Day: April 11, 2021

“There are three that bear witness”

The week of Easter immerses us in the accounts of the Resurrection just as Holy Week immersed us in the Passion. In both the Gospel of John plays a crucial role as providing the underlying logic to the accounts of both Passion and Resurrection. This is simply to recognize what we see or know through the eyes of John whose Gospel helps to illuminate what belongs to the unity of the Scriptures of the New Testament and in its relation to the Jewish Scriptures; in short, to what is known as the Canon of the Scripture, and by extension to the development of the Creeds. The Bible did not just drop out of the sky. To call it the Word of God does not deny in any way how it has come together in its parts and as a whole through human agency precisely in our engagement with the things which are written and passed on.

It is important to mention this with respect to the Resurrection since the readings both in Easter week and throughout the Easter season show us the way in which the idea of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. John’s Gospel is particularly helpful in highlighting the unity or balance between ontology and epistemology, how we think about being or reality, and how we think about thought or the forms of knowing.

It is known as the Johannine Comma. It is not about punctuation – itself a most helpful innovation that helps to clarify the relation of phrases and words. The term here refers to a phrase or clause either added to the fifth chapter of I John or removed from it. It is one of the notorious mysteries about the transmission of texts. While not found in the earliest New Testament manuscripts known to us which don’t predate the second and third centuries, it seems to have been received and accepted by some theologians such as Origen. And it appears in much later texts and entered into the later translations such as the King James Version of 1611 which, following Tyndale, drew upon Erasmus’s third critical edition of the Greek New Testament which included it. It doesn’t appear in Luther’s Deustche Bibel since he based his German translation of the New Testament upon Erasmus’s second critical edition of the New Testament which excluded it.

The classical Book(s) of Common Prayer which have used the King James Version for the Epistles and Gospels since 1662 have therefore included this phrase right up until fairly recently. It was in the 1918 Canadian Prayer Book but absent from the 1928 American Prayer Book and quietly disappeared in the 1959/1962 Prayer Book. Some of you are just old enough perhaps to remember this. What is the phrase and what is the controversy?

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