There has been a concerted millennia old effort by what I call the Jesus-is-God Movement to misuse the writings of John.

This has led to the discovery of widespread mistranslations and, even worse, corruptions to the inspired Biblical text itself!

Some corruptions have been well-known since Reformation days.

For example, the classic so-called Johannine Comma of 1 John 5:7-8 found by the noted Catholic and Dutch humanist Erasmus in the 1500s.

So the only verse in the entire Bible believed to explicitly teach the doctrine of the Trinity is a flat out forgery, i.e., a counterfeit!

A similar corruption involves the classic non-trini claim found in John 17:3.

Some of the early so-called “Church Fathers” like Augustine, Aquinas, Ambrose and several others changed the meaning of the text. From:

You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.

To:

You [i.e., the Father] and Jesus Christ…as the only true God.

This is such a twisting of scripture that even some noted Protestant scholars like the German scholar Heinrich Meyer (of the famous Meyer’s NT Commentary) called it “a perversion of the passage, and running counter to the strict monotheism of John.”

And that was because he said:

“Only One, the Father, can absolutely be termed the only true God [and] not at the same time Christ (who is not even in 1 John 5:20 the only true God).”

Less well-known, but nonetheless shocking attempts at corruption are further detailed in Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (written in the early 1990s when Ehrman was still a self-professed fundamentalist Christian!).

Other recommended reading:

• Orthodoxy and Heresy by the noted German scholar Walter Bauer, called the grandfather of textual criticism;
• Philosophy of the Church Fathers by Harvard scholar, philosopher, historian and the first chairman of a Judaic Studies Center Dr. Wolfson.