The Case of the Missing Verses

So this is the story where. Where Jesus says, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Is that. Am I on the right story here?

You are on the right story.

That’s one of the best stories in the book. You’re telling me that that’s not real? Oh, man, that’s. That stays in my version.

Well, that’s one of the reasons that so many people make such an impassioned case for. For treating this historically. They can’t imagine a Jesus who does not say, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” even as they go casting. Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we seek to increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat misinformation. About the same. How are you doing today, Dan?

Rocking and rolling, baby. It’s. It’s a good day to learn about the world.

Yes, it is. As are most days.

As are most days. Some days you don’t want to. But today’s a good day and we got some fun things coming up. We’re keeping it historical.

Yeah. As is our wont.

As is our wont. We are wont to do so. So maybe we should just dive in with. That’s history.

A question I get an awful lot. And something I think a lot of people don’t know is how the King James Version came about. One of the most, probably the single most influential English translation of the Bible or perhaps any translation of the Bible that exists, the King James Version, many people know it was published in 1611, that King James had something to do with it. There are a lot of ideas out there about what precisely King James had to do with it and a lot of misinformation out there. So let’s get into a discussion of the history of the King James Version.

I love it. You know, when I was back some 10-ish years ago, I watched a play on London’s West End and I’m trying to remember what that play was called. It was something along the lines of oh, oh, it was Written on the Heart. That’s what it was.

Okay.

It was a play called Written on the Heart. And I think you’d love it. It’s by a guy named David Edgar and he was a. And. And so. And it incorporates. It goes through some different moments in history. It has. William Tyndale. It has. But the thing that stood out to me was scenes where. And I don’t remember it well. So, you know if someone else saw this and they, you can correct me if you want to, but it had scenes where there were the, it was a big room where people where, where a bunch of men were negotiating what was and wasn’t going to go into this new version of the Bible. So this is, you know, a long time after, after. What’s his name? I just said it. Tyndale. Tyndale. It’s so it’s a. But yeah, it’s, it’s the, it’s the crafting and, and the sort of the, the, the political machinations that then became the, the King James Bible.

So I’m excited to understand and hear a little more about it.

Excellent. But actually to start talking about the King James Version, I want to go back to Tyndale and actually a little bit before Tyndale to a Dutch humanist scholar named Desiderius Erasmus. And he is working at the very beginning of the 1500s and he’s a scholar publishing all different kinds of stuff. And at the time there was one main English translation of the Bible that was Wycliffe’s translation. And it was not the product of Wycliffe’s own work all by himself. It came together from the work of a lot of different people. But that was the end of the 14th century, so the end of the 1300s, we have Wycliffe’s Bible, which is a translation of the Latin Vulgate into English. Now Erasmus does something pretty crafty. There is a desire to have a Greek or an edition of the Greek New Testament and somebody is working on one.

And a publisher who is working with Erasmus comes to him and wants Erasmus to get to it first, basically cut this other scholar off. And Erasmus wants to create a new translation of the New Testament in Latin. And so what he does is he creates a two column text where he has his new Latin translation on one side and then Greek on the other. And the idea is to basically show his work here’s the Greek text so you can compare and you can see that my translation rules. And in order to do this, he goes to his library in Switzerland, in Basel. And I never know if I’m saying that name right, but goes to the library and says, give me all your Greek New Testament manuscripts. And initially he’s got like five or six of them. And the oldest one is from like 1100 CE, so not incredibly old manuscripts, but he has two manuscripts that represent the overwhelming majority of the text, almost every single verse.

And then the other manuscripts, the five or six of them or four or five of them, are basically, he’s going to look at them, and if he thinks one of them may preserve an earlier reading, he might, you know, fit that in there. And he’s going to cobble together a Greek New Testament. And the last few verses of the Book of Revelation are not extant. He does not have them. And so what he does is he takes the Latin Vulgate and translates it back into Greek and then writes that Greek into the Greek column. And he then publishes this in the early.

Look at how perfect my translation of my translation is.

And this becomes the first edition of the Greek New Testament that had ever been published. And it’s cobbled together from a handful of manuscripts. And that Greek side of things becomes the most popular aspect of this publication. I don’t think that people really cared about his his translation of the of the Latin. But Erasmus, he goes on and does several more editions of this, and many years later, it becomes known as the Textus Receptus, which is Latin for the received text. And this is what’s known as an eclectic manuscript, or an eclectic edition. We’ve looked at all the manuscripts. This does not represent one single manuscript, but we’ve cobbled together what we believe are the best readings from the manuscripts that we had available. And as he’s doing these other editions, he looks at some other manuscripts and he brings some other manuscripts into view. But I don’t think he ever gets more than like 14 or 15 manuscripts that he’s consulting as a part of this.

