“Why Does my Bible have Verses Missing?”
“WHY DOES MY BIBLE HAVE VERSES MISSING?”
A question that I’m asked every so often is, “why does my Bible have certain verses missing when I compare it to other translations?”
One example of this is the last line of the what has become known as “The Lord’s Prayer” appearing at end of Matthew 6:14, which reads, “For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen” (NKJV).
Many of the more modern translation of the Bible leave off that line, and many readers don’t know why.
The old King James version of the Bible was translated in English in 1611, and was based on what has become known as the “Majority Text” of the Bible, which was a family of New Testament manuscripts that represented 90% of all surviving copies of the original Greek text. Later discoveries of older copies the New Testament text, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc, proved that the Majority Text was NOT based on the oldest manuscripts, so it casts doubt on how accurate the Majority Text is, because there are some discrepancies. Therefore, a new and perhaps more accurate standard of interpreting the New Testament was established based upon what is now called the “Alexandrian texts“, which represent the oldest copies of the New Testament.
Thus, newer translations of the New Testament are based upon the older Alexandrian texts to stay as close to the original Greek manuscripts as possible. This is why there are certain lines omitted in the newer translations compared to the older translations, because it is now apparent that there were later additions to these texts that are represented in the Majority Text translations, but were NOT in the oldest Alexandrian texts.
So going back to our example of Matthew 6:14, the line, “For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and glory forever and ever” was NOT in the older, original manuscripts. Therefore, Bibles translated according to this Alexandrian standard omit this line and a few others that are not found in the original manuscripts, while older translations such as the King James, New King James, and New American Standard Bibles leave them in.
I admit that it’s frustrating to me that certain people dismiss the newer translations as “perversions” of the Scriptures due to these omissions. That’s a really unfair accusation. If people would just do a little homework, they can discover why these translations read the way they do. None of the omissions actually change the message of the text. In almost all cases, those same lines or something similar can be found in other places in the Bible that are in the original manuscripts.