Missing Verses in the Bible: The Real Truth Explained

Two things are true at the same time, and holding them together is uncomfortable. God closes the Bible with a warning that anyone who takes away from the words of His book will answer to Him for it. And if you read an NIV, an ESV, an NLT, or a CSB, there are verses printed in the King James Bible that your Bible does not print at all.

You can look them up right now and find an empty space where a number should be. That is what sends people searching for missing verses in the Bible, and it is a fair thing to want settled. Either something was taken from the word of God, or something else happened. It matters which.

Are There Really Missing Verses in the Bible?

Nothing God spoke has been lost. A small number of verses that appear in the King James Version are absent from most modern translations because the oldest surviving copies of the New Testament do not contain them. The question was never what modern translators took out. The evidence points the other way, to what earlier copyists put in.

That turn settles the matter with evidence instead of suspicion. A verse can be absent from your Bible without ever having been part of Scripture in the first place, and that can be checked line by line.

Before anything else, the concern itself deserves respect. A person who reads closely enough to notice a skipped verse number is reading the way God asks us to read.

“To this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word” (Isaiah 66:2). Trembling at God’s word is a good instinct. It only needs the facts.

What You Saw Was a Gap in the Numbering, Not a Hole in Scripture

Open Matthew 18 in a modern Bible and the numbers run 10, then 12. Verse 11 is not on the page. The eye reads that as a missing page, because we are trained to treat verse numbers as part of the text.

Translators could smooth this over by renumbering the chapter, and they refuse to for a good reason. Every concordance, cross-reference, study Bible, sermon outline and commentary in the English-speaking world is built on the current numbering, and renumbering one chapter would break all of it. So the gap stays, and a footnote explains it.

Where Chapter and Verse Numbers Came From

Scripture came to us without chapter or verse numbers. Paul wrote Romans as one continuous letter, and Mark wrote his Gospel as one unbroken account. The letters and Gospels were read aloud in full, straight through.

Chapter divisions came in the early 1200s. Verse divisions for the New Testament came in the middle 1500s, and the Geneva Bible of 1560 was the first complete English Bible printed with both. The numbering is a filing system laid over the text about fifteen hundred years after the text was written.

That filing system can be imperfect. The word it points to is not. A gap in the numbers is a fault in the index, and the index was never inspired.

The Complete List of the Missing Verses in the Bible

Here is the whole list in full, so you can read what is in question rather than trust anyone’s summary of it. Every verse below appears in the King James Version and the New King James Version, and most modern translations drop them to a footnote.

• Matthew 17:21 “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.”
• Matthew 18:11 “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.”
• Matthew 23:14 “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.”
• Mark 7:16 “If any man have ears to hear, let him hear.”
• Mark 9:44 “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”
• Mark 9:46 “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”
• Mark 11:26 “But if ye do not forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.”
• Mark 15:28 “And the scripture was fulfilled, which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors.”
• Luke 17:36 “Two men shall be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”
• Luke 23:17 “(For of necessity he must release one unto them at the feast.)”
• John 5:4 “For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.”
• Acts 8:37 “And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”
• Acts 15:34 “Notwithstanding it pleased Silas to abide there still.”
• Acts 24:7 “But the chief captain Lysias came upon us, and with great violence took him away out of our hands.”
• Acts 28:29 “And when he had said these words, the Jews departed, and had great reasoning among themselves.”
• Romans 16:24 “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.”

Three longer portions are also disputed and are handled further down, because they raise their own questions: the ending of Mark at Mark 16:9-20, the account of the woman caught in adultery at John 7:53-8:11, and a phrase inside 1 John 5:7.

Why Some Lists Say 16 and Others Say 17 or 45

The number depends on what is being counted and against which translation. Count whole verses absent from the NIV compared with the KJV and you get sixteen. Add John 5:3, where part of the verse is in question rather than all of it, and you get seventeen. Lists that climb into the forties have stopped counting verses and started counting individual words and phrases, which is a different measurement wearing the same label.

None of the counts are secret, and none of them are large.

Verse by Verse: Where Each Truth Still Stands in Your Bible

Almost everyone who writes on this subject says the same sentence: no doctrine is affected. Very few show it. Here is the list again, with the place each truth still stands in a verse no translation questions.

