1 John 5:7--Added to the Greek Text (J.E. McDermond)

Finally, the famous textual issue in 5:7 merits attention. As mentioned in the Preview, the KJV reads, 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…. These words are found in many Latin Vulgate manuscripts and a few late Greek manuscripts, dating mostly from after AD 1400. Textual experts generally agree that these words first found their way into the Latin texts in or around the fourth century. The Johannine Comma, as these words have come to be known, “is quoted by none of the Greek Fathers…. Its first appearance in Greek is in a Greek version of the (Latin) Acts of the Lateran Council in 1215” (Metzger: 717). It appears in four late Greek manuscripts, which were translated from “a late recension of the Latin Vulgate”: manuscripts 61 (16th c.), 88 (12th c.), 629 (14th or 15th c.), and 635 (11th c.), “which has the passage written in the margin by a seventeenth-century hand” (716-17). The Comma does not appear in any Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic, or Slavonic NT translations before AD 1500. Copyists, aware of the Vulgate version, likely added these words to the later Greek manuscripts that then were frequently reproduced and used for the KJV. Because of the lack of support from the earliest and most reliable Greek manuscripts, modern translators omit these words [The Johannine Comma, p. 309]

See J.E. McDermond, 1, 2, 3 John, Believers Church Bible Commentary, page 399 of the electronic edition.