Commentary on 1 John 5:6-12

Notes (NET Translation)

6 Jesus Christ is the one who came by water and blood – not by the water only, but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth.

The author is using phraseology that was familiar to his original readers but which is unclear to us. What is meant by “water” and “blood”? The following suggestions have been made:

1. The water and blood refer to the sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s supper, respectively. But neither sacrament is mentioned elsewhere in this epistle. Blood would be an unprecedented symbol for the Lord’s supper. In fact, blood is one of the things signified by the Lord’s supper, not vice versa.
2. The water and blood are linked to the water and blood that issued from the side of Jesus when he was pierced by the spear at his crucifixion (Jn 19:34-35). They are symbolic of Jesus’s death. But note the word order differs in Jn 19:34 (“blood and water”). It is difficult to explain how Jesus Christ came through the water and blood when they, in fact, came out of him. This option does not explain the phrase “not by water only”.
3. Water refers to Jesus’s birth and blood refers to his crucifixion. The terms are a reference to his incarnation.
4. Water refers to the baptism of Jesus, when he was declared Son of God and commissioned for his work, and the blood refers to his death, when he completed his work. The one who came from heaven is the one who passed through water (baptism) and blood (death). Like the third option, this sees the terms as a reference to the incarnation.

Options 3 and 4 are the most probable, in my opinion. In stressing that Jesus Christ came not by water only, we may have an indication that the separatists downplayed Jesus’s death. John Stott explains how the fourth option may have responded to the separatists:

At least this meaning of the expression tallies with what Irenaeus disclosed of the heretical teaching of Cerinthus and his followers. They distinguished between ‘Jesus’ and ‘the Christ’. They held that Jesus was a mere man, born of Joseph and Mary in natural wedlock, upon whom the Christ descended at the baptism and from whom the Christ departed before the cross. According to this theory of the false teachers, Jesus was united with the Christ at the baptism, but became separated again before the cross. It was to refute this fundamental error that John, knowing that Jesus was the Christ before and during the baptism and during and after the cross, described him as ‘the one who came through water and blood’. Neither word has the definite article. The author is stressing the unity of the earthly career of Jesus Christ. He who came (from heaven, that is) is the same as he who passed ‘through’ water and blood. For further emphasis he adds (using the definite article this time before each noun, and changing the preposition from dia, ‘through’, to en, ‘in’), ‘not with the water only’, since the heretics agreed that at least he was the Christ at his baptism, ‘but with the water and (with) the blood’ (RV, RSV). ‘The statement is as precise as grammar can make it’ (Brooke), and it is disappointing that neither the NEB nor the NIV expresses this precision. For full measure, in opposition to the heretics’ differentiation between Jesus and the Christ, John adds that the one who so came was Jesus Christ, one person who was simultaneously from his birth to his death and for evermore (this is the one, present tense) both the man Jesus and the Christ of God.¹

The Holy Spirit testifies, in some way, to the incarnational ministry of Jesus Christ (2:20, 27; 3:24; 4:2, 13). The Spirit’s testimony can be trusted because the Spirit is truth (Jn 14:17; 15:26; 16:13).

7 For there are three that testify, 8 the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are in agreement.

The Spirit, the water, and the blood are in agreement in testifying that Jesus is the Christ and Son of God.

Kistemaker asks how the testimony of two historical events could be made equal to the testimony of the Holy Spirit. Jesus answers this question in John 5:31-37. There He first points His opponents to John the Baptist as His witness, then to His works, and finally to His Father. John’s use of water and blood fits this same pattern and may, in fact, allude to Jesus’ statement there and in John 10:25-38.²

9 If we accept the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, because this is the testimony of God that he has testified concerning his Son.

In saying the “testimony of God is greater”, the author is either saying the testimony of God stands behind the testimony of the three mentioned in vv. 6-8 or that God’s testimony is in addition to the testimony of the three. In the Synoptic gospels, God the Father testifies concerning Jesus at the baptism (Mt 3:17; Mk 1:11; Lk 3:22; cf. Jn 1:32) and the transfiguration (Mt 17:5; Mk 9:7; Lk 9:35). John 12:28 describes God’s voice from heaven: “I have glorified it [the Father’s name], and I will glorify it again” (cf. Jn 5:36).

10 (The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself; the one who does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has testified concerning his Son.)

The purpose of the testimony to Christ is to evoke faith/belief/trust in Christ. The “testimony in himself” may refer to the inner witness of God’s Spirit or an internal certitude. The second half of the verse concerns not believing God’s testimony about his Son. One may believe in God but reject Jesus Christ. Such a person is still identified as a liar (2:22-23). “Rejecting Jesus or redefining Jesus to accommodate modern values is an act of choosing not to believe what God has said about His Son.”³

11 And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

Eternal life is a gift (cf. Rom 4:1-4). With the resurrection of the Son of God, the age to come has broken into the present age so we possess eternal life in the present (as well as in the future).

12 The one who has the Son has this eternal life; the one who does not have the Son of God does not have this eternal life.

Eternal life can be found nowhere else than in the Son of God.

Comment

The Johannine Comma (Comma Johanneum) is a short description of the Trinity that is found in some Latin MSS and a very few Greek MSS.⁴ In this usage “comma” means part of a sentence or a clause. It is found between verses 7 and 8, which read as follows (Johannine Comma in bold): “For there are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth, the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are in agreement.” The Johannine Comma is known to the English-speaking world through the King James Version. Besides the NKJV, no modern English translation of the Bible contains the Johannine Comma because it is certainly a later addition. If it is original, there is no explanation for how it dropped out of MSS.

