Why Was Matthew 17:21 Removed From Some Bibles? The Real Answer

Two things about Matthew 17:21 are true at the same time, and holding both is what makes this hard. The King James Bible prints a sentence there: “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.”

Open an NIV or an ESV at the same page and the numbering runs from verse 20 straight to verse 22, with the sentence moved to a footnote at the bottom. Both Bibles were produced by people who believe every word of Scripture matters, and they cannot both be right about what belongs on that page.

So the question is fair, and it deserves better than a shrug or a slogan. Why was Matthew 17:21 removed from some Bibles, and what does it mean for the Bible sitting on your table right now? There is a real answer, there is real evidence on both sides, and there is a question underneath the question that matters more than either.

Why Was Matthew 17:21 Removed From Some Bibles? 

Matthew 17:21 is absent from most modern Bibles because the earliest surviving Greek copies of Matthew do not contain it. Most translators judge that the sentence was copied into Matthew by a later scribe from the parallel account in Mark 9:29, so they move it to a footnote rather than print it as Matthew’s own words.

That is the answer in its shortest form, and it raises the harder question straight away. The great majority of ancient copies do contain the verse, and Christians were quoting the saying very early, so the evidence is not all pointing one way.

What Matthew 17:21 Says

Here is the sentence at the centre of all this, as the King James Version prints it:

“Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” (Matthew 17:21)

Jesus has just cast out a devil His disciples could not move. They ask Him privately why they failed. The sentence answers them, and the answer carries weight: this kind of resistance gives way when a believer prays and fasts.

The same saying stands in Mark’s account of this same event: “And he said unto them, This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29).

Why Some Bible Jumps From Verse 20 to Verse 22

The gap in the numbers alarms people more than anything else about this, and it helps to know what those numbers actually are.

Chapter divisions were laid over the Bible in the early thirteenth century. Verse numbers for the New Testament came later still, fixed by a Paris printer named Robert Estienne in his Greek New Testament of 1551, and carried into English Bibles from there.

The copies being argued over in this article were made centuries before anyone thought to number a verse. The numbering is a finding aid laid on top of the text so that people can locate a sentence quickly. It was never part of what Matthew wrote.

That explains the gap. When translators judge a line to be a later addition, they leave the number where it has always been instead of renumbering the chapter. Renumbering would break every concordance, every cross reference, every commentary and every study Bible in existence, and a preacher who said “turn to Matthew 17:22” would send half the room to the wrong sentence.

So the number stays, the disputed words go into the footnote, and your eye reads the gap as a hole. What you are looking at is a printing convention doing its job.

Removed or Added? The Question Behind the Question

The word “removed” has already decided the case before the evidence is heard. It assumes the sentence stood in Matthew first and somebody took it out.

There is a second possibility, and it is held by careful people who love the Bible: the sentence was added to Matthew later by a copyist who knew it from Mark. If that is what happened, then modern editions are not subtracting anything from Scripture. They are declining to keep something that was put in.

Those are the two real options, and one of them is what happened. Nobody gets to settle it by picking the word they prefer, so the fairest way to ask is this: was Matthew 17:21 removed, or was it added?

The Story Behind the Verse: Matthew 17:14-20

A father comes to Jesus and kneels down to Him. His son is sore vexed, badly tormented, and the text says the boy “falleth into the fire, and oft into the water” (Matthew 17:15).

The man has already been to the disciples: “I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him.” Jesus calls the generation faithless and perverse, tells the father to bring the boy to Him, rebukes the devil, and the child is cured from that very hour.

Then comes the part the argument has buried. “Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, Why could not we cast him out? And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:19-20).

Take that on its own terms. Jesus traced the failure to their unbelief. Then He measured the faith needed at a mustard seed, which is to say almost nothing, and He set that seed against a mountain.

Verse 20 is the harder word of the two, and no manuscript anywhere disputes it. A man came with a son nobody could help and left with his boy whole, and the world is arguing about the footnote.

If you want to see the whole event, read Matthew 17:14-21, Mark 9:14-29 and Luke 9:37-43 side by side. Each writer set down his own account as he was moved by the Holy Ghost (2 Peter 1:21), and the three were meant to be read together.

Read also: Lessons from Matthew 17 and Parable of the Mustard Seed Meaning

Why Most Modern Translations Leave Matthew 17:21 Out

Start with the oldest surviving copies. The sentence is absent from the original hand of Codex Sinaiticus and from Codex Vaticanus, both copied in the fourth century and both among the oldest complete New Testaments we possess.

