engaging in truthful, honest scholarship and you're not engaging in truthful, honest study.

Your position is self -refuting, incoherent, and in error.

You can sugarcoat that and cover that over with a thick layer of wonderful theological frosting if you want, but it will not change the fact that if you hold to a position where you have to use one set of arguments for this verse and then a completely opposite set of arguments that refute these arguments for this verse to hold your text together, you are a traditionalist and you're only playing with history.

Please stop doing that. It's incoherent and something that is incoherent is untruthful.

It is not marked by a desire for consistency and coherence.

The arguments that we make for any particular text need to be coherent.

They need to go to a consistent set of principles and no one who argues for the comma does that.

They can't. It's not possible because if they are an advocate of the textus receptus, then the arguments they're going to use for the comma are going to be different than the arguments they use for Revelation 16 .5,

which would be different than the arguments for Revelation 14 .1, different for the text in Ephesians. Luke 2 .22,

they're going to utilize different argumentation for each variant, not because the context requires it, but because there is no coherence in their methodology.

They have a text that arose from differing sources, very few sources, in the midst of political issues, political in the sense of Rome was a political power at that time, and hence is inconsistent with itself in certain places.

And so the people who are Byzantine priority people, the people are majority people, they'll sit back, any honest one will sit back, and they'll say two things.

They'll say the textus receptus needs revision, um, and the commiohonium is not original.

Now they may say this, they may like this better than they like this, but what they will say if they were honest, and they will not argue this, and they will confirm this as much as it bothers them to know and to have to agree with me, on this point they will agree with me.

The textus receptus contains errors and must be revised, and the commiohonium is not original.

That's what they'll say. Um, like I said, they, it just may give them hives to have to agree with me about something, but they, but they will say it if they have the convictions to do so.

Um, so there's there's the information.

Um, let me at least show you, um, let me, uh, show you one of the, here's some of the information, uh, concerning, oops, didn't need to do that.

Let's just, uh, do this right here. So, for example, here are some of these later manuscripts, uh, where you have the commiohonium in the actual text.

So you've got Codex Atabanianus from the 14th, 15th century.

However, notice it is a Greek -Latin diglot. The Greek has been taken from the Latin text, and we know that the, the comma arose from the

Latin. Uh, skip Codex Montfortianus for a moment. You have 918, 110, uh,

Codex Ravianus, and 2318. Notice the dates, 16th, 16th, and 18th century.

So Codex Ravianus is, is written after you have the printed editions of the

Greek New Testament, where this is already being fought about to begin with. But number 61,

Codex Montfortianus, I'd like to show you what that, um, reads, and here is, that's a picture of me and, uh,

Doug McMasters, and a friend of ours. We're in the reading room at the

Trinity Library in Dublin, Ireland, and the manuscript laying before us is

Codex Montfortianus. And here's what Codex Montfortianus says. You will notice that it is not actually identical, uh, in its reading to what you have in the

TR, but it's close enough. Uh, but here you have the comma, and most scholars are convinced enough, uh, that we can put an exact date on this manuscript, 1520.

It is relevant to the dispute that has been had regarding why it is that Erasmus, in his first two editions, did not have the comma, but he does in the third.

Well, he was attacked. Well, he was attacked for a lot of things. He clearly initially thought he would be attacked for his messing with the

Latin Vulgate text. He fully expected that. But the

Greek was not his focus at all when he first did it. That's why it was done rather haphazardly initially.

And continued to be haphazard even after that, as we've discovered, only recently, as to why that was as well, especially in certain parts of the

New Testament. Um, but, uh, this manuscript, the argument that was made is that in response to his critics,

Erasmus said, I've never seen a manuscript that contained this.

Now what that's turned into over time is he made a wager or a challenge. Show me a manuscript.

Well, if you say I've never seen one, there is an implicit challenge. Well, show me one. But that's not exactly the same thing.

But if you've got someone who's attacking you, they're going to interpret you in those ways. And so it is quite possible that this specific manuscript was produced and these words put there specific to say, well, here's one.

