Three Famous Textual Variants: Mark’s Ending, the Adulteress, and the Comma Johanneum

What Does a Textual Variant Actually Mean?

New Testament writings were copied by hand for centuries. Copyists therefore left thousands of differences, ranging from spelling and word order to omitted lines, harmonization with parallel Gospels, and a much smaller number of substantial additions. The existence of variants is not itself surprising; what matters is what kind of variants they are, when they appear, and how they are distributed among witnesses.

Textual critics therefore do not simply count manuscripts. Hundreds of late copies may descend from a common ancestor, while a single early or genealogically independent witness can carry greater explanatory weight. In addition to Greek manuscripts, ancient versions—Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and others—and quotations by early Christian writers matter. Internal evidence matters too: which reading best explains the rise of the other, what language an author normally uses, and what a copyist would more plausibly alter.

For that reason, earliest attainable text is not exactly the same expression as “the original.” Eldon Jay Epp emphasized that even the category of an original text can be multivalent for works produced and copied in antiquity. This article therefore limits its claims to what the evidence can actually support: whether a reading belongs to the earliest reconstructed form of a particular book, and how early the reading can otherwise be shown to have existed.

The Ending of Mark: Why 16:8 Remains the Starting Point

Mark 16:1–8 narrates the women at the empty tomb, the young man in white, the promise of a meeting in Galilee, and flight in fear. Its final Greek words are grammatically and narratively abrupt: the women say nothing to anyone, “for they were afraid.” That is why the ending has long generated debate: did Mark intend to end there, or was an original ending lost?

The textual-critical question is narrower than the question of authorial intention. Writing in connection with the Editio Critica Maior for Mark, H. A. G. Houghton summarizes the present editorial consensus: the earliest attainable form of Mark ends at 16:8. The fourth-century Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus end there, and the same early form is supported by ancient versions and patristic testimony.

That does not prove that Mark personally intended to place his final full stop at 16:8. A lost ending remains a possible hypothesis, as does a literary reading of an intentionally open ending. What can be said with greater confidence is more modest: Mark 16:9–20 does not belong to the earliest attainable textual form of the Gospel.

The Longer Ending Is Secondary — but Very Early

Mark 16:9–20 is not a random marginal remark. It summarizes appearances to Mary Magdalene, two disciples, and the eleven; it adds a commission, signs accompanying believers, and Jesus’ ascension. On the basis of its literary relationships with other Gospel traditions, James Kelhoffer has argued that this conclusion was appended in the first half of the second century.

External evidence shows how early it had already been received. Near the end of the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons explicitly introduces a quotation in Against Heresies by saying that Mark “towards the conclusion of his Gospel” says that Jesus was taken up into heaven and sat at God’s right hand—the wording of Mark 16:19. The Longer Ending is therefore demonstrably much older than the medieval manuscripts in which it later becomes widespread.

The crucial distinction is between age and originality. A passage can be early Christian, influential, and copied for centuries without belonging to the earliest form of Mark. The existence of still other endings and combinations of endings further suggests that ancient readers and scribes experienced the abrupt close at 16:8 as something that could be supplemented.

The Adulteress: A Famous Story in an Unstable Location

The story of “let the one without sin cast the first stone” in John 7:53–8:11 is now one of the most recognizable episodes about Jesus. Yet major early Greek witnesses—including Papyrus 66, Papyrus 75, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Vaticanus—move from John 7:52 onward without the episode. The earliest surviving Greek manuscript of John to include it in the familiar location is the fifth-century Codex Bezae.

More unusual still is its mobility. In later manuscripts it can appear after John 7:36, after John 7:44, at the end of John, after Luke 21:38, at the end of Luke, or as an independent unit. Such unstable placement is difficult to reconcile with the idea that the twelve verses occupied a fixed position between John 7 and 8 from the beginning.

Jennifer Knust and Tommy Wasserman therefore summarize the prevailing judgment that the pericope was not part of the earliest form of the Gospel of John. At the same time, their detailed transmission history shows why it is inadequate to describe it as a simple “medieval addition”: the story is present much earlier in the Latin West and other early traditions, with a complex history before its later dominant placement in John.

Can the Story Be Ancient If It Was Not Originally in John?

Yes—and this is precisely where textual criticism often collides with a false binary. Saying “John did not originally contain this” answers a question about the textual history of the Gospel. It does not automatically answer when the story arose, what tradition it came from, or whether it preserves a historical memory of Jesus.

On the basis of scattered early evidence, Knust and Wasserman argue that the story was probably interpolated into a Greek copy of John in the West during the first half of the third century and then gradually integrated into Greek and Latin textual, liturgical, and artistic traditions. Their reconstruction also does not support the popular idea that the story was systematically removed from the earliest Gospels because Jesus’ leniency toward the adulteress was thought morally dangerous.

Two conclusions can therefore be held together: the pericope is secondary in John, while the story itself is ancient and may have circulated independently. Whether it preserves an actual event from Jesus’ life is a separate historical question that manuscript placement alone cannot settle.

The Comma Johanneum: From Latin Interpretation to Greek Print

The third case is text-critically the clearest. In the shorter Greek form of 1 John 5:7–8, the witnesses are “the Spirit, the water, and the blood.” The later long form adds heavenly witnesses—the “Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit”—and states that these three are one. Because of its explicit Trinitarian language, this addition acquired enormous theological weight in Latin Christianity.