It is missing too from the manuscript labelled Theta, the fragment known as 0281, the minuscule numbered 33, an early copy of 892, two Old Latin manuscripts, the Sinaitic and Curetonian Syriac, and the Sahidic Coptic used by Egyptian Christians. Those witnesses come from different regions, and a reading missing in all of them at once is hard to explain as one region’s slip.

Then picture the two possibilities. In one, a scribe reads a sentence of Jesus in his copy of Matthew and deletes it. In the other, a scribe who knows Mark’s account by heart writes it into Matthew so the two agree. The second happens constantly in the manuscripts we have, and the first is very hard to motivate.

Bruce Metzger, who edited the Greek text most modern translations work from, put it in those terms: since there is no satisfactory reason why the sentence would have been dropped from such a wide range of witnesses if Matthew wrote it, and since copyists frequently brought in material from another Gospel, the likeliest explanation is that most manuscripts have been brought into line with Mark 9:29.

Philip Comfort adds the sharpest point on this side. Mark 9:29 has a longer and a shorter form in the manuscripts, and the copies carrying the longer form of Mark are the same copies carrying the extra sentence in Matthew.

That overlap makes the direction of the borrowing visible. D. A. Carson puts the general rule in a line: scribes bringing parallel accounts into agreement is a well documented later habit rather than an original one.

How a Note in the Margin Became a Verse

The mechanism sounds far fetched until you watch it work on a case anyone can check. In John 5, a sick man at the pool of Bethesda tells Jesus he has nobody to put him into the water “when the water is troubled.” John never explains what troubled water has to do with healing, so somewhere in the copying a scribe wrote a helpful note in the margin about an angel stirring the pool.

A later copyist read that note as a correction, as though the previous scribe had caught a line left out by accident and was putting it back, and lifted it into the text. Every copy made from his carried it. That is why John 5:4 sits in the King James and in a footnote in most modern Bibles.

Most translators believe something close to this happened at Matthew 17:21, with a scribe noting the line from Mark beside the parallel story and a later hand promoting the note into the text.

What Metzger’s “A” Rating Means

The committee behind the standard Greek New Testament grades its decisions with letters, and it rated the omission of Matthew 17:21 with an A, its highest level of confidence. That letter records how certain the editors were, and it records only that. They also printed the evidence behind it, so anyone can weigh the same material and reach their own verdict.

Why the King James and NKJV Keep Matthew 17:21

Now the other pile of evidence, and it is larger than most readers are told.

The sentence stands in the overwhelming majority of Greek manuscripts of Matthew. Jonathan Borland, in a 2010 paper presented to a national gathering of evangelical Bible scholars, put the figure at 99.4 per cent of Greek copies. That number is his finding rather than a settled fact, though the general picture is not disputed by anyone: nearly every surviving Greek copy of Matthew has the verse.

It also runs across the ancient translations. It is in the Old Latin manuscripts, in Jerome’s Vulgate, in the Syriac Peshitta and the Harclean Syriac, in the Armenian, and in Georgian copies. Those are churches in different languages, on different sides of the Roman world, all reading the same sentence in Matthew.

The Early Christians Who Quoted These Words

Christians were quoting this saying long before the oldest surviving copy of Matthew 17 was written. The author known as Pseudo-Clement cites it in the Letters on Virginity, a work usually dated to the second or third century. Tertullian appeals to it in his treatise On Fasting around the same period.

Clement of Alexandria refers to the same episode near the year 200. Origen, writing in the first half of the third century, quotes the sentence and teaches from it in his Commentary on Matthew. After them come Asterius, Hilary, Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome and Augustine, from the fourth century into the fifth.

One qualification belongs right beside that list. Several of these writers never say which Gospel they are quoting, and Mark carries the same saying, so a quotation on its own does not always prove what stood in Matthew.

Origen’s case is the hard one to explain away, since his is a commentary on Matthew and the sentence appears as he works through this passage. Whatever a copyist later did with the line, believers in the second and third centuries were reading these words of Jesus and taking them seriously.

The Wording Does Not Quite Match Mark 9:29

If a scribe copied the line out of Mark into Matthew, you would expect the Greek to match. It does not. Nine of the twelve Greek words in Matthew 17:21 are the same as Mark’s; the rest differ, including the verb.

Why would a man borrowing a sentence reword a quarter of it? James Snapp, who has argued this side at length, treats the mismatch as the strongest single point against the borrowing theory, and it deserves to be named rather than waved off. It also stops short of proving the case, since a scribe writing from memory rather than copying letter by letter would produce exactly this kind of near match.