The second edition of his text is what Martin Luther uses to create his translation of the New Testament. Now we have a Greek text that we can use so that we’re not translating from the Latin, we’re translating all the way back from the Greek. William Tyndale does the same thing, translates his New Testament from the Greek provided by Erasmus, Textus Receptus. And this becomes very, very popular over the next 200 years. You have many, many translations going on. You also have many editions of the Textus Receptus book being produced all kind of in the same tradition. They’re not departing significantly from each other. They’re doing, they’re making small, little adjustments here and there based on, oh, I actually like the way this manuscript reads here over the other. the other. William.

Sorry, I’m just jumping in—is Erasmus’s Greek side of things, since this was eclectic and came from various different groups? Greek manuscripts.

Yeah.

Did he put multiple manuscript versions in his— On the Greek side of things, or did he just put whatever the ones that he wanted in?

Yeah. So he used two manuscripts as his base text. And then if there were readings in the other manuscripts that he thought were more original, he would write those in place of what the other manuscript was. So he’s producing a single text with one version of every— Of every passage in the New Testament.

And all of these other translators are then taking his Textus Receptus text as sort of the definitive thing.

Yes.

And not bothering to then go back to the other manuscripts to verify if they agree with the— The calls that Erasmus had been making.

So some of them are going to do that too, to the degree that they’re able, but they don’t have great access to all these manuscripts. And— And we had not discovered the overwhelming majority of the manuscripts that we have now. So, yes, for the most part, translators are trusting that whatever edition of the Textus Receptus is most recent is based on the best scholarship comparing these manuscripts. And so Tyndale does his New Testament and does a couple editions of that, and he gets— He starts translating the Hebrew Bible as well. And he gets through all the way up through, I think, Kings, and then does, like, Jonah, and those are published. And then he is executed and famously says, O Lord, open the King of England’s eyes. Because it was still illegal to produce English translations or any vernacular translation. And then we have a guy named Miles Coverdale who comes in and he wants to produce his own edition of the full Bible.

So he takes Tyndale’s New Testament and what he translated of the Hebrew Bible, and— And then he fills it in. Only Coverdale does not know Hebrew. So Coverdale takes the German translations that are available, the Latin translations that are available, and he compares those and then produces an English translation of those to fill in the gaps left by Tyndale. And then we have a handful of others who are going through and revising the editions that came before. So we’ve got Matthew’s Bible, we’ve got Whitchurch’s Bible, we’ve got the Geneva Bible, we’ve got the Great Bible, we’ve got the Bishops’ Bible. These are all taking all the translations that had come before, making little tweaks here and there, and then releasing an edition of the Bible in English. And you can actually go find PDFs of all of these online fairly easily. And it is absolutely fascinating to chart the trajectory of renderings of certain passages. It’s fascinating stuff.

If you’re listening to the audio, this will be meaningless to you, but I have a page from— This was a gift I was given by my former colleagues working in scripture translation for the LDS Church, I have a manuscript page from a 1549 version of, I believe, the Tyndale-Matthew Bible. So I still have to get it framed. But in America, trying to frame A4 papers is such a huge headache. Just kidding. It’s not on A4 paper. But one of the things that, that is interesting about these translations is they’re starting to add notes to them. The Geneva Bible is called by some people the world’s first study Bible because it has introductions to a lot of the books and it has a lot of explanatory notes in the margins. And this Geneva Bible becomes the most popular Bible translation around.20.800] Dan McClellan: This is what the Puritans took with them.

This, and it supported kind of a Puritan take on Christianity.

And this is an English translation, regardless of the fact that English was not presumably what was spoken in Geneva.

Correct. This was published in 1560, the Geneva Bible. There were people who spoke English in 1560, but it wasn’t like the national language. The Bishops’ Bible was supposed to be for the church. And then in 1604, we have the Hampton Court Conference, which was supposed to be a “come to Jesus” moment between Anglicans and Puritans. And there was very little “coming to Jesus” on either side of the aisle. But one of the things that a man named Rainolds did was say, “Hey, we need a new translation of the Bible. We can all come together on that; that will help Christianity become more unified.” And this was one of the things that King James was like, “I like the cut of his jib.” And so he decided he was going to approve that request. And so he decided he was going to approve that request. And. And thus was born the initiative to create what would become the King James Version of the Bible.

Now, King James, this is an express attempt to create a Bible that could be useful both for the Church of England and the Puritans, is that what that was?

I think some people were hoping would happen. That was not King James’s intentions.

Oh, okay.

