Why Does My Bible Say 'Some Manuscripts Do Not Include This Verse'?

You are reading along in Mark, and at the end of the chapter the type changes, or a bracket appears, or a small note at the bottom of the page says that the earliest manuscripts do not contain verses 9 through 20. Or you go looking for Acts 8:37 and find that your Bible has skipped from 36 to 38 without apology.

The reaction is almost always the same, and it is not unreasonable: what else has been taken out, and who decided?

The short answer is that nothing was taken out. Something was added, centuries ago, and your translators are telling you about it instead of hiding it.

What you are actually looking at

Nobody has the original sheets Paul wrote on. They were papyrus; they wore out. What we have instead are copies—and then copies of copies—made by hand for roughly fourteen centuries before printing.

Hand-copying introduces differences. A scribe’s eye jumps a line. A word gets spelled the shorter way. A note somebody wrote in the margin gets read as text by the next copyist and moves into the paragraph. This is what happens to every hand-copied document in history, without any conspiracy required.

What makes the New Testament unusual is not that it has these differences. It is how much evidence we have for finding them. There are well over five thousand Greek manuscripts, plus early translations into Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, plus thousands of quotations in the early Church Fathers—some of it within a couple of generations of the writing itself. Most ancient works survive in a handful of copies made a thousand years after the fact, and nobody puts footnotes in those, because there is nothing to compare.

So the footnotes exist because we are rich, not because we are poor. A book with one surviving copy has no variants. It also has no way of checking itself.

What the differences actually are

The overwhelming majority are invisible in English: spelling, word order, whether the text says “Jesus,” “the Lord,” or “Jesus Christ.” Greek can rearrange a sentence without changing the meaning, and scribes did.

A much smaller group affects the sense of a sentence. A very small group affects a whole passage, and those are the ones your Bible flags. The famous ones are worth knowing by name, because once you know them, the footnotes stop being ominous:

• Mark 16:9–20. The oldest manuscripts end at verse 8. The longer ending is early and was widely used, but it is almost certainly not from Mark’s hand.
• John 7:53–8:11, the woman caught in adultery. A genuinely old story that floats—it appears in different places in different manuscripts, which is a strong sign it entered the text from outside rather than sitting where John put it.
• 1 John 5:7. The explicitly Trinitarian sentence in the King James is not in any Greek manuscript before the late Middle Ages. It came in through the Latin.
• Acts 8:37, the eunuch’s confession, and the closing doxology of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13—both very early liturgical material, both later additions to the text.

Notice what that list does not contain. Not one article of the Christian faith stands or falls on any of it. The Trinity is taught throughout Scripture without 1 John 5:7; the resurrection is in all four Gospels and 1 Corinthians 15 whether or not Mark’s longer ending is original; baptism is not endangered by Acts 8:37. There is no reading anywhere in the manuscript tradition that, if adopted, would change what the Church confesses.

Why your Bible differs from your grandmother’s

This is usually the live question underneath the first one.

The King James New Testament rests on a printed Greek text assembled in the sixteenth century from a small number of late medieval manuscripts—what was available in Europe at the time. It was good work with thin materials. Since then we have found vastly older evidence, including papyri from the second and third centuries that nobody in 1611 could have consulted.

So the modern translations are not subtracting from the King James. They are working from a wider and older body of witnesses, and where those witnesses show that a verse entered the text later, they say so in the margin instead of quietly dropping it. That marginal note is the translator refusing to make the decision for you.

Where certainty actually rests

It is tempting to think that faith would be safer if there were no footnotes—if a sealed book had dropped from the sky and no human hand had ever touched it.

But that is not how God has ever worked. He puts his Word in ordinary things and delivers it through ordinary means: ink, parchment, tired scribes, translators, a preacher’s voice on Sunday morning. The same God who was willing to be born in a barn was willing to have his Word copied by hand.

And your assurance was never resting on your personal command of the manuscript evidence. Almost no Christian in history could read the originals; most could not read at all. Faith comes by hearing, and what they heard was enough, because the power is in the Word itself and not in the reader’s expertise. “The grass dries up, the flowers wither, but the decree of our God is forever reliable” (Isaiah 40:8, NET).

Bottom line: the footnote means your translators are being honest with you about a text we can examine more closely than any other document from the ancient world. The variants are real, the disputed passages are few, no doctrine hangs on any of them, and the Bible you are holding is the same Word the Church has always been given—now with the working shown.