A question people are afraid to ask out loud

Were Things Added To The Bible?

Yes. A handful of lines in your Bible were not in the earliest copies, and we can show you exactly where. Here is the evidence, word for word, and why it should make you trust Jesus more, not less.

Apostle Johnny OvaSound of Heaven Church15 minute read

The straight answer

Yes, And The Bible Itself Tells You So

Open an ESV, an NIV, or a CSB to John chapter 8 and look at the bottom of the page. There is a footnote, in small print, that says the earliest manuscripts do not include John 7:53 to 8:11. That is the story of the woman caught in adultery. That is where the line "go, and sin no more" lives. The publishers of your Bible already told you it was added. Most of us never read the small print.

So when somebody at the diner on Deer Park Avenue leans across the table and says, "You know they added stuff to the Bible, right?" the right answer is not to get defensive. The right answer is, "Yes. A few things. We know exactly which ones, we know roughly when, and we have a good idea why. Want to see them?"

In one breath

Were things added to the Bible? Yes, a small number of passages entered the text after the originals were written, and scholars have identified them by comparing thousands of ancient copies. None of them changes who Jesus is. Every one of them reminds us that we worship the Word made flesh, not the paper that points to him.

How we know

Copies, Margins, And A Paper Trail

Nobody has the original sheet John or Mark wrote on. What we have is better than people expect: more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, plus thousands more in Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, plus the quotations of early pastors who were reading their copies out loud to their churches in the 100s, 200s, and 300s. When you lay all of that side by side, you can watch the text being copied across the centuries.

What you see is this. Scribes were careful, and scribes were human. They slipped a letter. They fixed a sentence that sounded rough. They wrote a note in the margin, and the next copyist, not sure whether the note was a correction or a comment, slid it into the text. They added the line their church sang every Sunday because it felt wrong to leave it out. None of that is a conspiracy. It is what happens to any hand copied book over a thousand years.

The good news is that the paper trail catches it. When a passage shows up in the fifth century but is missing from every copy in the second, third, and fourth, that passage was added. When a line floats to four different locations in different manuscripts, that line was added. When no Greek speaking pastor comments on a story for a thousand years, that story was not in their Bible. This is not guesswork. It is forensics.

When I sat down with Dr. Dirk Jongkind of Tyndale House, Cambridge, on The Dig In, one of the editors of the Tyndale House Greek New Testament, he made a point that stuck with me. The additions are not the scary part. The scary part would be if we could not find them. We can. That is what a well preserved text looks like. If you want the longer backstory on how the books traveled from the first century to your nightstand, I walk through it in how we got the Bible.

Keep this in view

A text with known additions is a text we can check. The additions were caught precisely because the manuscript record is deep enough to catch them.

Example one, the deep dive

"Go, And Sin No More"

This is the big one, so we are going to take our time. The woman is dragged before Jesus. The men want her stoned. Jesus bends down, writes in the dirt, and says whoever is without sin can throw the first stone. One by one they leave. Then he says to her:

"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more."

John 8:11, King James Version

It is one of the most beautiful scenes in the Gospels. It is also missing from every early copy of John that we have. Not damaged. Not torn out. Missing, with the text running clean from the end of chapter 7 straight into what we call 8:12.

John 7:52 into 8:12 What the page looks like in the oldest copies

ΜΗ ΚΑΙ ΣΥ ΕΚ ΤΗΣ ΓΑΛΙΛΑΙΑΣ ΕΙ ΕΡΑΥΝΗΣΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΙΔΕ ΟΤΙ ΕΚ ΤΗΣ ΓΑΛΙΛΑΙΑΣ ΠΡΟΦΗΤΗΣ ΟΥΚ ΕΓΕΙΡΕΤΑΙ ΠΑΛΙΝ ΟΥΝ ΑΥΤΟΙΣ ΕΛΑΛΗΣΕΝ Ο ΙΣ ΛΕΓΩΝ ΕΓΩ ΕΙΜΙ ΤΟ ΦΩΣ ΤΟΥ ΚΟΣΜΟΥ

Read it: "Are you also from Galilee? Search and see that no prophet rises out of Galilee." Then, with no break, "Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, I am the light of the world." The orange seam marks the spot where twelve verses sit in your Bible. In Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus there is nothing there. This is a rendering of the text in the uncial style those codices use, with the abbreviated sacred name for Jesus written the way the scribes wrote it. It is not a photograph. You can see the real page yourself through the Codex Sinaiticus Project, which has the whole manuscript online.

