Which Bible Can You Trust?

More Than a Matter of Modern Language

When people defend modern Bible translations over the King James Version, the argument usually runs something like this: the KJV is written in archaic English that modern readers find difficult; newer translations simply render the same text in contemporary language for clarity and accessibility. This argument is plausible at first glance. But it is not true — or rather, it is true of some changes and entirely false about others. The differences between the KJV and modern versions like the NIV, the ESV, and the NASB are not merely stylistic. Many of them are doctrinal. They affect what the text says about the person of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the resurrection, and the way of salvation. And the reason they differ is not that modern translators are better at English — it is that they are working from different Greek manuscripts.

The question of which Bible you hold in your hand is ultimately the question of which manuscripts your Bible is translated from. That question deserves a serious answer.

Acts 3:26 — Is Jesus God’s Son or God’s Servant?

Consider a single example that illustrates the nature of the problem precisely. The Apostle Peter is preaching in Solomon’s porch following the healing of the lame man. He declares:

Is Jesus God’s Son or God’s Servant? The answer is not a matter of stylistic preference or modern clarity. The answer is the difference between the second Person of the eternal Trinity — co-equal and co-eternal with the Father — and a servant, which is a title of office and function that any man or angel could hold. Every Christian knows that Jesus is the Son of God. But when the NKJV, NIV, ESV, and virtually every other modern translation render this verse with “servant,” they diminish what the text plainly says.

The Greek word at issue is paida (παῖδα), which can mean either “child/son” or “servant” depending on context. The KJV translators, working from the Textus Receptus and with the full theological context of Peter’s sermon in view, correctly rendered it “Son.” Peter has already proclaimed in this same sermon that Jesus is the Holy One and the Just, the Prince of life whom God raised from the dead. He is not preaching a servant. He is preaching the Son of God. The modern translations, following their Alexandrian manuscripts and their preference for “servant,” produce a text that, taken alone, sounds no different from what one might say about Moses or Elijah.

The NIV and the Missing Verses

The departures from the KJV in modern translations go far beyond single word changes. The NIV completely removes at least 16 entire verses that appear in the KJV — not places them in brackets or footnotes, but removes them without trace from the main text. Other critical phrases are quietly dropped mid-verse without any indication to the reader that anything is missing.

Note carefully what some of these omissions accomplish. Removing Matthew 18:11 eliminates one of the clearest statements of why Christ came. Removing Acts 8:37 removes the confession of faith required for baptism — a verse of significant importance to all who hold to believers’ baptism on profession of faith. Removing the closing of Luke 4:4 means that when Satan tempts Christ, Jesus’ response in the NIV lacks the full force of His answer — that man lives by every word of God, which is also, not incidentally, a rebuke of every translation that removes words from that same Word of God.

The Long Ending of Mark — Mark 16:9–20

One of the most significant and doctrinally consequential departures of modern versions from the KJV concerns the ending of Mark’s Gospel. The King James Bible contains the account of Christ’s post-resurrection appearances in Mark 16:9–20, including His appearance to Mary Magdalene, the Great Commission as recorded by Mark, and the promise of signs following those who believe. Modern versions — the NIV, ESV, NASB, RSV, and most others — place this passage in brackets or footnotes with a note informing the reader that the earliest and most reliable manuscripts end at verse 8.

Verse 8, where these manuscripts end, reads: And they went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid. That is where two of the oldest Alexandrian manuscripts — Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus — end the Gospel of Mark. The risen Christ does not appear. No post-resurrection commission is given. The gospel ends in fear and silence.

The implications are profound. Mark 16:15–16 contains words that go to the heart of the Great Commission and the gospel’s call to faith:

This passage is not in the two Alexandrian manuscripts. It is in the overwhelming majority of all other Greek manuscripts — more than 600 of them — as well as in the Old Latin, the Syriac Peshitta, the Coptic, the Gothic, and the Armenian versions. It is quoted by the church fathers Irenaeus (writing around AD 180), Tertullian, and others — centuries before Codex Sinaiticus was supposedly written. The question that honest scholarship must answer is: why do two manuscripts from Alexandria omit a passage that hundreds of other manuscripts include, that ancient versions in multiple languages include, and that second-century church fathers quote? The answer that Bible-believing Christians have always given is that those two manuscripts are corrupt, not that the passage is spurious.