You said you hadn't seen one before. What are you going to do now? He inserts it in the third edition, includes a long note in his annotations, indicating he does not believe it's original.

That may be why some people actually allege that Erasmus was non -Trinitarian. I don't,

I don't think so. He was attacked for all sorts of stuff. And back then, one of the most effective way of attacking somebody, similar to our political situation today, but back then was to question their

Trinitarian bona fides, ask a guy 40 years later by the name of Servetus how that goes.

And so I'm, I'm really hesitant to give much weight to those criticisms of Erasmus, but might have had something to do with this, but here's

Codex Monfortianus and there's your comma. Now, here's, here's the question.

Is that how you want the text of your New Testament determined? Based upon events such as that.

That really, really, really is a question that I think any person needs to, needs to consider.

So we'll take that down. And I think in listening to this video, we will be able to pick up any of the other particular aspects of the issue that we need to address.

But there you have the background information, material, maybe more information you ever wanted.

But it's important to have it. And so I want to look at Taylor DeSoto's video that was put out just a few days ago.

It's 23 minutes long. And so if I started to do that right now, I assume it takes about three minutes for me to respond to each minute.

So we'd have another hour and a half of the program to go. And we generally don't go that long.

Most people don't like to listen to something that long. So in the last six minutes, he gave what he called a positive case for the

Qam Yohanian. What he did in the preceding part was to respond to what he considers to be the arguments against the

Qam. I don't think those were really the arguments, totally. One part we did deal with, and that is the fact that this text is not found in the patristic argumentation.

He also spent a lot of time on the argument that the papyri somehow has something to do with this.

I don't know anybody who's made that argument. I've never seen it in print, but maybe he ran to somebody on the web or something and did that.

I don't know. They didn't seem to be the best arguments. At least they really didn't deal with what we've presented.

Let's put it that way. That aside, the last six minutes are the positive presentation. So five minutes we can probably get done and still keep this to an hour and a half.

So I want to respond to these things. I think it's important to do so. So let's present a positive case for the

Qam Yohanian. The Qam Yohanian is indeed the most difficult passage to defend, especially against those who deny the authenticity of non -Alexandrian readings.

Okay, I'm going to be stopping and starting it. It has nothing to do with Alexandrian readings, because this isn't a

Byzantine reading. This isn't a Western reading. This isn't a Caesarean reading. Just to let people know, outside of Byzantine, those categories,

I think, are going to be going the way of the dodo bird in the not -too -distant future. I don't know what terminology is going to be taking its place, but over the next 20 years, those terms are going to be passing away due to the application of CBGM.

But be that as it may, this has nothing to do with Alexandrian readings, because this is not a

Byzantine reading against an Alexandrian reading. It is a Greek manuscript reading versus a late

Latin manuscript reading. And yeah, that is indefensible. It does require a radical reorientation of the entirety of New Testament textual criticism to take a late

Latin reading and demand its insertion into the Greek manuscript tradition by basically saying it was there originally.

That's the level of corruption. There's that level of corruption.

The vast majority of scholars, including unbelieving scholars working in the New Testament, do not have that low a view of the scribes in the transmission of the text.

That's how radical it is. I've said before, if you go full comma today, knowing what we know today, and they'll talk about, well,

Calvin liked it. Fine. Calvin did not have 1 500th of the information that we have today. Trying to drag those people into this conversation is bogus.

It would never survive in a debate. It's irrelevant. They did not have the information we have today.

Leave that aside. The fact of the matter is you're presenting a perspective that would require a massive level of corruption of the

New Testament to actually be relevant, which is not the foundation, which is the exact opposite of the perspective of Byzantine priority, the exact opposite of the perspective of majority text, and it's the exact opposite of the perspective that this gentleman presented himself, actually, that his co -pastor presented in the

Pulpit and Pen article that I probably shouldn't have mentioned because we want to make this a freestanding thing, but in a there was a recent article that talked about how the scribes were used in the process by God of purifying the text.

Well, if you go full comma, you can't believe that. Maybe they disagree on this. I don't know, but you can't hold both of them at the same time.