The Two Families of Manuscripts, Explained in Plain English

Behind every argument here sit two groups of copies, and the disagreement gets clearer once you can name them. The first group is often called Alexandrian, after Alexandria in Egypt, where the dry climate preserved old papyrus and parchment that would have rotted elsewhere. These are the oldest surviving copies, and there are not many of them.

The second group is called Byzantine, after the eastern empire where Greek stayed the language of the church for another thousand years. These copies are later, and there are thousands of them, because the church there kept copying Greek Bibles long after the West had moved to Latin.

So one side has the oldest copies and the other has the most copies, and each thinks its own strength is the one that decides. Both groups were made up of Christians who copied the Scriptures because they believed them.

One objection deserves to be stated plainly rather than buried. When someone calls a small group of manuscripts “the best” and then uses that same group to decide which readings are best, the reasoning has run in a circle. Snapp presses exactly that point.

The answer from the other side is that a manuscript earns its standing before it is used here, by its track record in thousands of places where the reading is not in doubt at all. You are allowed to find that answer persuasive or to find it thin. What matters is that you can now state both positions, which is more than most of the arguing online manages.

The Mark 9:29 Complication Almost Nobody Mentions

Nearly every article on this subject sends the worried reader to Mark 9:29 for comfort and then stops. Here is the rest of it.

The two forms of Mark 9:29 differ over the words “and fasting.” The earliest copies read “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer,” and the phrase about fasting appears in later copies, which is why the ESV and NIV read “prayer” alone there while the King James reads “prayer and fasting.”

That cuts in both directions. It weakens the easy reassurance that the saying survives in Mark exactly as you remember it. It also complicates the borrowing theory, since the line supposedly copied into Matthew is a line whose own longer form is under dispute in Mark.

One thing holds steady through all of it. In every English Bible in print, King James and NIV and ESV together, Mark 9:29 records the Lord Jesus teaching that this kind comes out by prayer. Open two Bibles and look.

What Jesus Said and What Matthew Wrote Are Two Different Questions

Nobody in this debate is claiming Jesus did not say these words. The question is whether Matthew wrote them at this point in his Gospel.

Those come apart cleanly. A copyist’s whole task was to reproduce Matthew as Matthew left him, so even a man certain that Jesus spoke the words owed it to the Gospel to leave them where they belonged.

A translator who moves the line to a footnote is answering the second question, about what stood in Matthew’s Gospel, while the first question stays exactly where it was. Once you separate the two, most of what feels frightening about a footnote settles down.

Is This a Conspiracy to Water Down the Bible?

The fear is reasonable, especially when the first place you heard about this was a list of verses somebody said had been taken out. So take it seriously rather than laughing at it, and then test it.

Ask what a cover up would actually have to look like. Someone hiding a verse does not print a footnote at the bottom of the page telling you the words he hid and which manuscripts contain them. That footnote is the disclosure. It is the reason you were able to ask this question at all, and every version accused of hiding this verse is the version that told you about it.

Then look at who publishes these Bibles. The King James, the NKJV, the NIV and the ESV come from competing publishers chasing the same readers. A translation caught cutting Scripture on the sly would be finished in a season, and its rivals would make sure of it. Nobody in that market has an incentive to hide anything, and everybody has an incentive to expose it.

Two verses get quoted often in this argument, and they are worth handling honestly. Deuteronomy 4:2 warns Israel not to add to or take away from the commandments God gave them. Revelation 22:18-19 warns against adding to or taking from the words of the prophecy of that book.

Both are true and both are serious. Neither one is a ruling about which handwritten copy a translator should follow, and using them that way asks them to answer a question they were not addressing.

Does Any Doctrine Change If Matthew 17:21 Is Not Original?

Test that properly instead of accepting a reassurance. Name what would be lost, then go and see whether it is gone.

What would be lost is the teaching that certain spiritual resistance calls for prayer and fasting. Go and look for it. Mark 9:29 has it, in every Bible in print.

Beyond that, nothing about who Christ is, how a sinner is saved, or how a Christian is to live rests on this sentence. The whole matter has that shape: the places where manuscripts differ are usually small, they are visible in the footnotes, and so far as the surviving evidence shows, no article of the Christian faith is left resting on a disputed reading.

If God Preserved His Word, Why Is There a Footnote?

This is the real question, and most answers dodge it in one of two directions. One side says the verse was stolen. The other says it does not matter. Neither speaks to a believer who holds two things at once: that God keeps His word, and that this line carries a footnote.

Begin with what Scripture actually claims. “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever” (Psalm 12:6-7).

