Dear Everett,

Thank you for your letter asking about all the Bible translations that are on the market today. You asked "why all the different versions?" This is a question often asked and seldom understood. I am happy to explain it if I can. I wish that all Bible students could understand what I am about to tell you. It would save a great deal of misunderstanding about the newer versions.

Let me give you a little history of Bible translation, and I believe it will help answer your question about "versions" and their omitting some verses. Let me see if I can illustrate it like this:

THE NEED FOR COPIES

When the Holy Spirit inspired John (for example) to write the original "Gospel of John," he wrote it in the Greek language on a flimsy sort of paper called "papyrus." When his letter was finished, the brethren who got hold of the book (let's say they lived in Ephesus) immediately started making copies and sending them to other brethren living in Alexandra and Thessalonica and Colossi.

When they received their copy, these brethren began making their own copies--both to keep and to share with others. So the layout at this point looks like this:

• the inspired letter written by John
• copies made by brethren
• copies of the copies

By about 300 AD, when all the 27 books of the New Testament were collected into one "New Testament" you can imagine how many hand- made copies were already extant (in existence) in the world.

A WORD ABOUT "ERRORS" IN THE BIBLE

There is a hard thing for some Bible believers to accept, but we must face it, and here it is: the original writing of the New Testament books were inspired, but not the copies.

That means that, even though he may mean well, a man sitting down making a copy of something by hand is capable of making mistakes. (On my desk this very moment is a "New American Standard Bible" published by a big printing firm in California. In that Bible (1 John 3:2) reads, "Beloved, now we are the children of God, and it has not appeared as yet that we shall be." It doesn't make sense, does it? Why? Because there is a misspelled word there. The word "that" was supposed to be the word "What"--"it has not yet appeared what we shall be." If modern publishers can "slip up" in their printing, imagine how many "slips" were made when they were being published by hand!

In most cases, great care was taken to assure that no mistakes crept in, but during times of persecution, hundreds of brethren "jotted down" a copy in a hurry, and some of these contain errors.

Thus it only makes sense that, if I made a copy of the New Testament in 125 AD, and if my children copied my error into the next text, then their children did the same--after 100 years you would have hundreds of New Testaments with my mistake there.

So as early as 350--at the end of the terrible Diocletian persecution, a new king by the name of Constantine came to the throne. He saw that king Diocletian had burned every Bible he could get his hands on, so the new king ordered the scholars to produce 50 Bibles. The scholars were worried about producing a Bible with textual purity. They began saying "we need to keep the text as pure as possible." So how do you do that? They said, "Let's go back as far as we can to the original text. Let's get the oldest manuscripts we have, and come up with a translation that is true to the original Greek version." They tried, but all they had to go by was one "major text" and a Latin translation called the "Old Latin."

By the time King James came to the throne of England, the old version of the Bible was getting outdated. People wanted a text in their own English language, so the advisors to King James told him "we need a new, commonly accepted version of the Bible." King James (who by the way was a "mongoloid"--a deformed and mentally retarded fellow) put his seal on the order, and the scholars went to work. In 1611 they came up with the famous King James Version. It was the best version of the time, but by no means was it a great translation. Why? Because they hadn't found many old texts and didn't have much to go by.

Because it was good at the time and because the king ordered that it become the accepted translation used by all, the KJV became the "only" Bible used by the people for almost 300 years. Other translations were made, and most of them were better than the KJV, but never caught on with the people.

Since 1611, archaeologists have discovered many more older and older manuscripts--some of them just a few years away from the original. The scholars figure a "first copy" manuscript is more valuable than a text written 300 years later, because it had less time to become corrupted by mistakes. Scholars are constantly seeking those ancient manuscripts to purify our text even better.

Thus in the past 50 years, better and better versions of the Bible have been translated and published using older and older texts to go by. (Get you some material on the the Dead Sea Scrolls and you will see what I mean. That was a discovery in 1947 of an entire Old Testament 600 years older than anything we had ever had before.)

HOW DID THE ERRORS GET INTO THESE TEXTS?

• Translating errors:

  In the first century, the Greek language had no punctuation. Every letter was a capital and there were no spaces, periods or question marks. Now imagine that you were reading the original Greek of this sentence. I am writing it in English of course, but you can see what I am saying. What is the following sentence saying?

  HAVEYOUEVERSEENABUNDANCEONTHETABLE

  It is easy to figure that it is a question, but what is the question saying? I could be asking "Have you ever seen abundance on the table. . ." or I could be asking "Have you ever see a bun dance on the table?" Some mistakes got in like that.

