Manuscripts from much earlier existed-they just hadn’t been discovered yet. The earliest manuscripts known at this time, and even up until the modern era, were only a few hundred years old. At the time, the earliest accessible manuscripts dated back to approximately the ninth century AD for the Old Testament and the twelfth century AD for the New Testament.
Those working on these projects worked hard to use the best source material they had access to, and debates continued over which source material was most true to the original text. When printing press technology began allowing Bibles to be mass-produced in the 1400s, many new translations emerged. In fact, it was primarily written in ancient Hebrew and Greek. The Bible wasn’t first written in the King’s English of Renaissance England or even ancient Latin. So, how did the KJV and other earlier Bibles end up having more words than ours do today? There are countless biblical scholars who have spent their lives coming to the best human understanding of what the most accurate original biblical texts are.
The method used to determine the original text from these manuscripts is known as textual criticism.
In many cases, we have so many similar, overlapping pieces that we can reasonably conclude that we have the entire book. But we’ve found enough pieces from as early as 250 BC to be able to piece them together like a giant puzzle. It’s important to realize that we currently don’t have any complete books of the Bible on a single scroll or codex from before AD 350. If we want to find the closest text to the original writings, we have to study all of the ancient biblical writings we have access to and compare them to one another. A later scribe might wonder if this was a correction and put the comment from the margin into the text of Scripture. In other cases, scribes would add context to what they were copying with a comment in the margin. Now, as you can imagine, sometimes a scribe would miss a word here or there. The people who did this were called scribes. Until the invention of the printing press, the only way for Scripture to be shared with others (aside from public reading) was through the long, tedious process of copying it word for word by hand. In fact, if you are reading a modern Bible, such as the NIV, it is actually truer to the Bible as it was originally written than some of the older translations that include more words and verses. Most modern translations don’t have that.īut don’t worry. Many of us grew up with these words concluding the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:13, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Yep, there are several places in modern Bible translations where words and entire sentences are skipped. Are There Verses Missing From the NIV Bible?ĭid you know that modern Bible translations have fewer verses in them than some of the earliest printed Bibles such as the King James Version, Gutenberg, and Geneva Bibles?
You can also watch the video at the top and/or bottom of this page for a more interactive experience. Does the NIV Bible translation omit verses? Does the NIV leave out verses traditionally included in older Bibles? In this article, you’ll learn the answer to these questions and more.
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