The Johannine Comma — 1 John 5:7

The clearest Trinitarian statement in the entire New Testament is found in the KJV at 1 John 5:7:

Modern translations either omit this verse entirely or reduce it to the verse that follows — that there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood — which, while true, says nothing about the Trinity in heaven. The NIV, ESV, NASB, and virtually every other modern version either remove the heavenly witness entirely or relegate it to a footnote with a note explaining that it does not appear in the oldest manuscripts.

The argument of modern textual critics is that the Johannine Comma — as the passage in verse 7 is called — appears only in late Greek manuscripts and was not part of the original text. This argument rests almost entirely on the two Alexandrian manuscripts, Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, which do not contain it. But the passage is found in the Old Latin manuscripts, some of which date to the second and third centuries. It is quoted by Cyprian of Carthage in the third century: “The Lord says, I and the Father are one; and again it is written of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, And these three are one.” Priscillian of Spain quotes it in the fourth century. The passage is present in the Vulgate from the earliest manuscripts.

What modern textual criticism has done is to elevate two manuscripts above the accumulated witness of the Latin tradition, the quotations of the early church fathers, and the testimony of the Received Text — on the grounds that Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are the oldest Greek manuscripts. But age alone does not determine authenticity. A manuscript that was corrupted early is older than a manuscript faithfully copied from the original — and it is still corrupt.

The Two Manuscripts: Where They Came From

The entire edifice of modern Bible translation rests, in very large part, on two Greek manuscripts: Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. It is worth knowing their history.

Codex Sinaiticus (known by the Hebrew letter א, Aleph) was discovered in 1844 by the German scholar Constantin von Tischendorf at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai. The circumstances of its discovery are telling. Tischendorf observed pages of the manuscript being used as kindling — portions of the parchment were found in the monastery’s waste basket or rubbish bin, destined to be burned. A larger portion was subsequently presented to him by one of the monks. The manuscript was not treasured. It was being thrown away.

The internal condition of Sinaiticus is consistent with its treatment. John William Burgon, who spent years examining every available New Testament manuscript and whose work The Revision Revised (1883) remains one of the most thorough critiques of the Alexandrian manuscripts ever published, described Sinaiticus in terms that leave no room for ambiguity:

Sinaiticus is also one of the most heavily corrected manuscripts in existence. Tischendorf himself enumerated approximately 14,800 corrections in just the two-thirds of the codex held in St. Petersburg. The total corrections across the whole manuscript are estimated at approximately 20,000. Between the 4th and 12th centuries, seven or more different correctors worked over the text. This is not the profile of a trustworthy, carefully preserved document. It is the profile of a manuscript that was repeatedly found to be in error and repeatedly patched.

Codex Vaticanus (known as “B”) was found in the Vatican library, where it had apparently been kept for centuries. Its origin is unknown. Vaticanus also omits Mark 16:9–20, the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11), and numerous other passages present in the overwhelming majority of manuscripts. Vaticanus also contains the Apocrypha — books rejected by Bible-believing Protestants as non-canonical.

The KJV translators in 1611 were aware of Vaticanus. They did not use it. Erasmus, who produced the foundational work on the Received Text that underlies the KJV, had access to Vaticanus as well. He also declined to follow it. As one account of Erasmus’s work records: because he viewed the text of Vaticanus to be erratic, he seldom followed it when it differed from other Greek texts.