King James just wanted to put on a show that he was willing to kind of come to the table, but had very little interest in acquiescing to Puritan needs. But what King James did see an opportunity for was replacing the Geneva Bible. Because one of the things the Geneva Bible was, was very anti-monarchic, was very critical of kingship and monarchies. And this is something you find in the Hebrew Bible: “We have no king but God.” You actually see some kind of conflict in parts of the Hebrew Bible where people are saying that we shouldn’t have a king, the Lord is our King, and other people saying the Lord needs to give us a king. You actually see some kind of conflict in parts of the Hebrew Bible where people are saying that we shouldn’t have a king, the Lord is our King, and other people saying the Lord needs to give us a king. And so the Geneva Bible is on the “we have no king but the Lord” side of things. And their explanatory notes kind of supported that they were anti-monarchical. And so King James saw this as an opportunity to try to supplant that.

And so there were a list of 15 rules drafted for the translation of the King James Version. To begin, it was not really a translation in its own right; it was a revision of a 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. We’re basically taking this ecclesiastical text, the Bishops’ Bible, and we’re just going to do a light revision to it. And so the rule was, and I’ll go ahead and read this as it was originally written: “The ordinary Bible read in church, commonly called the Bishops’ Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.” So, very conservative revision of this text. And there are some scholars who have compared the King James Version to the Tyndale New Testament, and it matches word for word about 84% of the time. And then for the Old Testament that was produced for Tyndale’s Old Testament and then the Coverdale Bible, it matches about 75% of the time. So they’re following very, very closely in the footsteps of the translations that have come before.

But Tyndale did some stuff that King James didn’t like. Tyndale—and actually, one of the reasons that Tyndale got killed was because he was trying to undercut a lot of the structuring of power in favor of the institution of the church. So Tyndale didn’t like the word “church”; he translated “congregation.” He didn’t like the word “priests”; he translated “elders.” In fact, he was. Much of the church’s condemnation of him was revolving around, I think, five or six words that he picked for his translation that moved away from kind of this ecclesiastical institutional model and towards kind of a more individual congregational model. And so the third rule that King James laid down was the old ecclesiastical words to be kept, viz. the word church, not to be translated congregation, etc.

Interesting, you know, people. For anyone who says it doesn’t matter how you translate it, it’s still the word of God. Tell that to a guy who’s tied to a stake over five different words.

Yeah, yeah, that’s nuts. Yeah, it’s incredibly significant. And then the number six rule, number six, I think, is one of the interesting ones. So I said the Geneva Bible has a lot of marginal notes and a lot of them are very anti-monarchical. Number six. No marginal notes at all to be affixed.

Okay.

But only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words which cannot without some circumlocution so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text. So King James didn’t want any of that anti-monarchical sentiment in the text. And to the degree that he had any say over the text itself, he seems to have had some influence on the removal of the word tyrant from a handful of passages. So the King James Version does not have these occurrences of the word tyrant because he didn’t like that idea at least.

Weird. Why wouldn’t he like that? That seems like.

So a lot of people have noted that King James seems to have had some gay lovers who had access to his quarters through secret passages and in some of the places that were built for him and things like that. And so there are a lot of. I’ve heard rumors that, oh, he did this or that to try to influence the text one way or another regarding homosexuality in the Bible. And we talked a bit about that in the episode we did a while ago. But I don’t see any indication whatsoever that he had any influence at all on how the passages that are thought to be relevant to homosexuality in the Bible. I don’t see any evidence that he influenced that at all. So if anybody is wondering what. Yeah, what about that? I don’t think there’s a case to make that he had any influence there. But the text is basically, there are companies that are put together. The number of people involved, we’re not exactly sure, but somewhere around 48 or 50 scholars and they’re put in companies and then they’re assigned certain texts.

You have like the New Testament, you have the prophets, you have the Apocrypha. You have a handful of different divisions of the text assigned to these groups. And they’re sent physical copies of the 1602 edition of the Bishops’ Bible. And then they are literally crossing stuff out and writing in the margins what should go here. So they weren’t even going from scratch writing down the Bishops’ Bible translation. They were actually writing their recommended changes into the margins of the Bishops’ Bible and then they would be collected. And well, one of the first things they did before that was meet together to discuss, consult about how they were rendering things. And so you talk about a meeting in a big room where they’re trying to figure out what to include. If they’re talking about what books to include, that was never up for debate. That was never discussed. It was always going to be the books that were in the Bishops’ Bible. But if this was a meeting where they’re saying, I like this rendering better than this other one over here, or, no, you’re an idiot, it should be this way over here, that most likely did happen.d happen.

