What the King James prints. "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." (1 John 5:7, KJV).
What the others print at the same reference. "For there are three that testify:" (1 John 5:7, BSB). "And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth." (1 John 5:7, ASV), the American Standard's numbering falls differently here, so its verse 7 carries what other versions place at the end of verse 6. The Literal Standard Version prints the heavenly-witnesses words but encloses them in double brackets.
What a named reference work says. The translations reference records that these words "appear in the King James but [are] absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts, so modern versions drop [them] to a note", and that the King James rests on the Textus Receptus, the Greek text assembled by Erasmus in 1516 from a small number of late-medieval manuscripts, while most modern versions rest on a critical text weighing all the surviving evidence including the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus.
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The positions, with no winner picked. That same synthesis lays out three: a King-James-Only position, that the Textus Receptus is the true text and modern editions remove verses; the position of most textual scholars, Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, that weighing the older evidence brings us closer to the original and that no doctrine changes either way; and the Eastern Orthodox position, whose authorised New Testament is the Patriarchal Text of 1904, edited from Byzantine manuscripts actually used in worship, close to the tradition behind the King James, but on a churchly rather than a King-James-Only argument.
Sources: 1 John 5:7 (KJV, BSB, ASV, LSV); the translations reference on which manuscripts sit behind each Bible.
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