• Marginal errors:

  Assume that I am a scribe living in the second century. After a year or two, I make myself a copy of the New Testament--not to sell for others, but for my own study. So one day I am sitting on the porch reading Acts 8. When I come to the part where it says (verse 36 now--but there were no such verses in those days) "and the eunuch said, "Look! Water! What prevents me from being baptized?" At that point I get my pen and take down a note out in my margin. It was just a note and it was put there to remind me of something--maybe a point in a Bible lesson I was working up.

  Sometime later I die. I leave my Bible to my children who begin to make a copy of my worn out text for their own study. They come to that spot, and seeing my notes in the margin, they think it should have been in the text--that I made a mistake. Thus they include my note into their copy, and there is stays for hundreds of years as Acts 8:37, being copied again and again.

SO HOW DO THEY DETERMINE THE TRUTH?

In our generation, we have some very sure ways of knowing we have a pure text. I can't go into the entire art of "textual criticism," but let me give you a thought or two:

First, there are hundreds of Godly Christian men who are giving their lives to a study of the text. They will take the verse in Acts 8:37, and go back to the "Ryland manuscript" and the "Vatican Manuscript" and the "Sinaitic Manuscript" and the "Alexandrian Codex"--these are ancient texts that the KJV translators didn't even possess in their day. They will check to see if the verse is there in those ancient texts.

As they look through the hundreds of fragments and translations and versions, they may discover that Acts 8:37 first shows up in a New Testament written in 450 AD. Before that date, it is not to be found in any of the manuscripts. They can then conclude that it was a late addition and was not in your original New Testament.

The Scholars, then, will tell you that by using different methods. (1) Later scholars working on some study Bibles in the KJV put these questionable texts in brackets [like this] (see John 7:53-8:11). (2) Others will use the italics to note a questionable word or sentence.

It only makes sense that if a copy of the New Testament written in 1040 AD had a certain verse, but one written about 110 AD didn't have it, there is something wrong somewhere, and the ancient text is probably right.

BUT DOESN'T THAT MEAN THAT THE BIBLE IS FULL OF ERRORS?

Absolutely not! It merely means that sincere students of the word are keeping the text pure and taking us back closer and closer to the original. Someday somebody in Israel may stumble over a stone and underneath they may find a copy of the original New Testament. Then we will have the ultimate truth. But until that day we will search for older and older texts to get closer and closer to the truth.

But don't be perplexed about some verses being taken out of your King James Version. Compare versions. If you don't like the idea that the New International Version takes these verses out and puts them in the margin, then use the New American Standard Version. It notes that there is a questionable text, but leaves it in. I like that.

And every version of the Bible is still more than powerful enough to save you if you obey it.

Let me end by telling you a story--it is a story about a town that was located in the mountains. They took their water from a small river that ran through the town. One day they were looking at their budget and the mayor came across the name of John Boggs. The city had been paying this man for years for "water sanitation" and nobody knew him. They were angry that the fellow had been taking money for years and doing nothing so they wrote him and ordered that he present himself to the town counsel the next week.

John came to town and attended the meeting. He was a mountain man with beard and coarse clothes. They demanded to know about his robbing them of money for these many years, but the old man would say nothing except he did his job faithfully for years. They fired him of course, and threatened him, but let him go.

A few weeks later people in the village started growing ill. After a while an epidemic broke out in the town, and the scientists had to be called in to find the cause. It was the water supply. The scientists told the town council, "what you really need is someone who lives in the mountains to walk the river and keep out the trash and pollutants that fall into the river."

Immediately the counsel saw their mistake. They went in search of the old man, and found his home way up in the hills, at the spot where the water came pouring out of the mountain. They apologized to the man and hired him again. The old man forgave them and went back to walking the river. From the town all the way to the source, John Boggs was cleaning out anything that would pollute the water supply. Nobody ever saw him, and nobody ever appreciated him until he quit. But his work was vital.

Now I believe it would help, Everett, to see the work of Bible translation somewhat like that story. The river is the ever flowing word of God. The people of the village are people like you and me who "drink of the life-giving stream." The people who work on new translations of the text are somewhat like John Boggs. It is their job to trace the stream back as far as they can to its source, and weed out for us any questionable texts, thus assuring us of a purer and purer stream.

But do not be upset by the process. God didn't promise that every one of us who ever sits down to write out a scripture is going to be inspired and guarded from mistakes. Errors do creep in, but we have over 250,000 ancient hand-written copies of your New Testament. This is more than enough to trace any error and keep the text pure. All scripture is still inspired of God (2 Tim.3:16) and is still able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified (Acts 20:31). May God grant you

Grace and peace,

David Lusk