Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 996 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Who Took Verse 4 Out of My Bible? - Wisdom Wednesday


Thank you for joining us for our five days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. We are broadcasting from our studio at ‘The Big House’ in Marietta, OH.  Today is Day 996 of our Trek, and it is Wisdom Wednesday.  Creating a Biblical Worldview is important to have a proper perspective on today’s current events.  To establish a Biblical Worldview, it is required that you also have a proper understanding of God’s Word.  Especially in our western cultures, we do not fully understand the Scriptures from the mindset and culture of the authors.  In order to help us all have a better understanding of some of the more obscure passages in God’s Word, we are investing Wisdom Wednesday reviewing a series of essays from one of today’s most prominent Hebrew Scholars Dr. Micheal S. Heiser.  He has compiled these essays into a book titled  ’I Dare You Not to Bore Me With the Bible.’

Most of us are aware that the original and most copies of the scriptures did not have chapter and verse references because they were added much later.  We have certainly come to depend on them in today’s culture to locate that passages we are interested in.  There are occasions where there are verses missing

Today’s essay will look at one of those instances and find out why:
Who Took Verse 4 Out of My Bible?
Most of us have read John 5:1-10, the story of the blind, paralyzed man at the pool of Bethesda, many times, but I'll bet there's something that escaped your attention. While I usually remove the verse numbers, I will leave them in the passage for today.

1Afterward Jesus returned to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish holy days. 2 Inside the city, near the Sheep Gate, was the pool of Bethesda,[a]with five covered porches. 3 Crowds of sick people—blind, lame, or paralyzed—lay on the porches.[b] 5 One of the men lying there had been sick for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him and knew he had been ill for a long time, he asked him, “Would you like to get well?”

7 “I can’t, sir,” the sick man said, “for I have no one to put me into the pool when the water bubbles up. Someone else always gets there ahead of me.”

8 Jesus told him, “Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!”

9 Instantly, the man was healed! He rolled up his sleeping mat and began walking! But this miracle happened on the Sabbath, 10 so the Jewish leaders objected. They said to the man who was cured, “You can’t work on the Sabbath! The law doesn’t allow you to carry that sleeping mat!”If you read closely, you'll notice that verse 4 is missing! Start at verse one, and you will realize that verse for is not there.

Verse 4 which is included in some versions like the (NASB) tells us: “for an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and stirred up the water; whoever then first, after the stirring up of the water, stepped in was made well from whatever disease with which he was afflicted”

The verse is not just missing in the NLT; the situation is the same in the NIV, ESV, NRSV, CEV, and the NET Bible. If you use the NASB or NCV, you will see the verse, but it's been placed inside brackets, whereas the KJV and the NKJV contain verse 4 without any notation or demarcation. So what's going on here? Who took John 5:4 out of certain versions the Bible and why?If you're using a study Bible that doesn't have verse 4, you will likely see a note at the end of verse 3, or the beginning of verse 5, explaining why it isn't there. This is a textbook case of a disagreement between manuscripts of the Greek New Testament.  The reason that the last part of John 5:3 and all of verse 4 is missing in many versions is that they a...