To the editor:

In his antitrinitarian letter (DMG, 6-7 August), Robert Kohtala claims that I John 5:7, which mentions the Trinity, is a later addition to the Bible text. These words, known as the Johannine Comma, are in our King James Bible, which is so hated that critics have zealously worked to revise it in every conceivable way.

It is no less than miraculous that a book so despised and banned as the Holy Bible that its translators and readers have been tortured to death remains in the world.

God has preserved the Johannine Comma and other witnesses of the Trinity in it, such as Matthew 28:19, John 1:1-14, and Acts 5:3-4. Scholars refuse to consider, even as a remote possibility, that it is missing from their oldest Greek manuscripts because of a careless scribe, who, seeing two sets of witnesses, ‘the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost,’ followed by ‘the Spirit, and the water, and the blood,’ omitted the first set, thus creating a version favored by antitrinitarians.

The missing words had to be in manuscripts that existed before the oldest extant ones used by modern Bible revisers, which are said to be from the fourth century, because they are quoted in the third century by Cyprian (On the Unity of the Church 1:5) and even earlier by Tertullian (Against Praxeas, chapter 25).

The words were also in the Greek text used by Reformation-era printers and translators and still remain in the correct printed Greek text, known as the Textus Receptus, which is in my library together with a horde of foreign-language Bibles containing the verse. It is also found in Jerome early Latin translation, which is the text used in the Gutenberg Bible.

In his introduction to the General Epistles, Jerome complains about unfaithful translators, widely deviating from the truth, who place in their editions only the three words ‘water, blood and Spirit’ and omit the testimony of ‘the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit,’ in which the Catholic faith is confirmed in the highest degree and the divine substance of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is proved to be one.

Other citations are readily available in other Church Fathers, including Augustine well-known book The City of God, completed in 426 A.D., where it is alluded to in Book 5, Chapter 11.

Warren Hepokoski

Hancock