It can't be done. In this presentation, I will examine the Greek support for the passage, the commentary by various theologians, and the internal evidence of the disputed passage.

Greek support. The Communioneum is supported by 11 Greek manuscripts, six of which were corrected by a second hand to add the verse.

Okay, so that's a little bit higher than I've seen, but the the point is the over half of them, it is a later, sometimes even an 18th century hand, written in the margin.

Textually irrelevant. Textually irrelevant. It just needs to be said.

As discussed earlier, there are zero extant papyri manuscripts containing 1 John 5, and of the near 6 ,000 extant manuscripts we do have, just under 500 contain any part of 1

John at all. Okay, now keep in mind, even though he's not going to mention this, none of those that contain 1

John for the first 1 ,400 years of church history contain this reading positively.

He's going to argue, well, they only contain primarily the first part of the book. Maybe they contained it.

Again, notice the difference between doing textual criticism, where you actually have to bring forth evidence of something, and the defense of a traditional text, where you can go, well, it might have been this, might have been that, we don't know, could have been, don't know.

That's why I say, we don't know, I don't know, is not an apologetic methodology either, and is fundamentally destructive of an apologetic methodology.

It is important to note that though the majority of these extant witnesses do not contain the disputed verse, the majority of these extant manuscripts also exclude all of the verses past chapter 2 of the epistle.

So it's slightly misleading to say that most of the manuscripts exclude this passage. Okay, so again, this is not textual criticism.

This is theologizing, this is traditionalism, but it's not text criticism. The assertion is being made, it's a positive assertion that goes against all the ancient documentation, therefore, it requires positive evidence.

You can't just simply go, oh, it might have been. This is, this, if you find that to be compelling, then one of two things is true.

Either you've already made up your mind and you want to be TR only or something like that, or you've never done textual criticism before, you've never looked at any other variant, you've never tried to defend.

You know, through the, over the years, we have looked at numerous passages here on the program and defended

New Testament readings from criticisms from Muslims or atheists or others.

You have to have a consistent historical basis going, might have been there, is not enough.

That is destructive to apologetics. That's why we're addressing this and we'll continue to address this.

It's vitally important. So, what's the assumption?

Well, there may have been more, could have been more, there could have been thousands more.

They just haven't come down to us. It just so happens that the ones that have come down to us don't contain it, but there may have been lots of others.

Again, notice the actual reasoning here. You're starting with your conclusion and then you're trying to backfill from there.

This would not survive meaningful cross -examination. It would not survive in a textual critical classroom.

At least, I hope it wouldn't. This is reasoning backwards. Sounds good to someone who doesn't do textual criticism, doesn't actually take this out there and defend it.

It sounds good. But once you stop and go, you're sort of assuming your conclusion, aren't you?

Yeah, that's exactly right. You are. This is perfectly reasonable as hand copying of manuscripts was largely discontinued after the printing press.

I did find that somewhat humorous for one reason. Where are the majority of manuscripts that actually contain the comma?

They're written after the printing press. They're inserted probably from a printed text, which means that that 11 number is actually like four meaningful.

Those are the ones we looked at before where it's actually a part of the text and not written in the margin and not written in a hand from two, three hundred years down the road.

Here is prone to destruction by just about everything. In the last 200 years, the theory that the oldest surviving manuscripts were the best without question has held its place as the chief principle of textual criticism.

No, it's never been the chief principle. It is an important principle because of a simple reality, and that is a manuscript written in 200 has to have fewer generations of copying between the original and it than the same type of manuscript written in the year 1200.

So it is highly improbable that a manuscript written in 1200 is a copy of a manuscript that was written in the year 200.

We have a couple that are 1881, 1739 come to mind as 9th and 10th century manuscripts that we can tell were copying 3rd or 4th century texts, maybe even 2nd century texts, but they are the rarity.

They are the exception, not the rule. So yes, it is pretty obvious to most people that a copy of the

Gospel of John such as p75 which is written around the year 200 by a very careful scribe who wrote one letter at a time that has further evidence of the antiquity of its readings in Codex Vaticanus from a separate line that greatly enhances its value is to be given more weight than a 12th century minuscule manuscript.