So I don’t know the contents of that meeting in that play, but it could. It may or may not have been somewhat historical. Right. And so after they deliberate, the editors take the text and they get this final version. Now, it didn’t always work exactly how it was supposed to work. There is evidence that a lot of people didn’t do their job. There were people who carried the whole team, so to speak, for a lot of these companies. And there were a lot of issues as this went on. And if you want a really great discussion of this, there’s a book called God’s Secretaries that is all about the translators of the King James Version of the Bible. Some of them we know more about than others. In fact, we have some. A collection of notes that were kept by one of the people involved in the translation, which is just invaluable to reconstructing this history. But there’s not a ton that we can talk about, or at least that I can remember about the details of the translation until we come out the other end in 1611 with this publication of the King James Version, which was not obviously not called the King James Version at the time.

But some of the formatting things I think are interesting. You have versification, which is something that started in 1551, but the versification is front and center in the King James Version.

And by that you mean delineating out numbering each verse? Specifically, yeah. In fact, that before then, it wasn’t. It was just normal paragraphs the way. The way we would normally see a book.

Yeah. And there was. There was one editor of an edition of the Textus Receptus. I’m pretty sure it’s the 1551 edition. I think Stephanus was the editor. But that was the first New Testament to introduce versification. And so the versification is not even 500 years old in the New Testament.

Wow.

And so they also increased punctuation. And there was a reason for this. Almost every clause is set off by a comma or a semicolon or a colon or something like that. And the reason was this allowed the reader to speak in shorter fragments and pause because this was not a text intended to be read privately or quietly. This was intended to be read in churches, in public, in a group setting. In fact, on the frontispiece of the 1611 edition, it says, appointed to be read in churches. It was an enormous text. It was far too. It was a showpiece. It was too big for normal private use and was frequently chained to the pulpit. And so this was a text that was designed to be read out loud in a church. And the verses were intended to allow people listening, to be able to know where things were, to be able to look things up.

And. And you put. You separated out each verse into its own paragraph so that you could scan the page and more quickly find the verse you were looking for. And so when we think about the way Bibles are formatted, these Bibles were not formatted for somebody to sit down in their living room and read by themselves. These were intended for public oral reading. And that may not sound like a huge deal, but this does influence how the texts are used and how people make meaning with the texts. I think this is a fascinating aspect of the history of the King James Version, but I imagine that most everybody listening is like, move on with it. So it gets published. And it’s not incredibly popular at the start. We have reviews that say, man, it’s okay.[00:24:44.270] Dan McClellan: It’s outdated because it was such a conservative revision of such conservative revisions of such conservative revisions.

It’s basically using the same language that Tyndale was using almost a century before. So the day the King James Version hit the shelves in 1611, it was using language that people were used to hearing from their grandparents. So as outdated as we think of it today, it was outdated on the very first day it was released. And so, yeah, that’s something you don’t.

Necessarily think about because, you know, it. At this point, it just. That kind of language, whether it be from this, you know, from the KJV or, you know, people associate it with Shakespearean language, because Shakespeare was about the same time. It just sounds fancy to our to. To a modern ear. But, yeah, it’s. For it to have been, you know, almost 100 years old in. In its. In how it sounds. That’s a very different sound. Like, yeah, language changes fast.

Yeah, it changes very fast. And so it did not become popular right off the bat, even though the King, you know, was like, I want one in every household. Did not become the most popular translation until around 1660, when the Geneva Bible went out of print. And it was there to fill in that vacuum. But it went through new editions and new printings almost every year because there was a lot of money to be made, because this was the official Bible of the Church, and so only a few publishers had rights to publish it, and so they were raking in money. Now, most editions of the King James Version that people get today are actually not the 1611. They’re the 1769. One of these editions that was made was made by a guy named Benjamin Blaney in Oxford in 1769, and that became colloquially referred to as the Authorized Version.

And for whatever reason like it, the differences are not huge, but there are differences here and there between that edition and the 1611 edition. But that became the most popular edition, and that is what has been reproduced in most editions of the King James Version ever since.

Was there something specific that prompted that revision? Why did that happen? Why was the original not good enough?

There were always concerns with how perfect the new edition was regarding not. Not a ton having to do with new manuscripts that were being discovered. But people would identify certain typos, or people would say, you know, it’s been translated this way for so long. This is garbage. We need to translate it another way. So the little tiny things would be changed, and, you know, there would be kind of a critical mass of concern, and people would be like, gosh darn it, we need a new edition of the Bible again. And so Blaney’s was just the one that kind of became the most popular one.

And so we still call that the King James Version.

