Where Did v 4 Go in John 5:4? (Monday with Mounce 64)

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.

1. The writers wrote their gospels and epistles and sent
them to their churches.

2. These documents were copied so they could be shared.
In the process of copying, changes were introduced. (By the way, this is not
academic conjecture; we have these different manuscripts and can see the
differences for themselves.)

Some changes were accidental but others appeared to be
intentional, but not always for nefarious reasons. It is often to add an
explanation, or substitute an easier word to understand, or to harmonize the
gospels, etc.

In John 5:4, most believe that a scribe (the person doing
the copying) thought it was puzzling why the man would lie there for 38 years. Perhaps
he knew a tradition that said the angel periodically came down to stir up the waters
and the first person in was healed, and so he added in the verse. (Others would
argue that for some reason the verse was dropped off.)

3. As time progressed (and as we can tell from
archaeology), biblical manuscripts were collected in five different
geographical areas. Since the center of the church was in Rome, this area had
the greatest number of copies.

4. Erasmus (1500s) created a Greek text based on two
manuscripts from the 12th century (Matthew through Jude) and another 12th
century manuscript for all but the last 6 verses of Revelation. He went from
the Latin back into Greek to get those last 6. His work became the basis of the
King James translation.

5. 150 years ago we started digging up new manuscripts
that were in fact must older (by centuries). They came from a different
geographical area than the majority of the texts we currently had, and they
were different in places. For example, they did not have John 5:4.

And so the science of textual criticism was born, which
is the science of determining which of the different “readings” is most likely
original.

The general preference is to see scribes as adding
verses, not removing them. For that reason, and others, most feel that John 5:4
was added after the fact; there is no good reason why it would have been
omitted.

But God in his sovereign love made sure that the
differences among the manuscripts would not hinder our faith.

• About 5% of the Greek text is in
  question
• No major doctrine is brought into question by
  that 5%.

You can trust your Bible!

William
D. [Bill] Mounce posts every Monday about the Greek language, exegesis, and
related topics at Koinonia. He is the author of numerous books, including the
bestselling Basics of
Biblical Greek, and is the general editor for Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old
and New Testament Words. He served as the New Testament chair of the
English Standard Version Bible translation, and is currently on the Committee
for Bible Translation for the NIV. Learn more and visit Bill's blog
(co-authored with scholar and his father Bob Mounce) at www.billmounce.com.