• Matthew 17:21, on prayer and fasting, stands in Mark 9:29: “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.” The Lord’s teaching on fasting also stands in Matthew 6:16-18.
• Matthew 18:11 stands in Luke 19:10 with a word added rather than taken away: “For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
• Matthew 23:14, on devouring widows’ houses, stands in Mark 12:40 and Luke 20:47.
• Mark 7:16, “If any man have ears to hear, let him hear,” stands in Mark 4:9 and Mark 4:23, and the same call sounds again to each of the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3.
• Mark 9:44 and Mark 9:46 are word for word what Mark 9:48 says, and Mark 9:48 is printed in every Bible on the shelf.
• Mark 11:26, on forgiveness, stands in Matthew 6:15: “But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
• Mark 15:28 stands in Luke 22:37, where Jesus Himself quotes Isaiah 53:12 and says it must be fulfilled in Him.
• Luke 17:36 stands in Matthew 24:40: “Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”
• Luke 23:17 describes the governor’s custom at the feast, and Matthew 27:15 and Mark 15:6 describe the same custom.
• John 5:4 explains the stirring of the water, and the sick man explains it himself two verses later in John 5:7, which is in every Bible.
• Acts 8:37, the eunuch’s confession, stands in Romans 10:9-10 as the pattern for every believer, and in Peter’s confession in Matthew 16:16.
• Acts 15:34, Acts 24:7 and Acts 28:29 are details of who stayed where and who said what. Nothing taught anywhere in Scripture rests on them.
• Romans 16:24 is the same benediction that Paul writes four verses earlier in Romans 16:20.

Read that list through and the fear runs out of the subject. Not one truth disappears. The most a reader loses is a second copy of something God already said elsewhere, often within a few chapters. Losing a duplicate is a different thing from losing a truth.

Why These Verses Are Not in Modern Translations

How a Verse Gets Added to a Copy

Picture a man copying the Gospel of John by hand. He reaches the pool of Bethesda, where a sick man speaks about the water being troubled, and he knows readers will wonder what that means. So he writes a short explanation in the margin, the way you might pencil a note beside a hard verse in your own Bible.

Years later another man copies that copy. He sees writing in the margin and has to make a decision about it. He judges that the first copyist had left a line out by mistake and corrected it in the margin, so he does the respectful thing and puts it back into the text. From that day, every copy made from his copy carries the sentence as Scripture.

Two other ordinary things happened as well. A copyist who knew Matthew and Mark by heart could smooth one Gospel toward the other without meaning to, which is how a line that belongs in Mark 9:48 turns up at Mark 9:44 and 9:46. And a phrase used constantly in public worship could work its way onto the page because the ear expected it there.

Scripture does not tell us what was in these men’s hearts, so no one should accuse them. What we can see is that the additions almost always came at points where a reader would struggle, which looks far more like reverence than mischief. It is a sobering thing all the same. Even honest care can end in adding to what God said.

The Two Streams of Manuscripts Behind Your Bible

The original sheets Paul and John wrote on are long gone. What survives is copies, thousands of them, and they fall into two broad groups.

The King James Version and the New King James Version rest on a printed Greek text called the Textus Receptus, assembled from a handful of later copies. Those copies are plentiful, and most were made a thousand years or more after the apostles.

Modern translations, including the NIV, ESV, NASB, CSB and NLT, also draw on far older copies that were found in the last few centuries, including two famous fourth-century books called Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, along with papyrus fragments older still.

One phrase confuses almost everyone here. When scholars talk about newer manuscripts, they mean documents newly discovered and much older in date. Newly found, older written.

Why the KJV Translators Are Not to Blame

The men who produced the King James Version in 1611 used the best Greek text anyone in England could obtain. Codex Sinaiticus was not found until the 1800s. You cannot fault a translator for failing to consult a book that was still sitting in a monastery two centuries after he died.

They did careful, God-fearing work, and that Bible carried the gospel through the English-speaking world for four hundred years. Loving the King James Version is not the problem, and nothing in this article is a charge against it.

How Translators Decide What Belongs in the Text

When copies disagree, someone has to weigh them, and the working rules are simpler than most people expect.