Still the King James Version? Yeah, it’s a very, very tiny revision of the text. And talking about language again, when we get into the 1600s or the 1700s. Excuse me. A lot of the language of the King James Version has dropped out of favor, but we suddenly get this rush of antiquarian interest. We need to get back to the old ways. You know, things were so much better in the good old days. And so the language is brought back into vogue because the King James Version is there. And that happens again in the 1800s. The Second Great Awakening makes. There’s a kind of a resurgence of antiquarian interest, and people go back to the King James Version as the standard, even though it never really was the standard.:50.130] Dan McClellan: And so a lot of people think of the King James Version as this pinnacle of English literature. The truth is, that is an accident of history. It was never the pinnacle of English literature until one of these attempts to go back to the way it was in the good old days.

The Second Great Awakening resulted in the King James Version, because of the American Bible Society just flooding not only the American market, but American schoolhouses. It became the translation that was used to teach children English. And so that cemented it in the foundation of the United States of America. Another interesting thing to note, in the 1800s, the American Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society up till the 1800s had been including the Apocrypha in every edition. The Apocrypha was a part of the Bible. Now, when Luther produced his edition, he didn’t like the Apocrypha for one, and he didn’t like a lot of books in the Bible. Hebrews, James, Revelation, a handful of others. He was like, “These are garbage. I’m putting them in the back.” And in earlier editions, the Apocrypha was just scattered among the other texts of the Hebrew Bible. Luther says, “Nope, I’m putting them together. They’re in one section. They’re the Apocrypha.”

And so this— And, you know, his movement of all those other books to the back, James and Revelation, all those other things, that was kind of, after a few editions, he was like, “Okay, fine.” And they went back to where they were, but the Apocrypha stayed a separate collection, which is one of the things that facilitated the American Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society in the mid-1900s saying, “We could move a lot more Bibles if we just pulled this out,” and it makes for a thinner Bible, easier to print, costs less money. And so they started taking the Apocrypha out and producing this Apocrypha-less, sans-Apocrypha Bible, which quickly became phenomenally popular. And the Apocrypha was never seen again among Protestants.

And you said that was in the—

1900s? Mid-19th century. Okay, so the mid-1800s. Yeah. Okay. And so this is around the time period that Protestants are getting annoyed with the Apocrypha. And it gets taken out and it does not return to Protestant editions of the Bible for the most part. You know, if you get an NRSV today, it’s going to— Usually it’s going to have the Apocrypha in it, but you can get editions that do not.

So the King James, the original KJV, had these books in it.

Yep.

That— That is crazy to me because the way that you hear a lot of, you know, Bible creators online talking about versions and talking about the perfection of this, you know, the holy word of God, it’s become a definite theme of our show. That this is not a book that is, you know, breathed by God word for word or whatever. But even the book that’s in their hand, as they’re doing it, has been edited and changed in, oh yeah, huge ways that they’re just not acknowledging or they don’t know.

Yeah, a lot of people don’t know this history. They don’t know that the Apocrypha was a part of it. They don’t know that the spelling of Jesus began with an I: Iesus. Sean Connery would be very disappointed in most Protestants today for not knowing that it begins with an I, but in the— In— If you go look at a 1611 King James Version, it’s going to be Iesus for Jesus.s. There are a number of things that they, that they don’t know about the history of the King James Version. Most people tend to think of the edition that they grew up with or the edition of their lifetime as somehow having just fallen out of the sky and without an enormous history behind it. There’s the famous edition of the King James Version called the Adulterer’s Bible. Do you recall this one?

No.

The. The Ten Commandments. There was a typo, and one of the commandments is, thou shalt commit adultery.

Now I remember that.

Yes.

I need a copy of that one. I like that.

They. They are not cheap, I’m sure, but yeah, there have been. There have been these typos and, and things like that throughout the history of. Of these different editions that have resulted in some humorous anecdotes that probably cost someone some jail time, if not their life. But, yeah, the. The King James Version that we, that we have today largely is the 1769 Blayney edition. There are a number of things about the King James Version that I think would. Would surprise an awful lot of people. But in terms of the motivations for its production, the. This is really King James trying to cement his legacy, trying to protect his power. He was motivated by a desire to put down kind of the Puritan factions that were challenging the legitimacy of his reign, the legitimacy of the monarchy. He was trying to protect this translation from giving power to those who challenged the institution.

And there’s not a ton more that King James was involved in. He did not translate it himself. He did not write the Bible. There are folks that think the thing changed wildly, that either new books were added in or old books were taken out or that people. I’ve heard theories that the idea that, you know, thou shalt not allow a witch to live, that passage that that was something introduced by King James because he was a notorious witch hunter. Totally false. Because we can look at the other editions, the Bishops’ Bible, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, all the way back to Coverdale and Tyndale. And we can see most of these things are already in place. The King James Version is kind of a boring, very conservative, not incredibly up to date revision that really became the most influential Bible translation to exist because of historical accident more than anything else.

