My wife Robin came home from a Christian speakers conference yesterday and told me about a discussion they had. John 5 was the passage under discussion, and when they arrived at v 4, to their surprise it wasn’t there. I guess it caused quite a stir. Someone found it in the NASB, but no where else. (I guess no one had the KJV).
This happens in several occasions in the Bible. There are even verse references “missing” in the KJV. What is going on? Well, either someone left the verse out, or somewhere along the line someone added a verse in. But who ever assigned the verse references, he had v 4.
This is a pretty big issue, and a simple blog can’t do it justice. It can also degenerate into a pretty ugly discussion; many of the people involved in the discussion don’t know much Greek (if any), and in the worst case scenarios the discussion is reduced to a matter of salvation. “If you don’t believe what I believe about the text of the Bible, you aren’t a Christian.” Let’s see if we can steer clear of this type of ungodliness.
This is the basic question of the Greek text, and the technical name for it is “text criticism.” (I am going to stick with the Greek Testament, not the Hebrew.) Here is the basic reconstruction.
1. The writers wrote their gospels and epistles and sent them to their churches.
2. These documents were copied so they could be shared. In the process of copying, changes were introduced. (By the way, this is not academic conjecture; we have these different manuscripts and can see the differences for themselves.)
Some changes were accidental but others appeared to be intentional, but not always for nefarious reasons. It is often to add an explanation, or substitute an easier word to understand, or to harmonize the gospels etc.
In John 5:4, most believe that a scribe (the person doing the copying) thought it was puzzling why the man would lie there for 38 years. Perhaps he knew a tradition that said the angel periodically came down to stir up the waters and the first person in was healed, and so he added in the verse. (Others would argue that for some reason the verse was dropped off.)
3. As time progressed (and as we can tell from archaeology), biblical manuscripts were collected in five different geographical areas. Since the center of the church was in Rome, this area had the greatest number of copies.
4. Erasmus (1500’s) created a Greek text based on two manuscripts from the 12th century (Matthew through Jude) and another 12th century manuscript for all but the last 6 verses of Revelation. He went from the Latin back into Greek to get those last 6. His work became the basis of the King James translation.
5. 150 years ago we started digging up new manuscripts that were in fact must older (by centuries). They came from a different geographical area than the majority of the texts we currently had, and they were different in places. For example, they did not have John 5:4.
And so the science of textual criticism was born, which is the science of determining which of the different “readings” is most likely original.
The general preference is to see scribes as adding verses, not removing them. For that reason, and others, most feel that John 5:4 was added after the fact; there is no good reason why it would have been omitted.
But God in his sovereign love made sure that the differences among the manuscripts would not hinder our faith.
- About 5% of the Greek text is in question
- No major doctrine is brought into question by 5%.
You can trust your Bible!
Comments
There have been many more
There have been many more trustworthy (and older mss found since the KJV was written. Most never translations use the Westcott-Hort Greek texts, which are much older, but some claim they have Gnostic teaching in them.
I also checked my copies of the Aramaic versions (which some claim to pre-date the Greek). The Etheridge and Murdock Peshitta translations into English have John 5:4 but those MAY have been translations of the later Greek. It seems to be adding a heretical teaching that is not mentioned anywhere else in scripture, so deciding to make it a footnote does not seem to hamper one's salvation.
A fellow sojourner
I echoed this sentiment to
I echoed this sentiment to someone who said that John 7:53 - 8:11 was added to the bible long after the initial gospel was written. He replied,
"seems like a rather cavalier attitude to take with regard to man pretending that words came from the mouth of god, particularly when you don't have any of the original source documents to know how many of these changes have been inserted that you don't know about."
He also said that two ways this is typically dealt with is to say that (1) later insertions were inspired by God, or that (2) there is some basis for knowing the other 95% of the Bible is rock solid.
I'm no biblical scholar and don't know what to say to this. What's your response? Thanks :-)
The answer is that there are
The answer is that there are many good reasons for a rock solid confidence that 99% (not 95%) is the same as the original, and those few places where we are not sure never impinge on any issue of relative significance. Doubts are on how to spell a few names, or whether the article is present. One thing that is interesting is that this confidence in the text is shared by people of many theological positions; our confidence cuts across conservative/liberal lines, across denominational lines, etc. But we know that we can't use the doctrine of inspiration for the copies of the manuscripts because we can physically see where they are different.
Two clarifications should be
Two clarifications should be made to this post’s explanation. The division of books and chapters of the Bible into verses is, first of all, an invention of the medieval university, probably of the University of Paris (see Beryl Smalley’s classic on the subject, viz., The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages). The close analysis of biblical texts that theology students in the West engaged in during the Middle Ages required the development of this kind of precise referential apparatus. The Bible these students used was, of course, the Bible translated into Latin, usually a version of the Vulgate. The Bible they divided into verses, therefore, was the Latin Bible; and this division of the Latin text then became the standard division of the Bible regardless of language. The question of missing or added verses in the Bible is, therefore, most immediately a question pertaining to manuscripts of the Latin Bible, and not “a basic question of the Greek text,” as the post argues. The question does, of course, ultimately refer to the Greek, since the Greek text is the basis of the Latin text of the New Testament, but it does so only to a limited extent in respect to extant versions of the Greek New Testament; for the Greek text or, rather, texts the translators of the old Latin Bible and Vulgate used are not the same texts as those still existing today. These translators based their work on a number of Greek manuscripts that are no longer extant, even in later copies, as well as on some that are still preserved.
The modern science of textual criticism may, in the second place, have developed within the last 150 years, but the practice of comparing manuscript variants to determine the best reading of a text is quite old. Origen engaged in this practice in the middle of the third century A.D. using his Hexapla; and St. Jerome did so again in the late fourth and early fifth centuries A.D. when translating for the Vulgate.
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