Shortly after becoming a Christian, I was participating in a Bible study at my church. As the elder was reading the passage, I noticed he was reading a verse that was missing in my Bible! If memory serves correct, it was John 5:4. As a brand-new Christian, I didn’t understand what was going on and I sort of flipped out, stopped the reading, and demanded to know why my Bible was missing a verse. Thankfully, the elder was very gracious and explained what was going on. In this article, I am going to do the same for anyone else who has noticed their Bible is missing verses and wants to know why.
Modern Bibles are missing verses because translation committees removed those verses that have been found to not be Scripture due to the discovery of older and more reliable manuscripts. Since the Bible’s versification has been fixed since the 16th-century AD, it is impossible to renumber the Bible.
I will take a developmental approach as to why most Bibles today are missing verses. I will begin with the Bibles that contain all the verses and then explain why verses began dropping out over time. Taking a developmental approach to this topic should help you, the reader, understand the topic best and give you confidence in the trustworthiness of your modern Bible.
The Bibles That Contain All the Verses
The first English Bible to contain chapter and verse divisions was the Geneva Bible in 1560. This Bible set the standard for chapter and verse divisions for all subsequent English Bibles to come. For more about who divided the Bible into its current chapter and verse divisions, click HERE for my article on that topic.
The Geneva Bible was soon replaced by the most influential English Bible in history, the King James Version (KJV), published in 1611. The King James Version used two manuscripts for its translation: the Leningrad Codex (what is commonly called the Masoretic Text [MT]) for the Old Testament and the Textus Receptus (Received Text) for the New Testament. These were the best Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the day. In its publication, the KJV adopted the universally accepted chapter and verse divisions.
The Discovery of MANY More New Testament Manuscripts
Since 1611, thousands of New Testament manuscripts have been discovered with many of them dating much earlier than the Textus Receptus. As more and more manuscripts were discovered, scholars, called Textual Critics, analysed the manuscripts by dating them, organizing them into ‘families,’ and comparing them to all previously known manuscripts, seeing where they agree and disagree. Most of the manuscripts agree most of the time, but there are minor differences. Sometimes (rarely), there are some big differences, like the inclusion of Mark 16:9–20.
As time passed, it became clear that the Textus Receptus came from a ‘family’ of manuscripts that was prone to adding to the biblical text. These additions were not malicious, but were generally to help clarify difficult readings or to synthesize similar passages or sayings. For example, John 5:2–5 says the following (notice that verse 4 is missing):
“(2) Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. (3) In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. (5) One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.”
JOHN 5:2–5
A reader of this passage may not be familiar with the pool by the Sheep Gate and may be wondering why invalids lay near it. The Textus Receptus and the manuscripts from that ‘family’ add a clarifying sentence to explain why so many invalids were laying by this pool:
“(2) Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. (3) In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed—waiting for the moving of the water; (4) for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool, and stirred the water: whoever stepped in first after the stirring of the water was healed of whatever disease he had. (5) One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.”
JOHN 5:2–5, emphasised portion is the clarifying sentence
According to the manuscript evidence, the earliest manuscripts, such as P66 (200AD), P75 (early 200sAD), Sinaiticus (א; 4th century AD), and Vaticanus (B; 4th century AD) do not include verses 3b–4 from John 5. The earliest manuscript to include verses 3b–4 is Alexandrius (A) from the 5th Century AD.
Constructing the Original Autographs
Based on the analysis of the almost 6,000 New Testament manuscripts, Textual Critics construct what they believe were the original autographs of the New Testament. Thus, when it comes to passages like John 5:2–5, Textual Critics have discovered that the overwhelming number of early manuscripts (those that are closest to the actual writing of the Gospel of John) omit John 5:3b–4. Thus, modern translation committees, which have Textual Critics on thm, have chosen to omit John 5:3b–4 from their translation because there is (a) no evidence in the earliest and best manuscripts that it was original and (b) there is a rational explanation as to why it was inserted (it helps the reader understand the passage). Thus, the translation committees of every major translation have determined that John 5:3b–4 is not the Word of God and, thus, should not be part of the Bible.
