My wife Robin came home from a Christian speakers conference yesterday and told me about a discussion they had. John 5 was the passage under discussion, and when they arrived at v 4, to their surprise it wasn’t there. I guess it caused quite a stir. Someone found it in the NASB, but nowhere else. (I guess no one had the KJV).
This happens in several occasions in the Bible. There are even verse references “missing” in the KJV. What is going on? Well, either someone left the verse out, or somewhere along the line someone added a verse in. But who ever assigned the verse references, he had v 4.
This is a pretty big issue, and a simple blog can’t do it justice. It can also degenerate into a pretty ugly discussion; many of the people involved in the discussion don’t know much Greek (if any), and in the worst case scenarios the discussion is reduced to a matter of salvation. “If you don’t believe what I believe about the text of the Bible, you aren’t a Christian.” Let’s see if we can steer clear of this type of ungodliness.
This is the basic question of the Greek text, and the technical name for it is “text criticism.” (I am going to stick with the Greek Testament, not the Hebrew.) Here is the basic reconstruction.
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