Interesting. Well, you know, one of the things that we are, that we’re going to talk about coming up is some ways that King James, well, the guys who did the King James Bible, some ways that they might have gotten it wrong. So should we just move on to that?

Let’s do it.

So on this edition of Know Your Bible, we’re going to jump off of the KJV train in an interesting way, which is that there are, there’s a bunch of verses in that if you’re looking in your KJV, you’re going to find them. And if you’re looking in a whole bunch of other versions, they’re just going to be missing.

Yeah, this, this is something I, I see videos on this a lot and it’s always the same verse. And the reason it’s the same verse is because this is the first verse where this happens in the canonical New Testament. And for some reason people never seem to read past that. But you’ll see, you’ll see a lot of things on social media where somebody’s like, I was just reading and I never noticed this before, but if you look in Matthew 17 , go look for verse 21 and they’ll show in there. They’ll be like, I brought out all my different translations of the Bible and it goes from verse 20 straight to verse 22 and it skips over verse 21 and it blows many people’s minds.le’s minds.

That’s Satan’s work right there.

Yeah. And they… And obviously they’re immediately going to Revelation. Someone has taken from this book, taken something out of the book. And the reality is that most translations of the New Testament today are based on better manuscripts. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But that verse was not part of the original New Testament. That verse was something that someone later down the road added in. And so if your translation is missing Matthew 17:21 , you have a better translation. You have a version of the New Testament that is closer to the original. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to convince an awful lot of folks of that with data because they are too mired in dogma. But let’s go back to the King James Version for a minute. We talked about the Textus Receptus being the authoritative source text for translations of the Bible. And this had been cobbled together from what started out as just a handful of manuscripts that Erasmus had available to him in his library in Switzerland in the early 1500s.

And now we’ve discovered literally thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament. And we have found some early manuscripts that people knew about in the days of Erasmus. Like Vaticanus, for instance, was a text that people knew about, but was under lock and key in the Vatican. And Erasmus knew somebody who had access to it. And so there are a few instances where he said, hey, go look up this verse for me. Tell me what’s going on here. And he would get answers about that. But he never had access, full access to the full manuscript of Vaticanus, which is a fourth, maybe fifth century manuscript of the full Bible. And, you know, that’s 800 years earlier than the manuscripts Erasmus was working with. But since then, that’s…

That is a significant number of years.

Yeah. And as the, as the science slash art of biblical archaeology was developing, particularly in the 1800s, we started to discover a lot more manuscripts of the Bible. There’s the famous discovery of Sinaiticus, which is our earliest manuscript of the full Bible that we know of. That’s probably mid to late 4th century CE. In fact, there are some people who think that this may have been one of the copies of the Bible that Constantine commissioned Eusebius to produce following the Council of Nicaea. And this was discovered by somebody who was in St. Catherine’s Monastery at the top of the traditional location of Mount Sinai, who was looking at some papers that were in a bin that was intended to be used for kindling and said, “What the what?”

And maybe don’t burn this bit.

This bit might be important, but found Sinaiticus, which has become one of the most important manuscripts of the New Testament. But we, we found Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus. I’m probably screwing up the Latin there, but this was a palimpsest. And for those of you who don’t know what a palimpsest is, that is when someone needs paper to write on or vellum or some kind of manuscript paper. And so they take an existing text and they scrape the ink off or wipe it off or something like that, and then they usually will turn it 90 degrees or something like that and then write their own text. And somebody found a text and was like, “There’s something under here,” and found a manuscript of the Bible that was probably 5th century. And then we find papyri that go all the way back to maybe even as early as around 125 CE. So we’ve discovered a ton of things. And as scholars have looked at these texts and the science slash art of textual criticism has developed, we’ve got a much better idea of what the New Testament probably said.00:41:15.890] Dan McClellan: So in 1881, there was a new edition of the King James Version published called the Revised Version.

But one of the things that this version did was make use of a lot of these new editions of the Greek New Testament that were incorporating the readings from a lot of the newly discovered manuscripts, which meant there were a number of changes to the text, including an omission here or there. And since 1881, we’ve had the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, and a number of other translations that have settled on about 16 verses from the New Testament where scholars are pretty sure that those verses did not exist at all in the earliest New Testament. And Matthew 17:21 is an interesting one because this is one where our earliest manuscripts don’t have it at all. And Sinaiticus is interesting because you can look at the page in Sinaiticus, and the verse is written at the top of the page with a little symbol next to it.