The above manuscript analysis process, called textual criticism, is done for the entire New Testament every time a Bible is translated/published, revised, or updated. The purpose of textual criticism is to determine the original autographs of the Gospels, Acts, and New Testament Letters. This is a worthy goal!
What to Do When a Verse Isn’t Part of Scripture
When a translation committee determines that a verse is not part of Scripture because it has been added, they have two choices: (1) change the verses in the Bible so there are no gaps or (2) leave the verses the same and simply omit a verse number here and there. All versions have chosen the latter option for a number of reasons. First, it would cause chaos for there to be Bibles with different versification (different chapter and verse numbers), especially since the KJV is still the best-selling English Bible. Can you imagine your pastor saying, please open your Bibles to John 5:5 and half the congregation has verse 5 say one thing and the other half have it say another? Not to mention the trickle effect. All the verse numbers would be ‘off’ throughout the Gospel of John if you made John 5:5 as John 5:4 in a modern version.
Second, it is easy to add the extra verse in a footnote so that the reader knows what is happening. Almost all major versions do this today. Thus, there is a simple way of communicating why there is a missing verse while maintaining the traditional versification.
Third, if the passage is too long to go into a footnote, like Mark 16:9–20 or John 7:53–8:11, the modern English Bible can put it in brackets explaining that this is not part of the original text, but has been incorporated in some earlier English Bibles. This is what most modern Bibles do.
Which Verses Are Missing from the Bible?
The following is a list of all the missing verses in modern translations of the Bible (all these verses are present in the KJV and NKJV):
- Matt 17:21
- Matt 18:11
- Matt 23:14
- Mark 7:16
- Mark 9:44
- Mark 9:46
- Mark 11:26
- Mark 15:28
- Mark 16:9–20 (note the brackets and footnote)
- Luke 17:36
- John 5:3b–4
- John 7:53–8:11 (note the brackets and footnote)
- Acts 8:37
- Acts 15:34
- Acts 24:6b–8a
- Acts 28:29
- Rom 16:24
What about the Old Testament?
Did you notice that all the missing verses are from the New Testament and none are from the Old Testament? There is a simply reason for this. All English Bibles from the 1611 KJV to the most recent updated NIV and NET use the same one manuscript for the Old Testament: the Leningrad Codex, which is preserved in the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS).
Further, although the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) were first discovered in 1947, it has taken decades to analyse them and most of them have not made it into the Old Testament translations of the Bible. As such, a new edition of the Hebrew Bible is currently being created that takes into account the DSS. That edition will be called the Biblia Hebraica Quinta(BHQ) and will hopefully be released by 2030 (some books of the Bible are complete and may now be purchased separately). In short, there haven’t been any discoveries that have called into question the verses of the Old Testament.
Summary and Concluding Thoughts
After discussing this topic with some Christians, the question is sometimes asked of me, “can we trust that we have the entire Word of God?” The answer is “yes!” As you may have picked up from this article, the problem is not that we don’t have all of God’s word. The problem is that we have 102% of God’s Word. What textual criticism does is sift away the 2% of text that has been added to the Bible that is not original and, thus, not the word of God, so that we are left with 100%. Again, we have 100% of God’s word; the problem is that it has been added to every now and then (not maliciously) and we are trying to discover and remove that unwanted 2%.
The KJV was and is a great Bible based upon the best manuscripts of that day. However, 400 years have passed since its publication and thousands of manuscripts have been found since then, many of them older and better than the manuscripts the King James Bible used. Thus, in my opinion, the KJV is outdated.
Finally, the additions that have been removed do not change doctrine or the meaning of the text in any substantial way. I encourage you to read them yourself. Many of the additions were quite helpful and can be used in study. They just shouldn’t be put on the same level as the inspired Word of God, because they are not.
If the topic of textual criticism interests you, here are two books that you may want to check out:
Paul D. Wegner, A Student’s Guide to Textual Criticism of the Bible.
Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (this is for those who have a Greek Bible).