There are a lot of people today who are what we call “King James only” Christians. They believe that the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is the only inspired version and that modern translations are modernist. One argument for this is that there are some verses contained in the KJV that are not in recent modern versions.
The argument of KJV-only adherents only betrays their ignorance of the process of inspiration, transmission, and translation. As Baptists we sometimes joked that, “If the KJV was good enough for St. Paul, it is good enough for me.”
Examples of missing verses and passages are Mark 16:9-20, John 5:4, Acts 8:37, and 1 John 5:7.
We don’t have any of the original writings of the documents in the New Testament—only copies and copies of copies. There are thousands of fragments and manuscripts from the early centuries. The earliest is called the John Ryland fragment, which contains a small portion of John 17 and 18. It is dated at A.D. 125 and was found in the sands of Egypt, written on papyrus.
The more ancient the manuscripts, the more likely they are to be accurate to what the apostles actually wrote. This reflects the old adage: “The closer you are to the spring, the cooler and clearer the water.”
Once at our home Bible study we demonstrated how accurate the comparison of ancient biblical manuscripts can be. My wife put a poem on the whiteboard. We had five of our study group go into the “translation room” so they would never see the original poem. We had the other forty-five members of the study group copy the poem, but they had to make a mandatory two mistakes—or more, if they wanted. We handed the forty-five flawed copies to the “translating committee” to see if they could reconstruct the original poem, accurately, even though using manuscripts with errors. In the end, the poem that they arrived at was 100% accurate to the poem my wife had written on the board.
This demonstrated to our group that even though scholars work with many manuscripts, some of them with flaws and errors, they ultimately produce a very accurate and trustworthy text that reproduces what the biblical authors had written.
King James I of England authorized the translation of the Bible known as the King James Version. He himself did not translate the Bible; it was done by a group of scholars and clergy and completed in 1611. It was translated when some of the best and most ancient manuscripts were unavailable, manuscripts that testify more closely to the apostles’ original writings. Over the last 400 years since the translation of the KJV, many ancient and more reliable manuscripts have been discovered.
Modern scholarship uses the most authoritative and trustworthy manuscripts to update the text of Scripture to make it much more accurate to what the apostles originally wrote. It was discovered that some verses had been added by copyists over the centuries, so King James included these later interpolations in his translation.
Modern translations do not include them as part of the text, because they were not part of the original texts. But, even though modern translators know that those verses are not in the original Greek text, they still often add them in brackets with comments like: “Early mss [manuscripts] do not contain this v [verse].” This note is from the New American Standard Bible, which is the Protestant translation I used in my middle years, even though I was raised with the KJV.
Commenting on the later interpolation, the NIV footnote adds, “Some less important manuscripts [add] . . .” The Catholic New American Bible, used for Mass in the United States, adds the footnote, “Toward the end of the second century in the West and among the fourth-century Greek Fathers, an additional verse was known. . . . This verse is missing from all early Greek manuscripts and the earliest versions, including the original Vulgate. Its vocabulary is markedly non-Johannine.”
Anybody who claims that those verses are definitely part of the original writings—and that Bibles that don’t include them are modernist and in error—only shows his ignorance of the whole process of inspiration, transmission, translation, and hermeneutics.