Yes, that is logical. That is pre -eminently logical. I don't know how someone cannot see that and if you can't then you have to ask yourself the question why.

What's standing in your way? The restructuring of these principles has inserted doubt into the theory and it may be wise to surrender the argument on the available data.

These late manuscripts that contain the comma could have easily been copied from a manuscript of great quality and antiquity.

Again, a necessary assumption provided without evidence.

To my knowledge and again, we only have four manuscripts. The ones that was in the column, that's irrelevant.

That's irrelevant. To my knowledge, there is nothing found in any...

Monfortianus is a throwaway. It's not textually relevant. I've never seen anyone go, wow!

Monfortianus has all these amazing early Byzantine readings and and all that.

I've never seen anyone make an argument that any of those manuscripts have any claim whatsoever to the kind of weight that's been given to 1881 and 1739.

And without the provision of evidence of that, then what you have here is wishful thinking, not solid argumentation.

Just wishful thinking. They may have been, could have been, who knows? Well, if again, you're the one making the argument.

You have to provide solid foundation for that. I've given you two manuscripts, 1881 and 1739.

There are numerous scholarly articles that analyze these manuscripts and demonstrate that they were copying an early exemplar, and we can tell why.

Because they differ from their contemporaries. Where do these manuscripts differ from their contemporaries, other than the comma?

I mean, Monfortianus is an entire manuscript. It's not just 1 John. But its readings are all common.

When? Around 1520. Around 1520. That's where it came from. It's not the copy of some ancient manuscript.

There's no evidence for it. There's plenty of evidence, by the way, of theologians throughout the ages that testify that a great number of manuscripts contain this passage.

Okay, now let's stop right there. Theologians. Well, we can have great respect for theologians, but I know a number of theologians that to be honest with you, if you opened up if you open this up to many of the theologians that I know and ask them to interpret the notes at the bottom of the page, they have no idea what they're looking at.

It's just not something they do. And until you have this level of information available to you, you know, we look at Jerome, and man,

Jerome is a goldmine of information about manuscripts in one particular area at one particular time.

But he only had access to that particular area, and he was probably the most important person at that time.

Origin was so weird, who knows, but he's important too, but the point is you couldn't call up your friend a thousand miles away and ask for a fax.

Hey, could you do a screen capture of that for me? PDF. PDF that for me. Couldn't do it.

So any commentary up until the modern period about the manuscript tradition as a whole is extremely fragmentary.

Extremely fragmentary. So the idea that because someone was a great theologian, they somehow knew what all the manuscripts across Europe meant or contained, nobody did.

No one had that information. So any statement about how many manuscripts or how widely distributed, anything like that, up until at least the last century, and really the middle of the last century, are just simply wild guesses.

There's nothing more to be given to them than that. I mean, that's just that's just recognizing the limitations of what had yet been done in the creation of a critical text at that point.

I have already demonstrated that Calvin and in other presentations that Turretin and John Owen agreed to this.

Francis Chanel of St. John's College in Oxford said this in the 17th century, These words in 1

John 5 -7 are to be found in copies of great antiquity and best credit. Now, it's interesting.

Great antiquity. Back to when? What did he have access to?

Which manuscripts did he have access to? They don't know. They can't say. But they want to say, well, he must have stuff that we don't have now.

And he must have known that it was greatly it was from antiquity. How did he date them?

Paleography is a rather modern invention. It requires access to a large number of manuscripts.

It's been greatly enhanced by our discovery of the papyri, for example. So how does he know? There are a lot of people

Erasmus was known to refer to manuscripts in antiquity that were from like the 1200s.

That's not antiquity. At least not from our perspective. So you get one guy someplace with no manuscript evidence and that's supposed to be a sufficient grounds for the insertion of a reading into holy scripture.

Think about that, folks. Think about what the foundation of this really is. What's really being said. Further, in Codex Vaticanus, there are three dots left by the scribe at 1

John 5, 6 through 8 that indicate the scribe knew of a textual variant. This is available publicly on the internet for all to see.