Prefer the shorter reading, because a copyist is far more likely to add an explanation than to delete a line of Scripture. Prefer the harder reading, because no one smooths a text into something more difficult. Prefer the wording that matches how that writer normally writes. And prefer the reading that best explains how all the other readings came about.

Take Mark 7:16 through those rules honestly, including the part that cuts the other way. The verse appears in a majority of the surviving Greek copies, which is a real argument for keeping it.

Against that, it is absent from the earliest copies we have, and the exact sentence already stands twice in Mark 4. It is easy to see how a copyist familiar with Mark 4 would write it here. It is much harder to explain why anyone would delete it.

That is judgment, not certainty, and translators say so on the page. The honesty is a point in their favour. A committee trying to bend Scripture would not publish the evidence against its own decision at the foot of the page.

What the Footnotes Are For, and How to Read One

Nothing was hidden from you. The footnote is the translator showing his work.

Look at the bottom of the page at Acts 8:36 in an NIV and you will find the whole of Acts 8:37 printed there, with a note that some manuscripts include it. The verse was not destroyed. It was moved down the page with an explanation attached.

The wording of these notes is short, so here is what the common phrases mean. “Some manuscripts” means the reading is in copies we have, though not the earliest ones. “Early manuscripts do not contain this verse” means the oldest copies we possess lack it. “NU omits” is a note in the NKJV meaning the main modern printed Greek texts leave it out, while the NKJV keeps it in.

So when a verse number is skipped, look down the page before you look for a conspiracy. The answer is almost always printed a few inches below.

The Verses People Feel the Loss Of Most

Matthew 17:21 and the Question About Fasting

This is the one people search for by name, and it is easy to see why. The disciples cannot cast out a spirit, and in the King James text Jesus tells them, “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” Losing a verse about fasting feels like losing ground in the spiritual life.

Nothing has been lost. Mark tells the same scene, and in Mark 9:29 Jesus says, “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting.” The teaching that Matthew 17:21 carries is standing in Mark, in the same episode, in every translation printed.

Beyond that one scene, Jesus assumes His people will fast. In Matthew 6:16-18 He does not say if you fast, He says when you fast, and He gives instructions for doing it without performing for an audience. In Matthew 9:15 He says the days will come when His disciples fast.

So keep fasting. A footnote in Matthew has taken nothing away from a practice the Lord Himself taught and expected, and the importance of fasting and prayer stands exactly where it always stood.

Mark 16:9-20 and the Ending of Mark

The last twelve verses of Mark are the longest disputed passage in the New Testament. Most modern Bibles still print them, usually with a line or a bracket noting that the earliest copies of Mark end at verse 8.

The dispute concerns the ending of one Gospel, and it leaves the resurrection standing untouched. Inside the undisputed text, at Mark 16:6, the angel says, “Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified: he is risen; he is not here.” The empty tomb is announced before the disputed section begins. Matthew, Luke and John each record the risen Christ at length, and Paul lists the eyewitnesses in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.

The verses about taking up serpents and drinking deadly things sit inside this disputed passage, and they should be handled with care rather than ignored. Whatever conclusion a person reaches about the ending of Mark, a contested text is a poor foundation for a practice that risks a life. Scripture never asks a believer to test God for a demonstration, and Jesus refused that very suggestion in Matthew 4:7.

John 7:53-8:11 and the Woman Caught in Adultery

The account of the woman brought to Jesus by her accusers is missing from the earliest copies of John, and it appears at different places in later copies, which is one of the reasons scholars question whether John wrote it here. Most Bibles still print it, set apart by brackets or a note.

Whatever is decided about where those verses belong, everything they show about Christ is taught plainly elsewhere. He receives sinners and eats with them (Luke 15:2). He came to save the world rather than condemn it (John 3:17), and Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus and walk after the Spirit.

And He sends the forgiven away with a command, “go, and sin no more,” which He also speaks in John 5:14 to the man He healed at the pool. Mercy and the call to leave the sin travel together in this passage, and they travel together everywhere else in the Gospels too.

1 John 5:7 and the Doctrine of the Trinity

Set the two readings beside each other. The King James Version reads, “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth, the spirit, and the water, and the blood.” A modern translation prints only the second half, about the Spirit, the water, and the blood.