Christians read the “them” of verse 7 in two ways, some taking it as the words of verse 6 and others as the poor and needy of verse 5, so the verse is quoted here alongside others rather than leaned on alone.

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8). “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). “But the word of the Lord endureth for ever” (1 Peter 1:25).

Those promises are firm, and they are worth reading for what they say rather than for what we wish they said. God promises that His word stands, that it endures, that it will not pass away. Scripture nowhere promises that every hand copying it would copy without a slip, and He has never left His church without His word for a single generation. Both halves of that are true together.

Now look at what we actually have. Thousands of copies made in different centuries, in different languages, on different continents, by people who had no way to compare notes.

Set them side by side and the agreement is overwhelming, and the disagreements are so few that a twelve word sentence stands out and earns a footnote of its own. You can see that difference because the copying was careful and the copies are many, and a footnote is what carefulness looks like written down.

And if a footnote can shake your confidence, your confidence had been resting on the absence of questions rather than on the God who speaks. He is not embarrassed by your looking. Believers who work through a question like this one tend to come out steadier than they went in, because they now know why they trust what they trust.

The Consistency Question Both Sides Have to Answer

Both positions cost something, and naming the cost is what separates a genuine disagreement from a conspiracy.

If you accept the modern reasoning here, be ready to accept it elsewhere, because the same standard that footnotes Matthew 17:21 also footnotes 1 John 5:7 and the long ending of Mark. If you hold to the King James text here, the same applies in reverse, since the King James keeps all of those readings and defending it at Matthew 17:21 means defending it at 1 John 5:7 too.

Christians who land on different sides of this are not enemies, and neither side is running a scheme. You are allowed to weigh it and to hold the question open while you keep reading your Bible.

Fasting Does Not Stand or Fall on This One Verse

If Matthew 17:21 were struck from every Bible on earth tomorrow, fasting would lose nothing. Look at how much of it there is:

• Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights before facing the tempter (Matthew 4:2).
• He taught His followers how to fast and assumed they would, saying “when ye fast,” never “if” (Matthew 6:16-18).
• He said the days would come when the bridegroom is taken away, “and then shall they fast” (Matthew 9:15).
• Anna served God in the temple “with fastings and prayers night and day” (Luke 2:37).
• The church at Antioch fasted and prayed before sending out Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13:2-3).
• Elders were appointed in the young churches with prayer and fasting (Acts 14:23).
• Paul lists fastings among the labours of his ministry (2 Corinthians 6:5; 11:27).

That is the Lord Jesus, a prophetess, the apostles and the early churches, none of them resting on one sentence in Matthew.

Read also: 10 Importance of Fasting and Prayer and Things to Do When Fasting and Praying

Do You Still Need Prayer and Fasting to Face Hard Spiritual Resistance?

Some readers were taught that this verse is the method for a particular kind of deliverance, and for them the question was never only about manuscripts. If the verse goes, does the practice go? Does the answer they have been praying for go with it?

Hold two things together here. Scripture does call believers to prayer and fasting, and Mark 9:29 stands. When you face something that will not move, giving yourself to prayer and denying your body food to do it is a right and biblical response, and the Lord Jesus Himself taught it.

Alongside that, hold what Jesus actually said when the disciples asked why they failed. He put it in one word: “because of your unbelief” (Matthew 17:20). The diagnosis landed on their faith. Fasting humbles a person before God, as David said: “I humbled my soul with fasting” (Psalm 35:13).

It clears the attention so a believer can seek God with everything they have, and it leaves God free to answer as He chooses. Treating it as a technique that obligates Him misreads the verse whether or not Matthew wrote it.

So to the reader in a long hard case, with a child or a marriage or a chain still holding: keep praying. Fast if the Lord leads you to. And when someone suggests the answer is being withheld because your performance fell short, weigh it against this chapter.

The disciples failed here. Jesus said hard words about a faithless generation, and then He told the father to bring the boy to Him and healed him.

Read also: Things to Avoid When Fasting and Praying and Wisdom In Spiritual Warfare

Other Verses Missing From Modern Bibles Like the NIV and ESV

You will meet this again, so it helps to know the list ahead of time. These are the places most often noticed:

• Matthew 18:11 “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.” The same saying stands in Luke 19:10.
• Matthew 23:14 a woe against devouring widows’ houses, which also appears in Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47.
• Mark 16:9-20 the long ending of Mark, usually printed with a note rather than dropped.
• Luke 17:36 a line about two men in the field, paralleled in Matthew 24:40.
• John 5:4 the angel troubling the pool at Bethesda.
• Acts 8:37 the Ethiopian’s confession of faith before his baptism.
• 1 John 5:7 the words about three bearing record in heaven.

