Why Does the King James Contain 1 John 5:7?

800 people of Scotland presented King James with the Millenary Petition which demanded that he abolish some of the non-Biblical Catholic traditions. So he had a conference at Hampton Court in 1604 to discuss this and other matters. Dr. John Reynolds suggested that a new version of the Bible was needed. King James agreed. Over 50 men were assigned to the project, many of whom were experts in the Hebrew and Greek. The extracting of the original Hebrew and Greek was in contrast to Wiclif's Bible which was, in fact, a translation of a translation (English translation of the Latin, the Latin having been translated from the Hebrew and Greek). And, of course, the Latin Vulgate had many corruptions.

So the King James Version was to come mainly from the original Hebrew and Greek or from English texts (such as Tyndale's) which had come from the original Hebrew and Greek. It was finished in 1611 and was the most accurate English Bible up to that date. Of course, some corruptions did get into it -- the most famous of which is 1 John 5:7. All the words in the verse after the word "witness" are spurious.

Out of over 2000 Greek manuscripts only 8 have these words inserted. Four of them are inserted in the margin. Four of them were contrived to promote the idea of the trinity, one of which was to trick Erasmus into including them in a revision of his ancient New Testament*.

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* About 1520, Erasmus was being attacked by critics for not including the spurious words of 1 John 5:7. His reply to the critics came in the form of a challenge. He stated that if he could find just one Greek manuscript with the words in question in it then he would include it in his translation. So a Franciscan friar, Froy, produced a contrived Greek Testament with the spurious words inserted into it. Erasmus, due to Trinitarian pressure at the time, kept his word and inserted the words into his translation. However he added a long footnote, indicating he knew that the source document in question had been produced to confound him in his work.

-- wilyelder