The heavenly witness clause is the clearest single sentence on the Trinity in the whole Bible, so the question presses hard. If that sentence goes, does the doctrine go with it?

It does not, and the proof is everywhere. Jesus commands baptism in one name belonging to three, “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19). At the Jordan the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends, and the Father speaks from heaven (Matthew 3:16-17).

John opens his Gospel with the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1), and that Word was made flesh (John 1:14). Paul closes a letter with the grace of Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost (2 Corinthians 13:14).

There is a lesson underneath the question. A doctrine that could be destroyed by removing one sentence was never resting on the weight of Scripture as a whole. The truth about the Holy Trinity is woven through the whole Bible, which is why it survives a disputed clause without a scratch.

Does This Break the Warning of Revelation 22:18-19?

This is the verse driving the fear, so let it be read in full.

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book” (Revelation 22:18-19).

Read what the warning actually forbids. It forbids tampering with the words God gave. Refusing to print as Scripture what the earliest copies do not contain is obedience to that warning rather than a breach of it. A translator who prints only what he has good reason to believe John wrote is doing precisely what the verse demands.

The same warning stands twice more in Scripture, and both times it cuts in both directions. Moses gives it to Israel in Deuteronomy 4:2: “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it.”

Solomon gives it again in Proverbs 30:6, where the emphasis falls entirely on addition: “Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.”

Adding is named first in both places. Adding to God’s word carries the same weight as taking from it, and it is the error that actually produced these sixteen verses.

So who should tremble at Revelation 22:18-19? Anyone who would bend the text of Scripture to his own preference, in either direction. A believer holding a translation whose committee laboured to print only what the apostles wrote can read that verse without dread.

Did God Fail to Keep His Word?

Underneath every version of this search sits one question, and it is worth naming plainly. If men could add lines to the Bible over the centuries, did God lose control of His own book?

Look at what God actually promised. “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).

“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8). “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matthew 5:18). “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35).

Now look at how He kept those promises. He did not preserve one flawless copy in one safe place, where a single fire or one determined ruler could have ended it. He scattered His word across thousands of hand-copied witnesses, in different countries, in different languages, in the hands of churches that could not consult one another.

That scattering is the reason no man, no council and no empire has ever been able to alter the Bible. Any change made in one place stands exposed by copies sitting a thousand miles away, and that is exactly how these sixteen verses came to light.

There is also a distinction worth holding. “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16) speaks of what God breathed out through the prophets and apostles.

Copying is a different work, carried by ordinary faithful hands, and God oversaw it in a way that kept His word intact without making any copyist infallible. The wonder is not that a handful of explanatory lines drifted into the text. The wonder is how few there are, and that we can identify them at all.

Your Bible is a book God has kept. The evidence of these verses is evidence of that keeping, not evidence against it.

How Much of the Bible Is Actually in Question?

Proportion helps here more than vocabulary does. Sixteen verses stand against 31,102 in the Bible, and every one of them says something the Bible says elsewhere.

The New Testament survives in thousands of Greek copies, with fragments dating within roughly a century of the writing, and further thousands of early translations and quotations on top of that. No other writing from the ancient world is attested anything like that well. The oldest copies of most celebrated ancient works stand many centuries from their originals and survive in a handful of manuscripts, and no one proposes that we therefore know nothing about what those authors wrote.

The honest summary is short. The differences are real, they are published in the open at the bottom of your own page, and they are small.

Missing Verses Are Not the Same as Lost Books

Two different questions usually arrive tangled together, and separating them saves a great deal of confusion.

A textual variant asks about the wording of a book the church already receives as Scripture. Did John write this sentence in this place? That is the question this article has been answering, and it is settled by comparing copies.

Books like 1 Enoch, the Gospel of Thomas, and the writings called the Apocrypha raise a completely different question. That question reaches past the wording of a sentence inside Matthew and asks whether a separate book belongs in the Bible at all.

It is answered on different ground: who wrote it, when, whether the apostles and the churches received it, and whether it agrees with what God has already said. If that is the question you actually came with, it is worth reading about the book of Enoch on its own terms rather than mixing it into this one.

Is It a Sin to Read the NIV, and Which Bible Has All the Verses?

No, it is not a sin, and no faithful translation is hiding anything from you. Every version discussed here prints its own evidence in its own footnotes, which is the opposite of concealment.

