1 John 5:7
1 John 5:77For there are three that testify:
This is one of the Watchtower's favourite doorstep exhibits. Older Bibles in the King James tradition read "there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one" — the only sentence in the whole Bible that states the Trinity outright. It is not in the early Greek manuscripts, and the JW argument follows directly: the clearest Trinitarian verse in Scripture turns out to be an addition, which shows the doctrine had to be inserted because it was not there to begin with. A Witness may produce a KJV, point to the words, and ask why your own Bible has dropped them.
Agree with them, immediately and without hedging. The words are a late addition. They appear in no Greek manuscript before roughly the fourteenth century, no early translation apart from Latin, and none of the Greek fathers cite them in the Arian controversy — which they certainly would have, had the sentence existed. Erasmus left the passage out of his first two editions and only added it under pressure. Every serious modern translation, Protestant and Catholic alike, has removed it, and so has the NWT. Conceding this costs nothing and gains a great deal, because it lets you make the point that matters: the passage was removed by the same textual scholarship the Watchtower relies on when it argues about the New Testament text. Christians did not defend a verse because it was useful. They followed the manuscripts and let it go. Then turn the question round gently. The Trinity was never built on this sentence — it was recognised and confessed for a thousand years before the words entered the Latin tradition. Ask which is the more honest position: a doctrine held on the accumulated weight of many passages, with a spurious proof-text openly discarded, or an argument that depends on Christians still using the bad verse. Compare , , .