Have you ever heard someone say that there are verses missing from the Bible? Perhaps this has even been someone in your church, and they might be comparing your NIV translation to their KJV. They're saying, "Look, these new Bible publishers, they're taking verses out of the Bible. They're distorting. They're corrupting God's word."

Is this true? You yourself might even have been looking at a passage that your pastor was preaching out of and you might have realized at some point, "I don't actually have that verse in my Bible." Or maybe you're reading around and you see where somewhere in your Bible it goes from verse 10 to verse 12, and the question is: Well where's verse 11?

All of these types of questions are related to something called textual criticism. That sounds really complicated, but we're just going to talk through this together to explain why different Bibles might have different verses in them. If you're able to get a Bible, I would suggest that you get one right now and turn to about Matthew 18. If you're in your car like so many people are that listen to podcasts, like I often am, you'll totally be fine with your Bible, but if you do have it, turn to Matthew 18. It will be helpful as we look at a couple of things.

We've talked about this before, but the Bible we have now is actually the result of a lot of work by a lot of people. Our Bible has a history. As Christians who affirm that the scriptures are the word of God, they're the very breath of God breathed out to us, we need to know their history. Part of that is what we're going to cover today. We certainly can't cover the whole history of the Bible in a 14-minute podcast, but we can cover part of it.

Initially, people like Paul wrote down on a manuscript, either personally or using a scribe or someone to write on their behalf, a letter, let's say, to the church in Galatia. That letter was sent to the church, and they found it to be helpful, and they copied it, and they sent it other places, and people borrowed it, and those people copied it. Copies were made of copies were made of copies were made of copies. Then this got translated into Latin. It also got translated into Syriac and different languages like that.

Then we came along and we said we needed an English translation. We took some Greek manuscripts and we translated into English. Today we do the same thing. Our English translation today, let's say the most recent version of the NIV, is not a translation of the previous NIV, which is not a translation of the RSV, which is not a translation of the KJV. It doesn't go back like that. It's not a telephone game in that way.

Every time we make a new translation, every time we want to try to faithfully take God's word and put it into modern language, we go back to the earliest and best manuscripts. What this speaks to is that there is a question as to which manuscripts we should use. We have over 5,800 copies of partial manuscripts or full books of the New Testament. We're always striving to go back to the oldest and best.

The reason for this is sometimes manuscripts got changed as they were copied. Now you may have noticed that, if you had to copy something, you may have inadvertently drifted your eyes down to a different line and written some words there, and then gone right back up. You might not have realized it, so you actually inserted something from a different place in the text.

Or perhaps, if you were copying something so frequently that you knew it so well, you might have included something from another part of the document in a previous part because it kind of fit.

Scribes did the same types of things. What we see is sometimes, in Matthew, a scribe accidentally, or maybe intentionally just trying to be helpful, included…