That is a short list against a book of more than a thousand pages, the footnote tells you in every case exactly what is in question, and notice how many of them are covered elsewhere in Scripture anyway.

What to Do the Next Time You Find a Missing Verse

Here is a way of handling this that you can use for the rest of your life.

1. Read the footnote. It tells you what the question is and which copies say what, given to you freely.
2. Check the parallel passage. Most disputed lines in the Gospels appear elsewhere. Here the saying stands in Mark 9:29.
3. Ask what would be lost. If a teaching rests only on the disputed words and appears nowhere else in Scripture, hold it loosely until you have weighed it against the rest of the Bible. If it stands elsewhere, the question is about wording rather than doctrine.
4. Compare two translations. Owning a King James and an ESV is a strength. It lets you see the question for yourself instead of taking anyone’s word for it, including this article’s.
5. Search it out like a Berean. They “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11), and Luke calls them noble for it. The God of truth is not threatened by a reader who checks.

Should you switch to the King James? That is not the question worth your energy. Read the Bible you own, read it more than you argue about it, and if you can, keep a second translation beside it. People who read widely in Scripture are rarely the ones shaken by a footnote.

Read also: Why Stay Away from the Book of Enoch and Is It a Sin to Read the Book of Enoch

Which Bible Versions Have Matthew 17:21 and Which Do Not

To find it in your own Bible, look at the bottom of the page beside the verse 20 marker. Most editions place the note there, and some put it in a centre column instead.

Is Matthew 17:21 in the Catholic Bible, the NIV, or the ESV?

In the NIV and the ESV, the sentence appears in a footnote and the verse number is skipped in the main text. Both versions follow the earliest Greek copies here.

Recent Catholic editions do the same, which surprises readers who expect the split to run along Catholic and Protestant lines. It does not run that way here. Catholic and Protestant translators are working from the same body of Greek manuscripts and reaching the same conclusion about this line, and that is a useful reminder that the question is about copies rather than about denominations.

What Brackets and Footnotes in Your Bible Actually Mean

Brackets are a translator saying two things at once: these words were probably added later, and they are too widely known and too widely attested to be buried. So the words are printed, and they are marked.

A footnote is a translator telling you what other manuscripts say at that spot, with his working shown in public.

Both marks exist to disclose, and the mark on the page is the only reason this question ever reached you.

What Is Certain, What Is Disputed, and What Is Not Worth Your Fear

Certain. A father brought his tormented son and Jesus healed him. The disciples failed because of unbelief. Jesus set faith the size of a mustard seed against a mountain.

Mark 9:29 records Jesus teaching that this kind comes out by prayer. Scripture calls Christians to fast, from the example of Jesus to the practice of the early churches.

Disputed. Whether Matthew wrote the sentence at 17:21, or a later copyist brought it in from Mark. The evidence runs both ways, believing scholars disagree, and you are permitted to weigh it without rushing.

Not worth your fear. None of these deserves it: that someone is editing your Bible behind your back, that a doctrine of the faith hangs on this line, or that God has lost control of His word.

The whole reason this sentence can be discussed at all is that the copying was careful and the copies are many. A book handled loosely would be unlikely to let you see a twelve word difference at all. You are looking at evidence of care.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Articles to Read Next

• Lessons from Matthew 17 walks through the whole chapter, from the transfiguration to the coin in the fish’s mouth.
• 10 Importance of Fasting and Prayer sets out what Scripture says fasting is for and what it does in a believer.
• Things to Avoid When Fasting and Praying is worth reading before your next fast.
• Parable of the Mustard Seed Meaning takes up the same image Jesus used with the disciples in this chapter.
• Why Stay Away from the Book of Enoch answers a related question about a writing many people expect to find in their Bible.
• Bible Matthew 17 Quiz with Answers is a good way to test what you now know about the chapter.

Two Bibles, two different pages, and both printed by people who tremble at the word of God. That is where this started, and the tension turns out to be smaller than it looked. The disagreement is honest, the evidence on each side is real, and the saying itself sits safely in Mark 9:29 in every Bible either side has ever printed.

So take the Bible you own and open it to Matthew 17. Read the father on his knees, the boy set free, the disciples asking why they failed, and the answer Jesus gave them about unbelief and a mustard seed. None of that is in question in any manuscript anywhere. Then go and pray about the thing that has not moved yet, and fast if He leads you, and let a footnote be what it has always been: a translator telling you the truth.