Go and look at the manuscript. That means that this text was disputed as early as the 4th century, which is coincidentally when many other passages were being omitted from specifically

Alexandrian manuscripts. Ah, now two things. We showed that earlier on.

I mentioned we don't know what the dating of these dots is because of the nature of Vaticanus and the fact that it was overwritten and things like that.

But, A, let's say it was then. That means Vaticanus is as old as we've always said that it was.

But B, I hope you caught what was just being said. All these texts were being deleted from the

Alexandrian manuscripts. Now, they have to believe that because the textus receptus is at least one percent longer than the corresponding what would in the past be called

Alexandrian version of the same thing. And so, from their perspective, people were successfully deleting material.

Well, not successfully because they end up being in the Byzantine manuscripts. But this is the exception.

So, the idea being that somehow, somehow, well, man,

I need to repent because Dan Brown got it right. Dan Brown, the

Da Vinci Code, got it right. Here's Taylor de Soto telling us that Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code, got it right. That somehow, at that time period, because that's the same time as Constantine, the whole thing for Dan Brown was that Constantine gathered up the manuscripts and made changes and did it so well that we never found out about it.

I've always said that was absolute fiction, that it was absurd.

Well, it is fiction and it is absurd. And the idea that this text was in manuscripts and then deleted from those manuscripts successfully from the entire

Greek manuscript tradition, that not a single one of all those manuscripts had one copy that managed to make it down through history, is absurd.

But folks, you need to see the radical nature. These guys don't look radical.

They sound as conservative as a day is long, but you need to understand that when you apply the principles outside of the

Kamiohanium that they are defending, it results in the radical deconstruction of the entire foundation of the

New Testament itself. Because they don't use this argumentation anywhere else.

They use a completely different set to defend Revelation 16 .5, a different set of Revelation 14 .1, Ephesians 3, etc, etc.

They use all sorts of different arguments. They're never consistent with themselves. They can't be. But this argument means that we have zero confidence outside of restoring texts from foreign language translations, that the

Greek manuscript tradition actually represents what was written by John or Paul or Peter or anybody else.

That you heard it. You heard it. If anything, the exclusion of the passage from the manuscript tradition is evidence that the passage was contested early on in the transmission process, not that it was absent to begin with.

So you begin with your conclusion, and now you're saying, well, the fact that it's not there shows that it was disputed.

See, there's no reasoning with this. You've started with your conclusion and then whatever evidence you encounter, you then fit it into what your conclusion requires it to be.

So if we don't find manuscripts, if we don't find it in Vaticanus, we don't find it in Sinaiticus, that means that it was disputed and that there was a reason for its being excluded, and that means it was there originally, which can be done with any text, any text whatsoever.

There are some quotes from Clement of Alexandria. We have no idea what Clement of Alexandria is talking about when he actually sounds like he's quoting from scripture.

What if you're dealing with someone who grabs hold of some of his stuff and says this was original too, and it has just as much evidence as the

Kamiohonium? These guys got no response. I do. I do, because of coherence, consistency.

I have called into question and demonstrated the lack of integrity of those manuscripts formerly belonging to the

Alexandrian family on my channel before, so it should not be surprising that they would contain such an omission.

And all the Byzantine manuscripts, and all the Western manuscripts, all Greek manuscripts, all

Greek manuscripts. The Alexandrian has nothing to do with this. It's all the

Greek manuscripts. In fact, it is far, it is obvious that the four

Greek manuscripts that contain it in the text do so because of Latin contamination. One of them is a polyglot.

It's got the Latin right there. That's where it came from. It's obvious that's where it came from, is from the

Latin, in every single one of them, due to the predominance of the Latin Vulgate in the West. There is no evidence of an antiquity in the manuscript to this reading at all, in any family.

But you'll notice the assumptions that are constantly put in to what is a supposed to be a positive presentation.

Let's look at internal support. Though many modern commentaries dismiss the disputed verse as being incoherent, theologians for centuries have found the passage fits most comfortably at verse 7.

Remember Calvin, who said, And Calvin was wrong about that.

