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Are They Taking Verses Out of the Bible?
I recently received an email with the subject line, “ALERT! Tell Your Church!” This is the content of the warning:
This was seen on Facebook and I wondered if it was true until I checked for some of the following verses. Apparently there is a crusade to alter the Bible as we have known it. The NIV [formerly published by Zondervan but since 1988 is owned and published by Harper Collins, who curiously also publishes the "Satanic Bible"], ESV and many more versions are affected. Many verses/words are no longer in the electronic version of our Bibles and as you know most of us have the Bible on our devices and phones especially. All these changes occur when they ask you to update the app on your phone or laptop etc.
The email then goes on to list some of the missing verses and suggests keeping a hard copy of the Bible to preserve the inspired text. We’ll come to verses and to that recommendation in a moment. First, I want us to consider the framing of this message. “There is a crusade to alter the Bible.” The NIV “is owned and published by Harper Collins, who curiously also publishes the ‘Satanic Bible.’” Let us acknowledge that the Adversary would love for the Word to be perverted—and that he often succeeds in doing so in the hearts of men, through false teaching. The question before us is whether Harper Collins and other Bible publishers are systematically removing verses from our Bibles in service to the Adversary, were it not for the keen work of some intrepid Facebook users. It is the kind of accusation that should bring to mind the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy.” In other words, we must discern the truth of the matter before believing such accusations.
That brings us to the verses in question. The complete list given in the email is as follows: Matthew 17:21, 18:11, 23:14; Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46; Luke 17:36, 23:17; John 5:4; Acts 8:37. It would be worth your while to check your favorite Bible or Bible app for one or all of those verses. Let me tell you what you might find. If you are using one of our venerable English translations, such as the King James Version or the 1599 Geneva Bible, you will find all of those verses printed in the text like you would expect. If you are using something else—ASV, NASB, ESV, NIV, NLT, RSV, and many others—you could find all kinds of things.
The most common circumstance is that your Bible will have a margin note that tells you that “some manuscripts insert verse X after verse Y,” and then they’ll give you the verse in the margin note. Some of those Bibles will also tell you that the verse in question is not found in the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament, which is true.
There are two less common circumstances. I have a copy of the NASB, for example, that includes the verses in the text but surrounds the verses in brackets and includes the kind of margin note I described a moment ago. This is, in my opinion, the clearest way to handle the issue (we will come to what the issue is momentarily). On the other end of the spectrum, I have two readers’ Bibles (Bibles without verse numbers or margin notes) that omit the verses with no indication at all that anything has happened—no brackets, no margin notes, nothing. Because readers’ Bibles lack verse numbers, you probably won’t even know that anything has happened. This is the worst way to handle the verses in question.
Those are all hard copy Bibles. Let us consider the electronic Bibles that the email warned about. I have looked at these verses in the two most visited Bible websites on the Internet, Bible Gateway and Bible Hub. As far as I can tell, Bible Hub always includes notes; there is no option to turn them off. The translations that I consulted in Bible Hub include the notes. Bible Gateway gives you the option to turn off notes; if you are missing verses and can’t find them in Bible Gateway, simply make sure that you have notes turned on. Otherwise, it is identical to Bible Hub in the way that it includes the verses in question in the notes. It is important that you tell the software to bring up the verse before the verse in question; for example, pull up Acts 8.36 to see the footnote about Acts 8.37. If you search for “Acts 8.37,” the system will return no results, because a computer’s not smart enough to check in the footnotes for a verse entry; it will simply look for an entry labeled “Acts 8.37” and fail to find it. This kind of user error probably explains upwards of ninety-nine percent of the times that people “discover” that “they’re taking verses out of the Bible” on the Internet.
At this point, we can safely say that the email’s chief accusation, that Bible publishers are sneakily omitting verses from electronic Bibles and that you can only find them in print Bibles, is false. The idea that software developers are “patching” these verses out with software updates is particularly bizarre. If your electronic Bible has notes, the “missing” verses are going to be included in the notes. The greatest risk, such as it is, actually comes from hard copy readers’ Bibles, not from electronic Bibles.
That brings us to the core issue: why are these verses being relegated to margin notes to begin with? Isn’t that taking away from the Word of God?
We are here alluding to John’s warning in Revelation 22.18-19: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” John is of course referring to the Book of Revelation and not to the entire Bible, but we understand the warning to hold true for the entire Bible. The Bible frequently speaks of its inspired and sufficient nature. To take away from it would be a grievous sin. The thing is, to add to it is also a grievous sin.
Consider for a moment that you are very likely comfortable with whole books having been “taken out” of the Bible. I am referring to the so-called “apocrypha,” many of which are held to be canonical by the Roman Catholic Church. This includes Judith, Tobit, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Sirach, and others. When the later English Reformers started printing Bibles without these books (the first King James Bibles included these books, by the way), were they guilty of taking away from the Word of God? We would say, of course not. They were merely removing books that had no business being in the Bible to begin with.
That is the issue with the verses listed in the email. Their status as Scripture is questionable, because, as all of those margin notes tell you, they are not present in the oldest Greek manuscripts that we have. They are present in the later manuscripts that the early English translators had access to, which is why they are in our earliest English translations.
So why not remove them altogether as we have the apocrypha? If they were added, why even include them in a margin note? They are included because their authenticity is still a matter of debate. Although some might consider the earliest Greek manuscripts to be better witnesses to the original text of the New Testament, the later Greek manuscripts (the ones including the verses in question) make up the majority of the manuscripts that we have. We’re left with the question, “What’s the best reading of the text: the one with the oldest witnesses, or the one with the most witnesses?” Most modern scholars think that the oldest reading is best but are not sure enough to remove the majority reading altogether. That leaves us with a handful of verses in the New Testament relegated to margin notes.
The fact that these verses are where they are, in the margin notes, tells us that the email’s suspicion about the character of the publishers is also false. The translators of our modern English Bibles have marked these verses out because they may be additions; they have left them in the margins because they are not one hundred percent certain. In short, they are taking the best approach that they can think of in good faith. There is no cabal plotting to sneak verses out of the Bible.
We must be on our guard against false teaching and against perversions of the Word of God, but we must also be on our guard against baseless conspiracies that seek to shake our trust in the English translations that we have today.
