The Translation Wars
From time to time images like this pop up on social media with the claim that the NIV (New International Version) doesn't want you to know about salvation and that verses such as the ones above have been deliberately left out.
Often this is linked to the fact that the NIV is published by Harper-Collins which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and which also publishes the Satanic Bible. Therefore there is a conspiracy to deceive christians.
It is true that the verses in question, along with a bunch of other verses in the New Testament, are missing from the modern translations of the Bible. Usually, they are omitted from the main body of the text and put in the footnotes with a comment like “Some old manuscripts have “For the Son of Man came to save that which was lost.”
It is not just the NIV, but all modern translations such as the New Living Translation. We can’t blame this on Rupert Murdoch, or the satan worshippers at Harper-Collins.
So what is going on?
The King James Version of the Bible arose in the years following the Reformation. At the time the only widely available versions of the Bible were in Latin. The Catholic Church did not want people reading Scripture in their own language because they might interpret it incorrectly and be led into error. But the Reformers wanted people to get scriptures in their own language so that they might find Jesus and salvation.
The King James Version was published in 1611 to meet this need to produce an English version of Scriptures. There had been earlier versions of Scripture published in English, but they were translations of the Latin version. The KJV was a direct translation from the original Biblical languages of Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament).
The invention of the printing press also made it possible for the first time to mass produce the Bible, and make it available to people who could read and who had the money to buy it.
The KJV was based on the “textus receptus” or “received text” of the New Testament. It was the best reconstruction of the original Greek text available at the time.
In the 400 years since the KJV was first published, there have been discovered thousands of manuscripts and text fragments of the various books that we today call the New Testament. These were scattered right around the Middle East and northern Africa.
Most ancient documents we are lucky to have one or two whole texts. With the New Testament , we have an abundance of them.
What we call the New Testament was not standardised until about 367, although all of the books of the New Testament were written by about 100. For a long time smaller collections of Paul’s letters or individual gospels circulated by themselves.
Before printing was invented, to distribute a document, it literally had to be copied by hand. Not only that, paper products were expensive so often animal hides or other flat surfaces were used. And there were no standard page sizes as we have now.
How do you mass produce a gospel or a letter without printing presses? You can sit a dozen people in a room taking dictation as one person reads their copy of the book. Errors sometimes creep in as people mishear what was said. Sometimes the person reading the text or making their own copy would add an additional sentence or a whole section that they thought would fit there.
Scholars over the years have tried to work out what is the best version of the text, that is the closest version to what Paul and the other authors originally wrote. Their desire is that people can have the most accurate version of the text originally inspired by the Holy Spirit. The current accepted version is often called the Nestle-Aland, third edition, named after two of its editors.. This is the version most often used by more recent translations into the English language.
It turns out that some of the verses incorporated in the textus receptus and carried into the King James Version were not in the most original versions of the Greek text. There are not a lot of these verses and they do not substantially change the gospel message contained in the Bible.
This whole process is animated by a desire to get the Word of God distributed as widely as possible, so that people can find Jesus.
The early church distributed hand-copied letters and gospels to as many places as possible because they loved the Lord.
The Reformers produced a version of the Greek text of the New Testament because they loved the Lord.
English scholars produced a translation called the King James Version so that ordinary people could read the Bible because they loved the Lord.
Scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took the thousands of manuscripts discovered in the intervening years and updated the Greek text to try to get as close as possible to the original text because they loved the Lord.
Various English translations have been published using these improved Greek originals because the translators want people to understand the Bible, because they love the Lord.
Whenever people imply some sort of diabolical conspiracy on the part of the people who devote their lives to making God’s Word available to all, they are in fact committing the worst kind of sin.
Do not believe those who say the King James is the only reliable Bible. There are many very good translations available, so use one which is understandable to you.