This is an interesting explanation about 1 John 5:7-8, unfortunately I lost the author's name.
Doesn't I John 5:7-8 clearly refer to the Trinity?
I John 5:7-8 
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For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost:
and these three are one.
And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit and the water, and the blood:
and these three agree in one.
The portion of I John 5:7-8 highlighted in bold has long given Biblical scholars pause for
thought. This "fragment" has been scrutinzed so thoroughly that it has a special
name: the Johannine Comma, a comma in this sense being a portion of a sentence or phrase,
with the implication being of something that has been inserted.
The Johannine Comma is a scripture which is used by some Christians, especially those of
the evangelical or conservative persuasions, as proof of the doctrine of Trinity.
"The Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." What could
be more straightforward an indication that the godhead is one, just like the Nicene Creed
says? However, translations newer than the Authorised Version (the King James Version, the
official Bible of the LDS Church in English) omit the Comma, almost without exception.
For instance, the NAB excludes the Johannine Comma:
I John 5:7-8 (NAB)
So there are three that testify,
the Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the three are of one accord.
(Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, The New American Bible, [World Bible Publishers,
Iowa Falls, 1991]: 1363).
The Greek New Testament, the original New Testament (as compiled by modern scholars from
the extant manuscripts) also omits the Comma:
"hoti treis eisin hoi martyrountes, to pneuma kai to hyd�r kai to haima, kai hoi
treis eis to hen eisin."
[literal translation] "Then three (there are) which witness,
"the spirit and the water and the blood, and these three are the of one.")
(Aland, Kurt; et. al.; editors, The Greek New Testament [Stuttgart, W�rttemberg Bible
Society, 1968]: 824)
How did the Johannine Comma make it into the AV in the first place, and why have other,
subsequent translations excised it? And, finally, should the fact that our official
English Bible, the AV, still contains the Johannine Comma be cause for concern?
First of all, there are stylistic reasons for doubting the authenticity of the Johannine
Comma. References to the Holy Spirit and the Word personified are not found anywhere else
in the writings of John, neither in the epistles, nor in the Gospel. The closest reference
to the Word is in the Prologue to the Gospel of John (John 1:1-5), where the Word was with
"God", and "was God"—there is no conjoining of the Word with the
Father specifically phrased that way. In other words, it's clear that the Word was Jesus
Christ, or God the Son, but the word used in John 1:1 for God the Father is the
non-specific "God", not "the Father." There was no need to be specific
since the controversy of the trinity had not yet arisen. The fact that the Johannine Comma
does explicitly refer to the Father conjoined with the Word would not be necessary if it
had been written in the First Century AD.
Likewise the Comma's doctrine of the Spirit bearing witness both in heaven and on earth
sounds suspiciously like a neo-hellenistic concept which seems to represent the Holy Ghost
as a member of a ruling troika, much like the leadership of the Roman Empire was a duality
during the later days of early Christianity (post 3rd century)—this heaven and earth
duality is a concept for which there was no need in the first century, so one has to
question its place in a document which purports to be a first century writing. It is, put
simply, an anachronism, like finding a Porsche in Camelot.
There are other passage in the New Testament which mention three divinities (e.g. Matthew
28:19), but even that scripture does not claim they are one; only the Comma has the
sophistication of 4th-century trinitarianism.
Even conservative Protestant scholars are acquainted with the sordid history of the Comma.
The Canadian conservative scholar Norman Geisler, after relating briefly the story of how
the Comma made it into the AV in the first place, criticizes the Comma, writing that
"…the acceptance of this verse as genuine breaks almost every major canon of
textual criticism." (Geisler, Norman L.; Nix, William E. A General Introduction to
the Bible, [Chicago, Moody Press, 1968]: 370).
How did the Johannine Comma make it into the King James Version (AV) in the first place?
It is often assumed that the AV is a translation from the original Greek and Hebrew texts,
but in fact it is actually a version. The AV was first published in 1611to solve a
political problem. The Hampton Court Conference, which was convened in 1604 soon after the
Protestant James I succeeded Elizabeth I, dealt with political pressure from Puritans for
a modern translation that was not a Catholic Bible by commissioning the AV
"translation" which was in fact based on previous versions and translations,
including the Bishop's Bible, the Great Bible, and the versions of William Tyndale and
Miles Coverdale. Tyndale's New Testament, the final version of which came out in 1525, was
based on Luther's German Bible with some "improvements" from the Greek text. The
only direct, pure translations of the English Bible until modern times were translated
from the Latin Vulgate—not only Catholic Bibles, but even the first complete English
Bible, Wycliffe's Bible of 1382.
Tyndale knew at least some Greek, and he was the first English translator to refer to
Greek texts. The apparatus of manuscripts he used was one which had just been published in
1516 by that amazing Renaissance man, Desiderius Erasmus.