He was not only wrong about it flowing, but he was wrong about the copies. And living at the time he was living at, given the amount of information he had, even if he had the 1550

Stephanus, there are places where Stephanus wasn't exactly spot on. So, there's no— the introduction of the doctrine of the

Trinity at this point, when you're talking about the Spirit, the water, and the blood, which are probably references to the humanity of Christ, to the nature of Christ at that point,

I mean, I'm not saying that we can't find it someplace, you know, we can't find it someplace.

It's just the idea of defending a reading that has no basis before the 14th or 15th centuries on the basis of smoothness is incredibly weak.

Incredibly weak. Calvin knew Greek better than I would say any scholar alive today. I would not say that at all, and Calvin never said it.

I think that's ridiculous. He certainly knew Latin very well, but pretty much everybody did. But I see absolutely no reason, for all the respect that I have and how many hours

I've spent defending John Calvin, even to the point of defending his pastoral ministry and things like that,

I would never ever say what was just said there. The verse indeed seems to be required to fit the flow of the passage.

Not only is a parallel to these three bear witness on earth, which is a common pattern for the apostle, there are syntactical ramifications if the passage is not authentic.

R .L. Dabney notes the article in verse 8 has no antecedent without verse 7, as you would expect.

And anyone who has taught Greek and taught through 1 John knows that trying to demand that John utilize that level of provision of clear antecedents is absurd.

The whole argument about 1 John 5 .20, there are just so many places where the antecedent is not expressed or is allowed to remain ambiguous in John that it's, again, an extremely weak argument.

Structure of the sentence. In the 4th century, Gregory of Nazianzus comments that the passage is confused in its grammar without the phrase that we now know as verse 7.

In that, after using three masculine gendered words, he follows with three neuter words, which is contrary to the definitions and laws which you and your grammarians have laid down.

Which could then be charged against John in other places and Paul in other places as well.

Again, this kind of, oh, it'd just be so much smoother if it was there. Let's not worry about the manuscript's argumentation.

There you go. A fourth century bishop. Dabney agrees with Gregory's analysis.

Given the parallel structure which is common to John and the strange grammar construction without verse 7, it seems unlikely that the passage was originally penned from verse 6 to 8, omitting verse 7.

Conclusion. The Kamyonam has been one of the most widely contested passages in the history of the trans -

And to be honest with you, should do the exact same thing. Should do the exact same thing.

Um, so I, I utilized, um, um, well, let's just finish it up.

Did you catch that? Been removed. By whom, how, when, and where.

And are you seriously saying, because it's the only way to understand your position, that in this instance, they succeeded.

They succeeded. I mean, that is a radical position of of skepticism for the

New Testament. Radical. Which would then require the radical theological reestablishment of the text.

Which is really what you have. Fundamentally, if you're gonna say this and this alone, doesn't matter what the manuscripts say, all the rest of that stuff,

I think you should just be straight up front and say, God re -inspired this, this is our standard, it was done in 1633.

If you want to really use this, go with the Trinitarian Bible Society. It was done, what was it, 1880s period.

And that's it. And, and stop saying that you're making a historical argument, because you're not making a historical argument.

You're saying, it was corrupted, was lost, it's been found, it's been restored, and here's how.

And here's how it worked out. That would be the way, I think, to go.

Well, I noticed in the time that it would be a convenient point to wrap this up and keep it right where it needs to be.

Hopefully this has been useful to you in navigating sometimes some confusing stuff that is to be found out there.

It's also hopefully been a mechanism whereby you can understand that this field of study is vitally important.

There are certain rules that are in accordance with truth. You cannot simply assume your conclusion and then try to make the facts fit it.

You need to be consistent in your application of standards. That's true when it comes to this area, it's true when it comes to exegesis and theology and everything else along the lines.

So hopefully this has been helpful to you. I certainly would rather have been talking about some theological, other theological things today, but hey, all that stuff is dependent upon having a text that has not been radically corrupted.

And thankfully, ours hasn't been, and this is a part of the defense of doing that.

So next time, maybe we can talk about some theological things. Please, well,

I was going to say, pray for us. We've got a lot coming up, but again, we'll talk about that when we get a chance to get together again.