This is the most important point in the whole discussion. The GotQuestions ministry summarised it accurately:

If Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus represented the authentic text of the New Testament — if they were closest to the originals — then the early church would have copied them, as it copied everything it valued. Faithful churches have always copied, preserved, and distributed the texts they believed to be authoritative. What actually happened to Sinaiticus and Vaticanus is the opposite: Sinaiticus ended up in a rubbish pile, and Vaticanus ended up in the Vatican library, uncopied and unused. The manuscript tradition that flowed through the churches of the East and eventually produced the Textus Receptus is represented in thousands of manuscripts that agree with one another — the Majority Text, also called the Byzantine Text — while the Alexandrian text of Sinaiticus and Vaticanus is represented in a tiny minority of manuscripts that frequently disagree even with each other.

Westcott and Hort: The Men Who Changed the Bible

How did these two rejected manuscripts come to dominate modern Bible translation? The answer lies in the work of two 19th-century Cambridge scholars: Brooke Foss Westcott (1825–1901) and Fenton John Anthony Hort (1828–1892). In 1881, after 28 years of collaboration, they published The New Testament in the Original Greek — a new critical Greek text that departed from the Textus Receptus in approximately 5,600 places and was built almost entirely on the foundation of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus.

The publication of the Westcott-Hort text coincided with the release of the Revised Version of 1881, which was the first major English translation to depart significantly from the KJV and to incorporate the Alexandrian readings. Every subsequent major modern translation — the RSV, the NIV, the NASB, the ESV, the NLT — has followed the same Alexandrian critical text in its essential character. The road from Westcott and Hort in 1881 to the NIV in 1978 is direct.

It is also worth noting what Westcott and Hort believed — not to judge their scholarship by their theology, but because their theology shaped their textual decisions. Both men were orthodox on some points and deeply heterodox on others. Hort wrote in a letter that he had a “strong feeling of repugnance to the peculiar Protestant doctrine of Justification,” and described himself as unable to believe the Protestant doctrine of the atonement. Westcott doubted the physical resurrection of Christ and held views on heaven and hell that departed significantly from orthodox Protestant teaching. Both men were members of what they called the “Ghostly Guild,” a society for the investigation of supernatural appearances and paranormal phenomena — activities that Scripture directly forbids.

These are not incidental biographical footnotes. They explain why two men who doubted the substitutionary atonement and the physical resurrection were comfortable with a manuscript tradition that removes or weakens the verses that most plainly teach those doctrines.

The Textus Receptus and the Preservation of God’s Word

Over against the Alexandrian tradition stands the Textus Receptus — the Received Text — which underlies the KJV and represents the manuscript tradition preserved, copied, and used by the churches of the Byzantine East across more than a thousand years. It is called the Received Text because it was received by the churches as the authoritative text of the New Testament. It is represented in more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts — the overwhelming majority of all surviving New Testament manuscripts — that agree with one another to a remarkable degree.

The KJV was translated from this Received Text by a committee of 54 of the finest Greek and Hebrew scholars in England, working over seven years, completing their translation in 1611. The translators were men of deep learning and orthodox Protestant conviction. They did not rely on two manuscripts found in a rubbish pile and a Vatican library. They worked from the accumulated textual tradition of the churches — the text that had been copied, preserved, and used by Bible-believing Christians across the centuries.

The principle at stake is the doctrine of preservation. God promised that His Word would not pass away:

If God preserved His Word, where was it preserved? Was it preserved in two manuscripts that ended up in a rubbish pile and a Vatican library, unknown and unused by the churches for over a thousand years? Or was it preserved in the thousands of manuscripts that the churches faithfully copied, distributed, and used across the centuries — the manuscripts on which the Textus Receptus and the King James Bible are built?

The answer is not difficult. The Word of God was preserved in the hands of God’s people, as it has always been. The Received Text is the fruit of that preservation. The King James Bible is its English expression. And the changes made in modern translations — whether they remove the Son of God and replace Him with a servant, silence the closing of the Lord’s Prayer, cut off Mark’s Gospel before the resurrection appearances, remove the one verse that explicitly names the Trinity, or omit the confession of faith required for baptism — are not improvements in accuracy. They are departures from the Word that God has preserved.