Where the notes come from. Two broad families of Greek text lie behind English New Testaments. The King James and New King James rest on the Textus Receptus, assembled by Erasmus in 1516 from a small number of late-medieval manuscripts. Most modern versions rest on a critical or eclectic text weighing all the surviving evidence, including manuscripts unavailable in 1611, the fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, older papyrus copies, and for the Old Testament the Dead Sea Scrolls (the translations reference on which manuscripts sit behind each Bible).
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The disclosure is the point. Where the families differ, a modern Bible prints a footnote, a bracket, or both. The translations reference puts it plainly: 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." A reader comparing two versions and finding a gap has not discovered something hidden; they have found the place the publisher marked.
And for the Old Testament the direction of the evidence is worth stating. When the Dead Sea Scrolls were found they were a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew copies then known, and they showed how faithfully the Hebrew text had been handed down (the translations reference on which manuscripts sit behind each Bible; the Dead Sea Scrolls reference carries the detail). ⚠️
They did not settle the Genesis 5 and 11 numbers.
Sources: the translations reference on which manuscripts sit behind each Bible; the Dead Sea Scrolls reference.
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