The first work to use the Comma Johanneum as an actual part of the Epistle's text appears to be the fourth-century Latin book Liber Apologeticus, probably written by Priscillian or his close follower Bishop Instantius.Wallace, Daniel B. "", accessed online 16 February 2006. (A Spanish theologian who advocated the strictly ascetic lifestyle, Priscillian was the first person in the history of Christianity to be executed for heresy.) Raymond E. Brown's Epistle of John specifies the Liber Apologeticus as the Comma's source.

This part of the homily, possibly originating from Cyprian, then became worked into copies of the Vulgate, roughly around the year 800; the passage in the Vulgate was then back-translated into the Greek. Out of the thousands of manuscripts currently extant which contain the New Testament in Greek, the Comma only appears in eight. The oldest known occurrence appears to be a later addition to a 10th century manuscript now in the Bodleian Library, the exact date of the addition not known; in this manuscript, the Comma is a variant reading offered as an alternative to the main text. The other seven sources date to the 16th century or later, and four of the seven are hand-written in the manuscript margins. In one manuscript, back-translated into Greek from the Vulgate, the phrase "and these three are one" is not present.Mann, Theodore H. "" Journal of Biblical Studies 1 (January–March 2001). Accessed online 16 February 2006.

No Syriac manuscripts include the Comma, and its presence in some printed Syriac Bibles is due to back-translation from the Latin Vulgate. Coptic manuscripts and those from Ethiopian churches also do not include it. Of the surviving "Itala" or "Old Latin" translations, only two support the Textus Receptus reading, namely the Codex Monacensis (sixth or seventh century) and the Speculum, an eighth- or ninth-century collection of New Testament quotations.

Early modern translations

The central figure in the sixteenth-century history of the Comma Johanneum is Desiderius Erasmus, a theologian and humanist whose writings prefigured and inspired Martin Luther. The author of many works—including The Praise of Folly, a dry-humored satire of Catholic traditions—Erasmus entered the field of Biblical translations thanks largely to a rivalry between publishers.

In 1502, Cardinal Cisneros sponsored a polyglot edition of the Bible, inviting a large group of religious scholars to create a multi-volume set containing parallel translations in all the Biblical languages: Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The result, now known as the Complutensian Polyglot, took fifteen years of dedicated effort. The New Testament translations were completed and printed in 1514, but their publication was delayed so that they could be released at the same time as the Old Testament.

Meanwhile, word of the Complutensian project reached Johann Froben

In his haste, Erasmus made a considerable number of translation mistakes. He was unable to find a manuscript containing the entire Greek New Testament, so he compiled several different sources. After comparing what writings he could find, Erasmus wrote corrections between the lines and sent the documents to Froben. Erasmus said the resulting work was "thrown headlong rather than edited" ("prœcipitatum fuit verius quam editum")."History of the Printed Text", in New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. II: Basilica – Chambers, pp. 106 ff. 18 February 2006. He fixed many but not all of the resulting mistakes in the second edition, published in 1519.

The Comma does not appear until the third edition, published in 1522. Its absence in the first two editions provoked considerable animosity, chiefly led by Lopez de Zuniga (also written Stunica) who had been one of the Complutensian editors. Erasmus replied that the Comma did not occur in any of the Greek manuscripts he could find; he eventually compromised with his critics, saying that he would add the Comma to future editions if it appeared in a Greek manuscript.

Such a manuscript was subsequently discovered. Today called "Codex 61", it was written after Erasmus's request by a Franciscan friar named Froy who lived in Oxford; others may have been involved in the addition as well. Erasmus added the Comma to his 1522 edition, with a note indicating that he doubted its authenticity. It was this third edition which became a chief source for the King James Version, thereby fixing the Comma firmly in the English-language scriptures for centuries.

The term Textus Receptus or Received Text generally refers to one of Erasmus's later editions or one of the works derived from them. The Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, a largely Protestant reference published in 1914, comments:

The textus receptus, slavishly followed, with slight diversities, in hundreds of editions, and substantially represented in all the principal modern Protestant translations prior to the nineteenth century, thus resolves itself essentially into that of the last edition of Erasmus, framed from a few modern and inferior manuscripts and the Complutensian Polyglot, in the infancy of Biblical criticism. In more than twenty places its reading is supported by the authority of no known Greek manuscript.

The English scholar Isaac Newton, best known today for his many contributions to mathematics and physics, also wrote extensively on Biblical matters. In a 1690 treatise entitled An Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of Scripture, Newton observed, "In all the vehement universal and lasting controversy about the Trinity in Jerome's time and both before and long enough after it, this text of the 'three in heaven' was never once thought of. It is now in everybody’s mouth and accounted the main text for the business and would assuredly have been so too with them, had it been in their books."Zahoor, A. "". Accessed online 17 February 2006. Newton believed that the Comma was introduced, intentionally or by accident, into a Latin text during the fourth or fifth century, a time when he believed the Church to be rife with corruption."", from the Newton Project. Accessed online 17 February 2006.

Modern views

All modern major Christian denominations are Trinitarian, with their beliefs refelected in three ancient creeds: The Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. Denominations whose beliefs follow these creeds accept the underlying theology of the Comma, whether or not they hold it to be a part of the First Epistle of John.

The Council of Trent established the modern canon for the Roman Catholic Church, deciding which books were truly inspired; however, the Council's decrees do not necessarily cover the Comma Johanneum. During the Council's preliminary discussions, the delegates decided to canonize "the entire books with all their parts, as these have been wont to be read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old Latin Vulgate". Because the earliest known copies of the Vulgate do not include the Comma, a strong argument exists that the Comma is not canonical.

On 13 January 1897, the Roman Curia's Holy Office decreed that Catholic theologians could not "with safety" deny or call into doubt the Comma's authenticity. Pope Leo XIII approved this decision two days later, though his approval was not in forma specifica; that is, Leo XIII did not invest his personal authority in the matter, leaving his approval in a sense "token". Three decades later, on 2 June 1927, Pope Pius XI decreed that the Comma Johanneum was open to dispute.

In more recent years, the Comma has become relevant to the King-James-Only Movement, a largely Protestant development most prevalent within the fundamentalist and Independent Baptist branch of the Baptist churches.

It is also worth noting that since the early nineteenth century, many scholars who practice higher criticism have come to question the authorship of the Johannine works. Tradition held that all of these books—the Gospel of John; the first, second and third Epistles of John; and the Book of Revelation—were all written by the same man, John the Apostle. However, in 1820 K.G. Bretschneider called into question the apostolic authorship of the Gospel, and even stated that the author could not have come from Palestine, since the author had a shaky grasp of Palestinian geography. Furthermore, he reasoned that since the meaning and nature of Jesus presented in the Gospel of John was very different from that in the Synoptic Gospels, its author could not have been an eyewitness to the events. Bretschneider's work began the modern investigation into the Johannian authorship question, and today, viewpoints on the issue range from affirming the authorship of the Apostle, to affirming the authorship of another author (called "John" for convenience), and even to theories of group authorship. If one accepts the Comma as a later hand's addition, then the "group authorship" theory becomes at least technically correct, with Priscillian or his friend Instantius possibly authors within the group.

See also

• Pericope Adulteræ

Notes