The Johannine Comma

Thus far I haven't spent much time talking about mistakes in the translation of the King James Bible. I have spent most of the space in this blog, and in the book that inspired it, talking instead about the beautiful aspects of the KJB.

But let's mention one important snafu, however.

It is called by biblical scholars, the Johannine Comma. It refers to the mistranslation of the verse, 1 John 5:7. The KJB reads:

For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the holy Ghost: and these three are one.

This translation arose because the translators were using a manuscript for 1 John that was unreliable. The mistake first appeared in English in 1522, nearly a century before the KJB, and was perpetuated without much comment into the nineteenth century. Interestingly, Erasmus fixed the mistake in his own translations of the New Testament into Greek and a revised Latin -- but then there was an outcry that he was compromising the doctrine of the Trinity.