Which manuscripts sit behind it: the Textus Receptus and the critical text

Translations differ not only in style but sometimes in which underlying words they translate, and this is where a reader comparing Bibles notices that a verse present in one is a footnote in another. We have no original handwritten copies of any biblical book; what we have are thousands of ancient manuscripts, and the careful work of comparing them to reconstruct the original wording is called textual criticism (a normal part of studying any ancient text). For the Old Testament, nearly every English Bible rests on the Masoretic Text, the meticulously standardized Hebrew text that Jewish scribes called the Masoretes copied, vowel-pointed, and safeguarded between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries AD; when the Dead Sea Scrolls turned up a thousand years older than the Masoretes' oldest copies, they showed how faithfully that Hebrew text had been handed down. For the New Testament, the differences between manuscript traditions are sharper, and it is there that most "missing verse" questions arise. Two broad approaches lie behind English New Testaments. The King James and New King James rest on the "Textus Receptus," a Greek New Testament first assembled by the Renaissance scholar Erasmus in 1516 from a small number of late-medieval manuscripts. Most modern versions rest on a "critical" or "eclectic" text (such as the Nestle-Aland/United Bible Societies edition) that weighs all the surviving evidence, including manuscripts unavailable in 1611: the great fourth-century codices (Sinaiticus and Vaticanus), papyrus copies older still (the oldest known scrap of a New Testament book, a fragment of John, is usually dated to the first half of the second century, though papyrus datings are handwriting estimates and scholars argue over them by decades), and, for the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Where these traditions differ, a modern Bible may print in a footnote, bracket, or omit a verse the King James includes, which is the real reason behind talk of "missing verses." The best-known cases are few and openly marked: the "Johannine Comma," the explicitly Trinitarian words in 1 John 5:7, appears in the King James but is absent from the earliest Greek manuscripts, so modern versions drop it to a note; the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9–20) and the account of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) are in the King James and the later majority of manuscripts but missing or marked doubtful in the oldest ones, so modern Bibles keep them with a note. Crucial honesty: this is the opposite of the Bible being secretly "changed." No core Christian teaching stands or falls on these passages, and the differences are disclosed in the footnotes on purpose so you can see exactly what the evidence is, it is transparency, not a cover-up. There is a genuine debate, and both sides deserve their best statement: a "King-James-Only" position holds that the Textus Receptus (and the KJV that renders it) is the one true text and that modern editions "remove" verses; the majority of textual scholars (Protestant, Catholic, and many Orthodox) hold instead that weighing the older and fuller manuscript evidence brings us closer to the original wording, and that no doctrine changes either way. A third position is easy to miss, and it is not the King-James-Only one: the Eastern Orthodox Church's own authorized New Testament is the Patriarchal Text, published at Constantinople in 1904 and edited from Byzantine manuscripts that had actually been used in worship. It therefore stands close to the tradition behind the King James, on a churchly rather than a KJV-Only argument. We lay out these views and pick no winner, and note that this whole question ties directly to the manuscript evidence in our wider case for the Bible's reliability and to the Dead Sea Scrolls.