If you want a Bible that prints all sixteen verses in the main text, the King James Version, the New King James Version and the Modern English Version do exactly that. If you read an NIV, ESV, CSB, NASB or NLT, the same material is on your page in the notes, and the truth each verse carries is in your Bible in another place, as the list further up shows.

Scripture does not name an English translation, so no one should make a rule where God has not made one. Read a translation you actually understand, because a Bible you can follow will do you more good than one you admire and rarely finish. When you sit down to study a passage closely, read it in two translations side by side. Where they differ, the difference itself will teach you something, and the footnotes will usually tell you why.

The KJV-Only Question, Answered With Respect

Start with what is right in the concern, because something in it is right. Behind it is love for God’s word and a refusal to let anyone tamper with it. That instinct is worth more than a hundred casual believers who would not notice if a chapter vanished.

Where the position runs into trouble is at the New King James Version. The NKJV rests on the same Textus Receptus as the KJV and prints all sixteen verses, and so does the Modern English Version. Both are commonly rejected all the same. When a translation built on the very Greek text the argument is defending is refused, the loyalty has attached itself to one English edition of 1611 rather than to the underlying text it claims to protect.

Say that kindly, and only if you are asked. A brother who is wrong about a translation is still a brother, and a person who loves the King James Version is not your opponent. The place loyalty belongs is with the words God breathed out through the prophets and apostles, and with the God who gave them.

Answering Someone Who Says the Bible Has Been Changed

If you are asked about this by a sceptic or a friend of another faith, concede the true part first. Yes, copies made by hand over centuries differ in places, and yes, some lines in the King James Version are absent from the oldest copies. A defence built on denying that collapses the moment the other person opens a study Bible.

Then state what stands. The differences are catalogued in public. They are tiny in proportion. Not one point of Christian teaching depends on them, which anyone can check for himself by looking up where each verse’s truth still stands.

Then make the turn, because this is where the argument reverses. The footnote that looks like an admission of weakness is the strongest evidence of integrity available. A book being edited in secret to suit its editors does not print the evidence against its own readings at the bottom of the page.

The church has published its own working notes for anyone to inspect, and the reason it can afford to is that there is nothing to hide. This is worth thinking through before you are the one being asked, and it belongs alongside learning how to explain the Trinity to a skeptic in the same conversation.

What to Do When a Verse Is Not on Your Page

Take the practical steps, and the anxiety loses its grip.

• In the service. If someone reads a verse you cannot find, glance at the footnote at the bottom of your page and keep listening. Nothing is being kept from you.
• In your own reading. Look up where that truth stands elsewhere. The list above gives you every one of them, and finding it yourself will settle the matter better than reading anyone’s assurance.
• With a relative who holds to the King James Version only. Agree with them about what matters, which is that God’s word is not ours to edit. Leave the argument there unless they want more.
• With a child or a new believer. Keep it simple and true. The Bible was copied by hand for hundreds of years, the copies were compared, the few differences were found and written down for everyone to see, and God kept His word.
• With your own fear. Take Psalm 12:6-7 and Isaiah 40:8 and read them until they sink in. The God who kept His word intact through two thousand years of copying is well able to keep you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Articles to Read Next

• What Is the Holy Trinity walks through what the Bible teaches about Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which is the doctrine most often raised in the argument over 1 John 5:7.
• 10 Importance of Fasting and Prayer picks up where Matthew 17:21 leaves off and shows what Scripture actually teaches about fasting.
• Why Stay Away from the Book of Enoch answers the separate question about books outside the Bible that readers often confuse with this one.
• How to Explain the Trinity to a Skeptic helps with the wider conversation you may be having when the reliability of the Bible comes up.

You came here holding two things that seemed to contradict each other: a warning from God about taking away from His book, and a verse number missing from your page. They never were in conflict. The verses in question were most likely added by men who were trying to help, they came to light by comparing the copies God scattered across the world, and every truth they carried is still sitting in your Bible in another place. Go and look up two or three of them tonight. Read Mark 9:29 where Matthew 17:21 was, and Luke 19:10 where Matthew 18:11 was, and see for yourself that the ground under your feet did not move. The grass withereth and the flower fadeth, and the word of our God is still standing.