Wow. Taking a chance like that and calling the words from God corrupt.
That scripture isn't from God. Someone inserted it long after the Apostle John had left the scene. That is what I learned from world-recognized Bible scholars. I'm kind of surprised that you don't know that.
A scholar by the name of F.H.A. Scrivener wrote: "We need not hesitate to declare our conviction that the disputed words
were not written by St. John: they were originally brought into Latin copies in Africa from the
margin, where they had been placed as a pious and orthodox gloss on verse 8. From the Latin they crept into two or three
LATE Greek codices, and thence into the printed Greek text,
a place to which they had no rightful claim." (
A Plain Introduction to the Criticism of the New Testament; Cambridge, 1883, 3rd edition; p.654)
A footnote in
The Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic translation, says that these words are "
not in any of the early Greek manuscripts, or any of the early translations, or in the best manuscripts of the Vulgate itself."
A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament by Bruce Metzger (1975, pp.716-718) traces in detail the history of the spurious passage. He states that the passage is first found in a treatise entitled
Liber Apologeticus,
of the FOURTH century, and that it appears in Old Latin and Vulgate manuscripts of the Scriptures beginning in the sixth century.
Modern translations as a whole, both Catholic and Protestant, do not include them in the main body of the text, because of recognizing their spurious nature."
The
Revised Standard, the Good News Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, the New American Bible, and the New International Version are just a few examples of versions that leave out the erroneous verse under discussion.
Erasmus was a 16th-century scholar, and when he translated his Greek New Testament he "appealed to the authority of the Vatican Codex
to omit the spurious words from I John chapter 5, verses 7 and 8." He was right but in 1897 Pope Leo XIII wanted to keep the corrupted Latin text of the
Vulgate. Only with the publication of modern Roman Catholic translations has this
textual error been acknowledged.
Can you
ever humbly admit to being wrong?