Erasmus had basically five more-or-less complete manuscripts at his disposal to create
this first Greek Textus Receptus. Perhaps because of a combination of his haste to publish
and the pressure he was subjected to from certain sources, Erasmus fell into a trap
concerning the Comma. As Geisler relates,
"There is virtually no textual support for the Authorized Version reading [of the
Comma] in any Greek manuscript, although there is ample support in the Vulgate. Therefore,
when Erasmus was challenged as to why he did not include the reading in his Greek text
edition of 1516 and 1519, he hastily replied that if anyone could produce even one Greek
manuscript with the reading, he would include it in his next edition. One sixteenth
century Greek minuscule (the 1520 manuscript of the Franciscan friar Froy, or Roy) was
found, and Erasmus complied with his promise in his 1522 edition [third edition]. The King
James Version followed Erasmus' Greek text, and on the basis of a single testimony from an
insignificant and late manuscript all of the weight and authority of some 5,000 Greek
manuscripts were disregarded in favor of this text. " (Geisler, Norman L.; Nix,
William E. A General Introduction to the Bible, [Chicago, Moody Press, 1968]: 370).
Although Geisler overstates the number of Greek mss. which Erasmus would have had access
to, the point is that all the Greek textual evidence—as opposed to Latin textual
evidence—points to the Comma being much later than the rest of the Epistle and
therefore its inclusion is spurious. However, because he did end up including it in the
Textus Receptus, it ended up eventually in the King James Bible we use today.
If the Johannine Comma is spurious in the sense of being anachronistic with respect to the
Epistle of John, where did it in fact come from? The key to understanding its origin lies
with the history of the Latin Vulgate in mediaeval Spain. Even in the Vulgate (not to
mention the Old Latin version upon which Jerome based his Vulgate) the Comma does not
appear until the seventh century, and even there it appears only in mss. of Spanish
provenance. We know that the primary critic of Erasmus's omission of the Comma in his
first two editions was D. Lopez de Zu�iga, the editor of Cardinal Xim�nes's
Complutensian Polyglot Bible which was roughly contemporary with Erasmus's first edition.
An Englishman named E. Lee also criticized Erasmus in 1520 for omitting the Comma, and it
was to Lee that Erasmus made his famous response that if but one Greek ms. could be found
with the Comma, he would include it in his next edition. The Codex Montefortianus was
promptly offered up by one Friar Roy (or Froy), and although Erasmus and many others felt
it was a deliberate forgery, Erasmus felt honour-bound to include it. Tyndale was one of
those who suspected the provenance of Montefortianus as well, so in his English
translation he put the Comma in brackets to indicate his doubt as to its authenticity.
However, Erasmus's reputation as a scholar was so great that future scholars, not knowing
the circumstances surrounding the inclusion of the Comma, assumed it was genuine, and thus
it ended up more or less permanently in the Textus Receptus until modern days when the
Nestl� Greek New Testament (and its current incarnation, the Aland-Black Greek New
Testament) finally got around to correcting a centuries-old error.
The first known mention of the Comma was from the Latin Church Father Priscillian, who
mentions it in his Liber apologeticus 1.4, written in the mid-4th century, but there's no
proof he originated the Comma. Its next mention is in tractates defending what came to be
the orthodox doctrine of the trinity in the century following Priscillian, but this was
during a period when it was by no means clear that the "Catholic" (non-Arian)
doctrine would eventually prevail. The Comma is referred to in a confession of faith by
North African bishops in 484 AD (recorded in Victor of Vita's Historia persecutionis
Africanae Provinciae 2.82) at Carthage. Less than a half-century later, another North
African bishop, Fulgentius (bishop of Ruspe, d. 527 AD) refers to it in two tracts:
Responsio contra Arianos and De Trinitate. These were written as an apology of what became
orthodox Catholic belief, but were attacks on Arianism, a version of Christianity
professed by, among others, the Vandals, a Germanic tribe who had crossed the Pyrenees,
conquered Spain, and crossed into North Africa.
There is no formal doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament writers, if this means an
explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons. But the three
are there, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and a triadic ground plan is there, and triadic
formulas are there. . . . The Biblical witness to God, as we have seen, did not contain
any formal or formulated doctrine of the Trinity, any explicit teaching that in one God
there are three co-equal divine persons. (Fortman, pp. 22-23, as cited by Robinson, p. 74)
In the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 14, p. 299, R. L. Richard writes that "the
formulation 'one God in three persons' was not solidly established, certainly not fully
assimilated into Christian life and its profession of faith, prior to the end of the 4th
century. . . . Among the Apostolic Fathers, there had been nothing even remotely
approaching such a mentality or perspective" (as cited by Robinson, p. 121).
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