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Comma Johanneum

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Religious texts

   The Comma Johanneum is a comma, or short clause, present in most
   translations of the First Epistle of John published from 1522 until the
   latter part of the nineteenth century, owing to the widespread use of
   the third edition of the Textus Receptus (TR) as the sole source for
   translation. In readings containing the clause, such as this one from
   the King James Bible, 1 John 5:7–8 reads as follows, the Comma itself
   here rendered with emphasis:

          5:7 "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father,
          the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. 5:8 And
          there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the
          water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."

   The resulting passage is an explicit reference to the Trinity (the
   doctrine that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God), and for
   this reason some Christians are resistant to the elimination of the
   Comma from modern Biblical translations. Nonetheless, nearly all recent
   translations have removed this clause, as it does not appear in older
   copies of the Epistle and it is not present in the passage as quoted by
   any of the early Church Fathers, who would have had plenty of reason to
   quote it in their Trinitarian debates (for example, with the Arians),
   had it existed then. Most Churches now agree that the theology
   contained in the Comma is true, but that the Comma is not an original
   part of the Epistle of John.
   El Greco's rendition of John the Apostle, traditionally identified as 1
   John's author.
   Enlarge
   El Greco's rendition of John the Apostle, traditionally identified as 1
   John's author.

Origins

   Several early sources which one might expect to include the Comma
   Johanneum in fact omit it. For example, although Clement of
   Alexandria's writings around the year 200 place a strong emphasis on
   the Trinity, his quotation of 1 John 5:8 does not include the Comma.

   One account of its origins suggests that the Comma originated in a
   Latin homily elaborating on this passage in the Vulgate. The
   third-century Church father St. Cyprian quoted John 10:30 and added,
   "Et iterum de Patre et Filio et Spiritu Sancto scriptum est—Et hi tres
   unum sunt" (De Unitate Ecclesiæ, "On the Unity of the Church", vi).
   Translated, Cyprian's remark reads, "And again it is written of the
   Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—and these three are one." If
   Cyprian had been aware of the Comma, he would likely have quoted it
   directly, rather than glossing a verse in a different Johannine book
   with a sentence which resembles the Comma. Tertullian, in his Against
   Praxeas (circa 210), also supports a Trinitarian view by quoting John
   10:30, even though the Comma would have provided stronger support.
   Likewise, St. Jerome's writings of the fourth century give no evidence
   that he was aware of the Comma's existence. (The Codex Fuldensis, a
   copy of the Vulgate made around 546, contains a copy of Jerome's
   Prologue to the Canonical Gospels which seems to reference the Comma.
   However, the Codex's version of 1 John omits the Comma, which has led
   many to believe that the Prologue's reference is spurious.) In the
   sixth century, St. Fulgentius referred to Cyprian's remark (in
   "Responsio contra Arianos", "Reply against the Arians"). Many figures
   in the African Church of the period quoted the Comma, but they did so
   inconsistently; the most notable and prolific writer of the African
   Church, St. Augustine, is completely silent on the matter.

   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 Priscillianof Ávila (died 385), or
   his close follower Bishop Instantius. (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
   sixteenth century or later, and four of the seven are hand-written in
   the manuscript margins. In one manuscript, back-translated into Greek
   from the Vulgate, the phrase "and these three are one" is not present.

   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 of
   Basel, who decided to commission his own translation and beat the
   Complutensian to market. He contacted Erasmus, who began a systematic
   examination of New Testament manuscripts and rapidly produced a Greek
   edition and Latin translation, which Froben published in 1516. Also, in
   the same year Erasmus published a critical edition of the Greek New
   Testament—Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. Recognitum
   et Emendatum—which included a Latin translation and annotations. The
   second edition used the more familiar term Testamentum instead of
   Instrumentum, and eventually became a major source for Luther's German
   translation.
   Desiderius Erasmus in 1523 Enlarge
   Desiderius Erasmus in 1523

   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"). 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 produced. 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, "but he indicates in
   a lengthy footnote his suspicions that the manuscript had been prepared
   expressly in order to confute him." 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." (Like 1 John itself, Newton's Historical Account is an
   epistolary work: he wrote it as letters to John Locke.) Newton's
   history of the Comma Johanneum reflects his belief that the Church's
   history was one of progressive decay from a pure original, in terms not
   just of doctrine but also of its relation with secular powers. 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.

Modern views

   Nearly all modern major Christian denominations are Trinitarian, with
   their beliefs reflected in three ancient creeds: The Apostles' Creed,
   the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. Denominations whose beliefs
   follow these creeds accept the underlying theology of the Johannine
   Comma, whether or not they hold it to be a part of the First Epistle of
   John. Contrastingly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
   widely known as the Mormon Church, disputes the Comma as part of their
   arguments against the doctrine of the Trinity. For example, officially
   sanctioned LDS translations of the New Testament into French and German
   omit the Comma entirely. Mormons view the Comma as an example of how
   spurious additions change the meaning of holy texts, calling the Comma
   an affirmation of the attitude that the Bible should only be considered
   valid where it is in accord with "modern revelation".

   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.

   An edition of the King James Version called the Cambridge Paragraph
   Bible was published in 1873, edited by F.H.A. Scrivener, one of the
   translators of the English Revised Version and a noted textual scholar.
   Scrivener set the Comma in italics to reflect its disputed
   authenticity, though not all later editions retain this formatting.

   On 13 January 1897, the 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 full papal authority in the matter, leaving the decree
   with the ordinary authority possessed by the Holy Office. Three decades
   later, on 2 June 1927, Pope Pius XI decreed that the Comma Johanneum
   was open to dispute. The updated " Nova Vulgata" edition of the
   Vulgate, published in 1979 as a result of the Second Vatican Council,
   does not include the Comma, nor does the English-language New American
   Bible.

   In more recent years, the Comma has become relevant to the
   King-James-Only Movement, a largely Protestant development most
   prevalent within the fundamentalist and Independent Baptist branch of
   the Baptist churches. Proponents view the Comma as an important
   Trinitarian text and assert that those who doubt its authenticity are
   threatening the biblical basis for Trinitarian belief.

   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.

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