1 John 5:6-8 — On Trinitarian Doctrine

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1 John 5:6-8 and Trinitarian Doctrine

I have a huge problem on your translations of these verses that so wonderfully explain the Trinity in other versions of the bible. Compare your version with the KJV shown below.

1 John 5:6-8 ISV
6This man, Jesus Christ, is the one who came by water and blood—not with water only, but with water and with blood. The Spirit is the one who verifies this, because the Spirit is the truth. 7For there are three witnesses [b] — 8the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and these three are one.
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b 5:7 Other mss. read witnesses in heaven—the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. ⁸And there are three witnesses on earth—

1Jo 5:6-8 KJV
This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. (7) For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. (8) And there are three that bear witness in earth, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one.

These verses are very important in explaining the Trinity. Your version is not even close to being correct compared to most other versions. ... This is a major mistake and disappointment in your version.

Major mistake? Disappointment? No. The premise of your argument is incorrect. The ISV is not translated from a single manuscript. (Then again, neither was the KJV, for that matter...) Please note Paragraph Two of our Principles of Translation:

For the New Testament, the main text of the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece and the main text of the fourth corrected edition of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament is used for the base text. The ISV New Testament does not rely solely on one family of manuscripts, such as the Textus Receptus redaction (commonly known as the Received Text) or the Westcott-Hort redaction. Instead, a wide choice of manuscript traditions was consulted. All significant departures from the base text, as well as all significant textual variants, are indicated in footnotes.

Now regarding the footnote to 1 John 5:7, please keep in mind that the footnotes are part of the ISV text and should not be separated from it. That's why it's inaccurate to say, for example, that the ISV removes part of 1 John 5:7 from the New Testament. No, we relegated part of it to the footnote register because there is a class of Greek manuscripts of the NT that omit that portion of the verse.

For the ISV COT not to have noted this obvious fact somewhere in the text would result in us being dishonest to the textual transmission history of the New Testament. That's why we've noted the difference in traditions in the footnote.

The ISV Committee on Translation (COT) believes that the Bible teaches that our one God exists as three eternal, co-existent persons, all of whom share the undiluted qualities of deity. One of the persons—God the eternal Son—took the form of humanity forever in the incarnation. This person, Jesus the son of Mary, is as much fully God as is God the Father and God the Ruach HaKodesh, God the Holy Spirit.

The question presented to us in the variant reading of 1 John 5:7 is not whether the variant reading proclaiming that "There are three who bear witness in heaven, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit and that these three are one" is theologically truthful. The ISV COT holds that the statement is accurate and truthful.

Instead, the question we had to consider is whether or not the statement appears in enough manuscripts to warrant inclusion in the main body of the text. We think it a wiser course of action to note that not all manuscript families contain the statement, since this is a simple fact verifiable by anyone who has studied the art and science of NT Greek manuscript tradition. It happens to be that—quite literally—one of the finest works available today from the evangelical Christian community in the United States of America is Dr. David Black, who served as New Testament editor for the ISV and who authored the book New Testament Criticism. Here's a list of books relating to biblical scholarship that Dr. Black has written.