Open an English Standard Version or a New International Version at Acts chapter 8 and look for verse 37. It is not there. The page runs from verse 36 straight to verse 38, and at the foot there is a line of small print. Open a King James Bible at the same page, or a New King James, and verse 37 is there in full.

Most readers never notice this. Once you do, it is difficult to leave alone. If one sentence can drop out of the Bible between one edition and another, the questions follow quickly enough: what else has gone, who decided, and were they entitled to?

Nothing has been taken out. To see why, you need to know what a translator is working from.

The King James translators, finishing their work in 1611, used the best Greek text available to them in print. It had been assembled in the previous century from a small number of Greek copies, most of them made in the twelfth century or later, because those were the copies Europe had. In the four centuries since, thousands more Greek manuscripts have come to light, some of them copied within two hundred years of the apostles. Modern translators work from that larger and much older collection. Neither Bible is being measured against the other. Both are measured against the manuscripts. So when a modern translation leaves a sentence out, it is not cutting something from the King James. It is telling you that the oldest copies do not have it.

Which raises the question that actually settles the matter. If the words are not in the oldest copies, where did they come from?

Often from the margin. Picture a scribe copying a page of Greek by hand. In the space beside the text he writes a short note — a cross-reference, an explanation of a hard word, a line from the church's confession that he knows by heart. That was ordinary practice, and the note was never meant to be Scripture. Now move forward a century. Another scribe is copying that same page and he sees the note. He cannot tell what it is. It might be a comment. It might equally be a line the man before him accidentally missed and then wrote in the margin to put right, which was also ordinary practice. Faced with the possibility that he is about to drop a real sentence of God's word, he does what a careful man does and writes it into the text. He is not deceiving anyone. He is trying not to lose anything. From that day every copy made from his copy carries the sentence, and every copy made from those carries it too.

There is a second route, and it accounts for most of the short lines in question. The same Gospel events are told by more than one writer, and a scribe who had copied Mark and Luke knew their wording. Copying Matthew, he reaches a sentence that is shorter than the one he remembers, and he completes it from memory. You can watch it happen. Matthew 18:11 in a King James Bible reads that the Son of Man has come to save that which was lost — which is what Luke 19:10 says, in Luke, where nobody disputes it. The sentence is not an invention. It is a true sentence of Scripture that arrived in a second place.

Both routes leave the same trace. The older the copy, the less it contains; the later the copy, the fuller it grows.

The best-known example is 1 John 5:7–8. If you are reading the New King James Version, it is in front of you:

1 John 5:7–8 (NKJV)

For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness on earth: the Spirit, the water, and the blood; and these three agree as one.

The King James reads much the same. Open an English Standard Version or a New International Version and the opening sentence is gone; the passage begins with the Spirit, the water and the blood. The New King James keeps the words and prints a footnote telling you the oldest Greek copies do not contain them, which is an honest report of the evidence. Those words about the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit appear in no surviving Greek manuscript from the first thirteen centuries. They surface first in Latin, and the margin is the likeliest route by which they arrived. The Greek text printed in Europe in the 1500s — the one the King James men translated from — did not contain the sentence at first either. Its editor, a Dutch scholar named Erasmus, left it out because his Greek copies lacked it, then put it in a later edition after critics objected. That printed text is what reached England, and the sentence came into English with it.

This is the verse Christians are most afraid of losing, because it sounds like a single line that proves the Trinity. But the doctrine does not depend on one verse; it rests on the whole witness of Scripture.

Now let's talk about the numbering system of the verses in the Bible. The men who wrote the Bible numbered nothing. Chapter divisions were added by an English scholar in the thirteenth century, and verse numbers by a French printer, Robert Estienne, in 1551. The Geneva Bible of 1560 brought them into English and the King James Bible inherited them. So the numbering arrived centuries after the text, and it was fitted to the printed Greek of the 1500s — the text that included the added lines.

This leaves translators with a problem they cannot tidy up. Suppose a modern translation dropped a doubtful verse and then closed the gap by renumbering. Every verse after it in that book would move up one. John 3:16 would be John 3:15 in some Bibles and John 3:16 in others, and two Christians sitting side by side could no longer look up the same reference. So the numbering is frozen exactly where it stands. The number is either printed with a footnote in place of the words, or passed over altogether, and every reference you already know keeps working.

Fewer than twenty whole verses in the New Testament stand in this position, along with two longer passages: the twelve verses at the end of Mark and the account of the woman caught in adultery in John 8. Your Bible prints both of those, with a note. Not one of them teaches anything the Bible does not teach somewhere else. Take the end of Mark away and Christ is still risen — Matthew, Luke and John all report the empty tomb, and Paul names the men who saw Him alive. Nothing the church believes has ever rested on a single line in a single margin.