EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 3/24/2025 8:21 PM
My Worship Time
Focus: PT-5 “The Particulars of God’s
Testimony”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
1 John 5:6-9
Message of the verses: “6 This is he who came
by water and by blood, Jesus Christ; not by water only but by water and by
blood. 7 And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is true. 8 There are
three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood: and all three are in
agreement. 9 If we take the witness of men to be true, the witness of God is
greater: because this is the witness which God has given about his Son.”
I begin with another quote from MacArthur’s commentary on
1 John: “The witness of the three that
testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood is in perfect agreement and
convincingly demonstrates that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. How foolish to receive the testimony of men about
matters of far less significance while rejection the infinitely greater…testimony
of God…that He has testified concerning His Son.” I have to say that years ago when I was
working at my job at the Cleveland Casting Plant making cast iron parts for
Fords that I had a man working for me and one day we were talking about
different versions of the Bible and he brought up these verses, mostly from
verse nine and said that he would not read any Bible that did not have these
three words in them, the Spirit, the water and the blood. I told him that my choice of versions of the
Bible has always been the NASB. With
that said I want to again quote from MacArthur’s commentary:
“Some English versions (e.g., the KJV and NKJV) add
between vv. 7 and 8 the so-called comma
Johanneum, which reads, ‘in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy
Spirit, and these three are one. And
there are three that bear witness on earth.’
Though what it teaches is true, the added passage itself is
spurious. Noted textual scholar Bruce M.
Metzger summarizes the overwhelming evidence against its authenticity:
The
passage is absent from every known Greek manuscript except eight [all of which
date from the Middle Ages], and these contain the passage in 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 latter addition to the manuscript.
The
passage is quoted by none of the Greek Fathers, who, had they known it, would
most certainly have employed it in the Trinitarian controversies (Sabellian and
Arian). Its first appearance in Greek is in a Greek version of the (Latin) Acts
of the Lateran Council in 1215.
The passage
is absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions…except the Latin; and it
is not found (a) in the Old Latin in its early form..or in the Vulgate (b) as
issued by Jerome…or (c) as revised by Alcuin [in the ninth century].
The
earliest instance of the passage being quoted as a part of the actual text of
the Epistle is in a fourth century Latin treatise entitled Liber Apologeticus …attributed either to the Spanish heretic
Priscillian (died in 385) or to his follower Bishop Instantius….In the fifth
century the gloss was quoted by Latin Fathers in North Africa and Italy as part
of the text of the Epistle, and from the sixth century onwards it is found more
and more frequently in manuscripts of the Old Latin and of the Vulgate. (A Textual
Commentary on the Greek New Testament, second edition [Stuttgart: Deutsche
Bibelgesellschaft, 2002], 647-48)
F.
F. Bruce relates how this passage found its way into English Bibles:
When
[the Dutch Christian humanist scholar and contemporary of Luther Desiderius]
Erasmus prepared his printed edition of the Greek Testament, he rightly left
those words out, but was attacked for this by people who felt that the passage
was a valuable proof-text for the doctrine of the Trinity. He replied (rather incautiously) that if he
could be shown any Greek manuscript which contained the words, he would include
them in his next edition. Unfortunately,
a Greek manuscript not more than some twenty years old was produced in which
the words appeared: they had been
translated into Greek from Latin. Of
course, the fact that the only Greek manuscript exhibiting the words belonged
to the sixteenth century was itself an argument against their authenticity, but
Erasmus had given his promise, and so in his 1522 edition he included the
passage. (History of the Bible in English [New York: Oxford University Press,
1978], 141-42)
From Erasmus’s Greek New
Testament the passage found its way into the Textus Receptus, the Greek text
used by the King James Version translators.
That this passage is not part of the inspired text does not affect the
biblical doctrine of the Trinity, which does not rest on this spurious insertion.”
3/24/2025 8:55 PM
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