His Holiness Pope Shenouda III presents a textual-critical issue concerning 1 John 5:7-8 and explains why some editions note in a margin that the verse is “absent in some manuscripts.”

Textual explanation and verification:
His Holiness clarifies that the cause may be a scribe’s oversight due to the similarity of the two sentence constructions: (those who testify in heaven…) and (those who testify on earth…), and a line may be omitted during copying because the line beginnings are similar, causing an entire clause to be lost from the manuscript.

Parallel biblical evidence:
He points out that Trinitarian ideas appear in other forms in the Bible (such as Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:14, and John 10:30) and that different expressions bring the three persons together in many places, which lessens the problem of a single line deletion regarding belief in the Trinity.

Educational dimension:
His Holiness teaches that textual criticism is scientific and natural, and that differences in manuscript copies do not imply a defect in doctrine if the doctrinal matters are supported by other reliable texts within the canonical tradition.

Spiritual and ecclesial dimension:
From the Coptic Orthodox perspective, he reassures that the substance of doctrine is not tied to a single verse as much as it rests on the whole word of Scripture and the apostolic tradition, urging preservation of faith and reliance on the corpus of scriptural and traditional witnesses.

Practical recommendation:
He calls for reading Scripture with a Christian critical awareness, respecting the work of scribes and manuscripts, while not allowing minor manuscript variants to provoke doctrinal anxiety since they can be explained scientifically and logically.

Brief conclusion:
The matter is essentially a scholarly issue in the copying of the book, and solutions are available through comparison of textual witnesses and understanding the context of faith; therefore, manuscript variations should not be used to weaken confidence in the core of Christian doctrine.

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