And then that symbol is written right in the middle of one of the columns, basically saying, “put this here.” And then later manuscripts have that little scribbled passage in the text, and that little scribbled passage is borrowed from Mark because it’s telling the same story. And what’s missing is this statement that Jesus—this is the disciples—they say, “We were not able to cast out this demon.” And Jesus says, “This kind cometh not out except by prayer and fasting.” And so someone has taken that statement from Mark and written it in the margins of the manuscript that has that story in Matthew. And later down the road, it just got incorporated right into Matthew. And so we know that that is not an original part of Matthew. And so these days it gets plucked out. And there are about 15 other passages where these verses are commonly missing.

And most of them are because it appears somebody tried to copy something from another gospel in order to align the text of the Gospels. Or there’s been some kind of expansion where someone has added a doxology or something like that.

Talk about a doxology, I don’t know.

That’s a glorification. It’s basically saying, “praise God for this, that and the other,” or “God is this, that and the other.” It’s. It’s a little bit of praise that is added in, but a lot of them are harmonizations with other texts.

Yeah. Because it’s so funny to me that people want to hold on to these, you know, want to make this a conspiracy theory so, so badly. Because it’s not like removing these verses removes them from the book they’re in. You know, as you say, this thing in Matthew is also in Mark. It exists in the book.

Yeah.

And that’s the case. You know, as I was going through these, that’s the case with most of them. It’s either in another book in the same part of the story, or it’s even in—there’s the case of there’s the case of Mark 9 , where they take out verse 44 and verse 46, because it’s repeated. If you leave them in, it’s repeated three times. It’s also the same as verse 48.

Yeah.

And, you know, that makes for an interesting sort of poetic moment

Yeah.

where it’s almost a call and response moment where they keep putting in this thing over and over again, but by removing it, you’re not changing the meaning of anything. You’re not changing…

Yeah. And then the Mark one is interesting because that’s the statement that’s borrowed from Isaiah 66 that we talked about in our episode on the development of the concept of hell.f hell. That’s a quotation from the Hebrew Bible where their worm dieth not. And the fire is not quenched. And so where that’s just. They’re repeating something three times and they add that to the last iteration. Now they’re like, no, we want to say that every time. So it’s say something where their worm dieth not. Say something else where the worm dieth not. And so it’s. Yeah, it’s. It’s poetic, it’s repetitive, but it wasn’t there to begin with. Right.

And so it does no harm to remove it.

Yeah, there’s an interesting one. John, chapter five. We have this story. I think we’re at the pool of. It’s Bethesda, isn’t it? Pretty sure it’s Bethesda, where there’s the paralyzed man who can’t get down into the water, and the water’s supposed to heal him. And there’s a thing where it says an angel came down a certain season into the pool and troubled the water and whoever the first person to get into the water after that was healed. And this is a weird kind of mythology that’s, that’s in the story there. But that is not in the earliest manuscripts. That is something that was added in later. And, and that’s an instance where it seems somebody wanted an explanation. Why do they think this water is going to heal them again? And somebody was like, there was an angel that would come down and wiggle his finger in the water, and then you knew you had to jump in. And so that is something that was, that was added in later.

So some of this is theological change. Some of it is intentional change. A lot of it is just kind of harmonization and wanting things to sound a little better. But there are a couple of big ones. You mentioned Mark 9 . Another big one is Mark 16 , the end of the Gospel of Mark , where we have the empty tomb and the story has the disciples running in fear. And then we have Jesus visiting them. And we have this post-resurrection ministry going on for a few passages or a few verses till we get to the end of Mark 16 . That ending is not in our earliest manuscripts. We have this much, much shorter ending that kind of abruptly ties off the story right after the disciples run. And even that ending may have been added later on. And so many contemporary translations will have either a footnote or they’ll put brackets around the last dozen or so verses of the Gospel of Mark , saying, hey man, this isn’t in some of our earliest witnesses.

And some scholars think that this ended very abruptly with the Greek particle gar, which generally means for or something like that. But it can be at the end of a sentence. But it is a little awkward to end a sentence that way. Very awkward to end a whole book that way. But there are some scholars that argue this was intentionally an abrupt ending to kind of inject the audience with this sense of urgency and of anxiety. The tomb is empty. And then, you know, scene. And so. And there’s a theory that Mark was written to be performed, that it was intended as a play.

Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve never heard that. That’s fascinating.

Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of scholarship on that. I think it’s a fascinating discussion as well. And I think one of the stories that is not in our earliest manuscripts and then begins to show up in the manuscripts, but not where we know it today, is the story of the woman taken in adultery.woman taken in adultery. So this is at the very end of, of John 7 , and mostly in John 8 . But in some manuscripts, we find this in Luke. In other manuscripts, it’s in other places in John, and in our earliest manuscripts, it’s not there at all. And scholars are in pretty widespread agreement that this is a. A later addition to the text. And. But this is such a famous story, and it’s so central to a lot of people’s understanding of the Gospel and the life of Jesus that there are an awful lot of people who still want to make the argument that it is historical and that it is something that the author of the Gospel of John told, and then it just got separated and then was brought back into the fold a little later on.

But many contemporary translations of the New Testament will put that story in brackets and include a footnote saying, hey, man, this is not in our earliest witnesses. Just, you know, heads up.

So this is the story where Jesus says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Am I on the right story here?

You are on the right story. He’s walking around in the temple. They bring him the woman, say she was caught in the act of adultery, in the very act. And they say, Moses said that she should be stoned. What say you? And he bends down and he writes in the sand. And then he stands up and says that he was without sin, cast the first stone. And then they. And then they. They depart from the young. It’s either from the youngest to the oldest or the oldest to the youngest. I don’t remember which. But then when they’re all gone, she. He says, where are your accusers? And she says, there’s no one left. And he says, go and sin no more.

That’s one of the best stories in the book. You’re telling me that that’s not real? Oh, man, that’s. That stays in my version.

Well, that’s one of the reasons that so many people make such an impassioned case for. For treating this historically. They can’t imagine a Jesus who does not say that he was without sin, cast the first stone. Even as they go casting stones. Oh, and the. And the whole drawing in the sand thing, people are like, oh, he was writing down the names of everybody, and he was writing down their sins and.

Getting their addresses right. What’s your Social Security number? I’m writing that down.

He was doxing her accusers in the sand. And the reality is probably much more mundane, and that is that this has resonances with the Sotah, the ritual from Numbers 5 , where if a man suspects a woman of adultery, he takes her to the temple. And then the priest writes down a curse on a piece of paper, scrapes the ink off into some water, and then takes some sand, some dirt from the temple floor, chucks it in the water, and she’s got to drink this concoction. And then if she is guilty, her, her genitals are distended and deformed and her belly swells and most likely she dies. But the idea is she is stricken with infertility and if she is innocent, then she becomes more fertile and she will conceive. And we’ve, we’ve talked indirectly about this a number of times in the past, but there we have a lot of elements of this going on in this story.

Woman taken in adultery brought to Jesus at the temple. And he writes in the dirt of the temple floor. And in a sense he’s asserting authority to judge the woman, saying, just like the, you know, the curse that she drinks is going to determine whether she’s guilty or innocent, Jesus scribbling in the dirt on the floor, stands up and, and says, you know, nor do I condemn you is a way of saying, this is my purview.. I have authority over questions of guilt and innocence when it comes to adultery. So, I mean, I think that’s probably what’s going on.

He made the potion of the sotah and then he said, all of you have to drink it.

He turned around and went pocket sand and then made his escape.

So, so what are we to make of, of, of all of this? I think I, I think part of the fascinating thing about the removal of these spurious verses is that this is still, to this modern day, a bit of a living document. It is, it is bound to continue to be updated.

Absolutely. And the only reason that anybody notices anything is gone is because they maintain the traditional versification. Because if they, if they said we’re going to make verse 21, we’re going to, you know, move 22 up to fill 21, then you’ve screwed up the rest of the chapter. And then, you know, you can’t compare verses between Bibles anymore. And that versification, again, doesn’t come until 1500 years after, you know, the time of Paul. So there are these elements that we’re adding to the text and there are these ways we’re curating the text that then result in these sensitivities. And you know, if this happened and we didn’t have any verses in the passages, no one would know and no one would care. Right, but because they’re skipping from verse 20 to 22. Suddenly there’s a problem with my Bible. But it is a better Bible.

It is more faithful to the earliest text as far as we can reconstruct it. And there will hopefully be more and more insight in the future regarding the earliest shape of the text that will allow us to refine our Bible translations. And it will, it will continue to baffle me if that causes more consternation from folks. They’re like, what, tearing their hair out over the fact that our Bible is now more accurate than it was before.

Put on your helmet, buddy. You’re prepared to be baffled. It will just, that’s, that is going to continue as long as there’s changes. Well, I, I find it fascinating.

I love it.

If you guys at home would like to hear a little bit more about this subject, chances are you can do so. Dan and I do some patron-only content after every show. So if you want to become a patron and hear what we have more conversation about this, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and become, you know, just kick a couple bucks our way every now and then and, and we’ll, we’ll give you a little bit more content. For the rest of you, thank you so much for tuning in. We sure appreciate it. You can write into us at contact@dataoverdogmapod.com if you have any questions and we’ll see you again next week.

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