In his survey of the early Latin New Testament, H. A. G. Houghton concludes that the addition most likely developed within the Latin tradition, perhaps as an explanatory gloss near the end of the fourth century. An early form is associated with Priscillian and other Latin witnesses. The Greek form known from the Textus Receptus, Houghton notes, reflects a translation of a secondary Latin form back into Greek.

The Greek manuscript evidence is also completely different from the situation with Mark’s ending. Known Greek manuscripts containing the Comma are very late; the earliest known inclusion in a Greek manuscript dates to the fourteenth century, while several others are even later or marginal and show Latin or printed influence. Juan Hernández therefore summarizes the standard textual-critical judgment: as part of the earliest text of 1 John, the Comma is secondary or spurious, regardless of its later theological reception.

Erasmus Without the “Promise” Legend

The history of the Comma is often compressed into a dramatic anecdote: Erasmus supposedly omitted it from his first two Greek editions, then promised to add it if anyone could produce a single Greek manuscript; opponents allegedly had a codex made and forced him to restore the verse. The first part—the omission in 1516 and 1519 and inclusion in the third edition of 1522—is historically secure. The explicit “promise,” however, is not.

Henk Jan de Jonge showed that Erasmus’ surviving writings contain no evidence for such a contractual promise. Erasmus did write that he would have used the longer form had he possessed a Greek manuscript containing it; that is not the same as publicly promising critics that he would restore it if they produced one. Grantley McDonald further shows that the controversy belonged to a wider conflict between philological assessment of Greek sources and the theological authority of the Latin Vulgate.

When he included the Comma in 1522, Erasmus knew a Greek codex from England, now Codex Montfortianus (GA 61), although he had doubts about its textual value. Nor did the Comma originate with Erasmus: the Latin tradition is centuries older, and the Complutensian Polyglot had independently printed it in Greek. Erasmus matters chiefly because his printed textual tradition helped the Comma enter the later Textus Receptus and, through it, translations such as the King James Version.

The Three Variants Side by Side

Calling all three cases simply “additions” obscures their most important differences. Mark’s Longer Ending has an exceptionally early reception, the adulteress has an early but locationally unstable narrative history, and the Comma has a predominantly Latin genealogy with very late Greek manuscript support. The type and degree of uncertainty are therefore not the same.

Why Modern Editions Bracket, Relocate, or Omit

Critical Greek editions were not produced by editors taking one ancient Bible and deleting unwanted lines. They compare a large body of manuscript, versional, and patristic evidence, print a reconstruction of the earliest attainable text in the main text, and document alternatives in the apparatus. That is why a passage may remain visible in a modern translation while being marked with brackets, a rule, or a note.

Because of their age, diffusion, and long ecclesial reception, Mark 16:9–20 and John 7:53–8:11 often receive special editorial treatment: modern Bibles may retain them in the flow of the page while explaining that the earliest and most important witnesses do not contain them in the same form or location. The Comma Johanneum has a far weaker Greek history, so modern critical Greek editions do not print it as part of the main text of 1 John 5; it survives as a documented historical variant.

Differences among translations therefore do not necessarily signal different “Bibles” in the sense of hidden evidence. Often the difference is editorial: whether to preserve a passage known for centuries with a warning, move it to a note, or follow only the critical main text. The key measure of transparency is that readers can see what is disputed and why.

What These Cases Show — and What They Do Not

The first conclusion is positive: the manuscript tradition is not mechanically uniform. Scribes, editors, and communities copied, corrected, harmonized, interpreted, and in some cases expanded texts. These three passages are especially visible because they are large and theologically significant, not because every page of the New Testament is equally unstable.

The second conclusion matters just as much: secondary does not mean worthless. Mark’s Longer Ending is an important source for the history of second-century Christianity. The adulteress pericope shaped theology of mercy, liturgy, law, art, and cultural memory. The Comma Johanneum is a major case study in the relationship between manuscripts, the Vulgate, Reformation print culture, and Trinitarian controversy. All three have histories even if they are not equally early within their present books.

But these cases do not imply that “we do not know what the New Testament said.” The reason the variants can be described so precisely is that many witnesses survive and their relationships can be compared. Nor can textual criticism by itself determine whether Jesus historically spoke a particular saying, whether Christian doctrine is true, or which canonical practice should be normative. Those are different questions requiring different criteria.

A Text Has a History

The article therefore looks for no sensation in saying that “verses were missing,” nor does it try to explain every difference away as an insignificant scribal slip. These three cases show something more interesting: a sacred text has literary, manuscript, and reception histories at the same time. Sometimes those layers overlap almost completely; sometimes they separate.

In Mark, a later ending is so early that it became the ordinary ending of Mark already in antiquity. In the adulteress pericope, a story entered John early and convincingly enough to become one of the most famous Gospel episodes, even though its location remained unstable for a long time. In the Comma, a theologically powerful Latin interpretation moved through print culture and shaped what millions of later readers encountered as 1 John 5:7–8.

If a passage can be ancient, canonically read for centuries, and theologically significant while still being secondary to the earliest attainable form of a book, what exactly do we mean by “the biblical text”: the earliest reconstructed authorial layer, the text received by a particular ecclesial tradition, or the whole documented history of both? And how should modern readers hold those layers together without confusing them?