Before looking at the MS evidence we may note a few (arguably) awkward aspects of the Comma. First, it has the Spirit as both an earthly and a heavenly witness. Second, it says the three are one whereas v. 8 merely says the three are in agreement. Third, it is odd that the Word testifies to Jesus Christ, that is, himself.

Out of the approximately 5,800 Greek MSS the Johannine Comma is found in only 9 late MSS:

• MS 61: Codex Montfortianus (Britannicus) (early 16th c.): Copied from an earlier Lincoln (Oxford) Codex (326) that did not have the Comma.⁵
• MS 88: Codex Regius of Naples (12th c. and 16th c.): The Johannine Comma is a variant reading from the 16th c. added to the 12th c. MS.
• MS 221 (10th c.): The Johannine Comma is an addition to a 10th c. MS.
• MS 429 (14th-16th c.): The Johannine Comma is an addition to a 16th c. MS.
• MS 629: Codex Ottobonianus (14th-15th c.): It has a Latin text alongside the Greek, which has been revised according to the Vulgate.⁶
• MS 636 (15th-16th c.): The Johannine Comma is an addition to a 15th c. MS.
• MS 918 (16th c.): Spanish MS
• MS 2318 (18th c.): Influenced by the Clementine Vulgate.⁷
• MS 2473 (dated 1634)

Of these, four have the words in a marginal note:

• MS 88
• MS 221
• MS 429
• MS 636

The oldest MS to include the Comma (MS 221 from the 10th century) includes the reading in a marginal note added some time after the original composition, instead of in the text itself. The oldest MS to include the Comma in the text itself is from the 14th-16th century (MS 629) but its wording is different from the wording in all the others. The wording found in the TR was apparently composed after the publication of Erasmus’s Greek NT in 1516. Erasmus included the Comma in the third edition of his Greek NT in 1522 after pressure from the Roman Catholic Church and being shown a Greek MS, Codex Montfortianus (MS 61), containing the Comma by an English Franciscan monk named Froy or Roya. It is suspected this MS was made to order (it now resides at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland). Erasmus omitted the passage in later editions of his Greek NT.

The Comma does not appear in any Greek witness of any kind until a 1215 Greek translation of the Acts of the Fourth Lateran Council, a work originally in Latin. The Comma does not appear in any pre-1500 copies of the Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, or Slavonic translations of the NT.⁸ Surely, if the early church fathers had known of the Comma they would have used it in the debates concerning the Trinity (both Sabellian and Arian).

In the Latin NT MSS known to us, the Johannine Comma does not appear in the OL until after 600 nor in the Vg until after 750. Until near the end of the first millennium it appears only in Latin NT MSS of Spanish origin or influence. The Comma may have made its way from Spain into copies of the Vg written in the Carolingian era.

In trying to determine the origin of the Johannine Comma, R. E. Brown states that it first appears in the work of Priscillian (d. 385). Other writings indicate it was known in Spain and North Africa between 380 and 650. He puts forth the following hypothesis:

The following picture emerges from the information drawn from the church writers. In North Africa in the third and fourth centuries (a period stretching from Tertullian to Augustine), the threefold witness of the Spirit, the water, and the blood in I John 5:7-8 was the subject of trinitarian reflection, since the OL translation affirmed that “these three are one.” Woven into this reflection were statements in GJohn offering symbolic identifications of each of the three elements, plus John 10:30, “The Father and I are one.” Eventually, in the continued debates over the Trinity, the modalist Priscillian or some predecessor took the Johannine equivalents of Spirit, water, and blood, namely, Father, Spirit, and Word, and shaped from them a matching statement about another threefold witness that was also one. If the phrase “on earth” had already appeared in the OL reference to the Spirit, the water, and the blood, the counterpart “in heaven” was obvious for the added threefold witness of the divine figures. At first this added witness was introduced into biblical MSS as a marginal note comment on I John 5:7-8, explaining it; later it was moved into the text itself. Some who knew the Comma may have resisted it as an innovation, but the possibility of invoking the authority of John the Apostle on behalf of trinitarian doctrine won the day in the fifth-century debates against the Arians and their Vandal allies. The close connection of Spain to North Africa explains that the Comma appeared first in Latin biblical texts of Spanish origin. In summary, Greeven phrases it well: “The Johannine Comma must be evaluated as a dogmatic expansion of the scriptural text stemming from the third century at the earliest in North Africa or Spain.”⁹

External Links

The Greek Manuscripts of the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7–8)

Bibliography

Akin, Daniel L. 1, 2, 3 John. The New American Commentary 38. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2001.

Brown, Raymond E. The Epistles of John. New York: Doubleday, 1982.

Derickson, Gary W. First, Second, and Third John. Evangelical Exegetical Commentary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012.

Kysar, R. “John, Epistles of”. Anchor Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

Metzger, Bruce M., ed. A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. Second Edition. Hendrickson Pub, 2005.

Miller, J. E. “Johannine Comma”. The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016.

Stott, John. The Letters of John. Reprint Edition. Tyndale New Testament Commentaries 19. Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2014.

Strecker, Georg. The Johannine Letters: A Commentary on 1, 2, and 3 John. Translated by Linda M Maloney. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996.

Yarbrough, Robert W. 1-3 John. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2008.

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1. Stott 2014, 178 ↩
2. Derickson 2012, 515 ↩
3. Derickson 2012, 521 ↩
4. Kysar 1992, 3.901 ↩
5. Brown 1982, 776 ↩
6. Brown 1982, 776 ↩
7. Brown 1982, 776 ↩
8. Brown 1982, 777 ↩
9. Brown 1982, 785-786 ↩