The “Case” of the Three Witnesses
December 19, 2004
Dear Friends,
In a recent exhortation, a brother made the excellent analogy between Bible study and detective work. While a detective looks at a crime scene for clues and evidence, we examine the Scriptures looking for clues to the appropriate interpretation. If you are like me, you have a list of “unsolved” verses or passages. These are passages which you have studied, but have not reached a conclusion on its exact significance. It remains an open “case” to hopefully be solved at a later date.
One of these solved cases is the case of the three witnesses of John 5. The seventh and eighth verses of the chapter say “there are three witnesses, the Spirit, water and blood .” (v. 5, New Jerusalem Bible) This passage has befuddled many. Plummer says “This is the most perplexing passage in the Epistle, and one of the most perplexing in the New Testament.”
Our “case” begins with a question? “Who can overcome the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” As we progress through the narrative, we will see that the implied answer to this rhetorical question is “no one.” This answer is stated in other passages of Scripture. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” (John 17:3) “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (Mark 16:15,16) If we had no idea what the verses following 1 John 1:5 said, we might venture an educated guess that they has something to do with believing that Jesus was the Son of God. Let’s see if the verses take us in this direction.
The next verse reads “He it is who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with water alone but with water and blood, and it is the Spirit that bears witness, for the Spirit is Truth.” Water and blood bring to mind two echoes from Scripture. The first is “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance; and immediately there came out blood and water. This is the evidence of one who saw it, true evidence, and he knows that what he says is true, and he gives it so that you may believe as well.” (John 19:34-35) The second echo is to the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus. At this point, we don’t have enough evidence to suggest how these fit into the case, so we proceed leaving them open.
The next verse presents a problem in our case. There are several significantly different translations. There are not problems that can be resolved with a Strong’s Concordance. The King James is nearly unique in its rendering of this verse. Most render the verse something like “So there are three witnesses.” The King James reads “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” Harry Whittaker in his book Seven Short Epistles writes “Out of more than 180 Greek Manuscripts and 50 early lectionaries, the words are found in only two…No ancient version of the Latin Vulgate has this verse…Its earliest occurrence as part of the epistle is in the documents attributed to Vigilius of Thapsus about A.D. 490, and after that it seems to have spread to all later copies of the Vulgate.” Similar thoughts are confirmed by most modern Biblical scholarship. So if we exclude the KJV rendering and stick to something akin to the New Jerusalem Bible, we have to ask ourselves WHO or WHAT are the three witnesses. Based on what we have read so far, the only three that we have in context are the spirit, water and the blood of the previous verse.
So we will have to wait to solve our puzzle until next week, but let us quickly summarize what we have so far.
We suspect that the passage has something to do with believing that Jesus is the Son of God but this is unconfirmed. We also suspect that the three witnesses are the spirit, water and blood, but we don’t know what that means yet. We’ll resume the case next week, Lord willing.
Have a great week!
