No, They’re Not Removing Bible Verses

Astute observers of the modern-day Bible might notice that some verse numbers are skipped when reading through certain books. Some of these verses include Matthew 17:21, Matthew 18:11, John 5:4, Acts 8:37, Mark 16:9-20, and 1 John 5:7. There might be more, but these are the ones I know of. In addition, some Bible translations remove certain words or phrases. There are more of these than I could count.

Some people are tempted to immediately jump to conspiracy theories when they notice this—or, as is much more likely, when some random shmuck on the Internet tells them translators are taking out verses. I’ve heard someone theorizing that this mysterious “they” removed Matthew 17:21 (and are trying to hide the verse) so that people wouldn’t know praying and fasting allows the body to heal itself in order to force us all to rely on modern medicine. I’ve heard a lot of stupid things in my life, but that one might just be the cherry on top of my “stupid things” sundae.

So now, despite the fact that thousands before me have addressed this (including gotquestions.org) I’m going to as well. Next Sunday, I’m going to get into the text of Matthew 17:21 to explain how silly the conspiracy theory I mentioned earlier is.

The Problem of Transcription

All of the “removed” text of the Bible comes from a single common denominator: manuscripts. When translators through history have translated the Bible into local languages, they did so from the most complete and original transcripts available at the time, generally—there were some dishonest translation groups throughout the ages, but they’re hardly worth mentioning since their translations have been discredited already. As time has passed, however, researchers have discovered older, more original copies of the actual original texts of Scripture.

Generally speaking, the older a copy, the more likely it is that said text is accurate to the original document. This is logically, and empirically, the case for two reasons. The first is that, at least in regard to OT texts, Jewish scholars, historians, and leaders throughout the history of OT Israel were very diligent about keeping copies of what they considered the Law and the Prophets in good condition. When they copied the texts, they did so diligently. Their diligence and commitment to perfection in copying the words of Moses, Samuel, Elijah, etc., is one of the reasons we can be greatly confident in the state of the OT as we have it today in English. Consider that each king of Israel had a command, per Deuteronomy 17:18-19, to copy the words of the Law in the presence of the Levitical priests (who would have kept the original) and study it each day for the rest of his life.

The second is that transcription errors compound. Just like a game of telephone, if transcriptionist 1 introduces an error, that error is copied in error by transcriptionist 2 (if he does not have access to the original). Sometimes, transcriptionist 2 might notice that something seems off and attempt to correct the error of transcriptionist 1; this could either correct the error or introduce an entirely different one. Transcriptionist 4 might not be able to read the handwriting of transcriptionist 3 in one section, so he gives it his best guess but writes down a word or two wrong. Transcriptionist 17 notes a parallel passage in a related text and wonders why it isn’t in the text he’s copying, so he adds it in. Transcriptionist 30 has received, then, not the original, but something very close.

The Infallible Word of God Remains

With the Bible specifically, we have to be careful with this end conclusion because we must also consider the power of the omnipotent God who has said very clearly that He will preserve His word and that it is pure (Matthew 24:35, Proverbs 30:5). Most traditions settle on something akin to this statement: the Bible, in its original form, is flawlessly the word of God, but the translations we receive today flawlessly relate the same perfect instructions and revelation from God even if it is no longer word-for-word what God commanded His mouthpieces to write. In essence, He has ensured that 2 Timothy 3:16-17 remains true.

Old Testament Manuscripts

OT Translations typically rely on certain manuscript collections. In general, we’re most often dealing with the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the OT that completed the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) in the 3rd century BC and the history and prophecy books through the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.* The other most common manuscript is the Masoretic Text (MT). This manuscript was prepared between 500 and 1000 AD by generations of Hebrew scribes.

A third contender in the translation arena is the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). These are texts and fragments of OT Scripture from between 250 BC to 125 AD that help scholars identify whether the Septuagint or MT texts we have are more accurate to the original Hebrew texts. And I bring all of that around to point out a unique little treasure: if you find a verse that’s been “removed,” it’s probably in your footnotes.

*The OT dates in this section of this article are taken from “The World and the Word: An Introduction to the Old Testament” by Eugene H. Merrill, Mark F. Rooker, and Michael A. Grisanti.

The issues of today’s post stems from neither of these but comes from a 15th century AD translation called the Textus Receptus; the errors contained therein are numerous, and I don’t have time to detail them, so go read the GotQuestions article on the topic if you’re interested. Because of these errors, there are quite a number of translations faithful to the MT and LXX that disagree in important places with the KJV and NKJV, which were based on the Textus Receptus.

New Testament Manuscripts

**The NT dates here are taken from biblearchaeologyreport.com/2019/02/15/the-earliest-new-testament-manuscripts/.

To be clear, all of the manuscripts that I mentioned above are related only to the OT texts, but the same principles apply to transcription of NT texts, even if the issues in the OT transcriptions are exaggerated in comparison to the NT transcriptions. This actually gives us more confidence when a verse is footnoted out of the direct text because the documents we do have exist much closer in time to the originals. Moses would have written the Pentateuch around the time the events contained therein occurred. This means that our earliest copy of the texts exists roughly 1,200 years after the originals. In contrast, our first copy of John might have been transcribed within a few years of John writing the gospel book, but it was certainly no more than 100 years considering John wrote his gospel near the end of the 1st century, and our first partial copy is dated to the 2nd century.**

The Transcription Error of Matthew

To make a very long story short, as more of the Ancient Near East has been uncovered, we have found more copies of the text; many of those copies are older than the copies we have used to translate the NT into English. When these new copies are uncovered, translators issue corrections in new translations (which is often why we have different editions of the same translation). In those older copies, the words of Mark 9:29 do not exist at Matthew 17:21.

This, then, is a perfect example of the error of transcriptionist 17 I mentioned earlier. Someone noticed that Mark 9 and Matthew 17 contain the same story, but Mark had words that Matthew didn’t. So, either in an attempt to connect the two passages for personal remembrance or to fix a supposed error, a transcriptionist of Matthew copied the words of Mark 9:29 at Matthew 17:21. When modern translators discovered this was not in an older copy of Matthew, they footnoted it because it is in Mark 9. With other such verses, a parallel cannot be found anywhere; even still, translators footnote it to indicate that some manuscripts do contain the verse.

So no, at the end of the day, there is no intellectual dishonesty going on. They’re not removing verses from the Scriptures. They’re making our translations more faithful to what they were originally, which can only ever be a good thing… unless you’re a false teacher seeking to profit off of various shenanigans.