The line, word by word

This is the Greek behind "go, and sin no more," taken from the later manuscripts that carry the story. Every one of these words is real Greek and real New Testament vocabulary. Not one of them appears at this spot in any copy of John before the fifth century.

πορεύουporeuougo, be on your way

καὶkaiand

ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦνapo tou nynfrom now on (present in some copies, absent in others)

μηκέτιmēketino longer, no more

ἁμάρτανεhamartanesin (a command: stop sinning)

Orange top bar means the word is part of the added passage

Notice the third card. The copies that do have this story cannot even agree on how the sentence goes. The King James follows manuscripts that read "go, and sin no more." Other manuscripts read "go, and from now on sin no more." Modern Greek editions print "from now on" in brackets because the evidence is split. That is a fingerprint of a passage that lived for a while as a story people told before it settled into a fixed written form.

The evidence, laid out

Do not have it

c. AD 200 Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75, the two oldest substantial copies of John
300s Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the two great fourth century Bibles
400s Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Ephraemi, Codex Washingtonianus, Codex Borgianus
Early versions The oldest Syriac and Coptic translations
Early pastors No Greek speaking commentator mentions it until Euthymius Zigabenus in the 1100s, and he says the accurate copies do not contain it

Have it

400s Codex Bezae, a Greek and Latin manuscript with a famously loose text, is the first Greek copy to include it
Latin West Most Old Latin copies and Jerome's Vulgate (AD 383)
It wanders One family of manuscripts puts the story after Luke 21:38. Another puts it at the very end of John, after 21:25. One copy puts it after John 7:36
Later majority The medieval Greek manuscripts behind the King James Version

When it was added, and why

The story itself is old. Around AD 110, a pastor named Papias knew of an account of "a woman accused of many sins before the Lord," which the historian Eusebius records. A third century church manual from Syria, the Didascalia, retells the scene and quotes "neither do I condemn you." So Christians were telling this story within living memory of the apostles. What they were not doing was reading it in the Gospel of John.

Somewhere between the second and fourth centuries, most likely in the Latin speaking West, somebody wrote it into the margin of a copy of John, right after 7:52, where the religious leaders are fuming and Jesus is about to talk about judging. It fit the mood. The next copyist took the margin note into the text. From there it spread through the Latin Bibles, and by the time Jerome translated the Vulgate in 383 it was standard in the West. The Greek East largely did not have it for centuries.

Why did it stick? Augustine, writing around AD 420, gives us the clue. He knew copies without the story, and he had an explanation: "certain persons of little faith, or rather enemies of the true faith," he said, removed it because they were afraid it gave wives permission to commit adultery. Augustine had it backwards on the manuscript history, but he tells you what the fight was about. The story was so merciful it made people nervous. Some wanted it in because it showed the heart of Jesus. Others were uneasy for exactly the same reason.

The language confirms it was not John's hand. The passage uses words and phrases John never uses anywhere else, and several that sound like Luke: the Mount of Olives, "the scribes," "at dawn," "all the people." John does not write like that. Luke does. Even scholars who think the event really happened agree the paragraph did not come from John's pen.

Before you throw the story out

Two things are true at once. First, this paragraph was not in John's Gospel. Second, Jesus really did say "sin no more." Turn back to John 5:14. After he heals the man at the pool of Bethesda, he finds him in the temple and says μηκέτι ἁμάρτανε, the exact same two words, "sin no more." That verse is in every manuscript we have. So the ethic is not lost. And the scene with the woman is completely in character for the Jesus we meet everywhere else: refusing to condemn, refusing to wink at sin, sending her out free.

What you should not do with it is this. Do not build a doctrine on it that you cannot find anywhere else in Scripture. Do not quote it as if it settles an argument. Treat it the way the earliest church treated it: as a true memory of what Jesus was like, handed down beside the Gospel, not inside it.

Example two

The Snakes And The Poison At The End Of Mark

Mark's Gospel, in the two oldest complete copies we have, ends at 16:8. The women find the tomb empty, a young man tells them Jesus is risen and has gone ahead to Galilee, and they run. The last two words of the book in those copies are:

ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ "for they were afraid."

Mark 16:8, the ending in Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus

Ending a Gospel on the word "afraid," with a dangling "for," felt unbearable to a lot of readers, and apparently it felt unbearable early. Your Bible continues for twelve more verses: Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, then to two disciples, then to the eleven, commissions them, and ascends. Along the way we get this:

ὄφειςopheisserpents

ἀροῦσινarousinthey will pick up

κἂν θανάσιμόν τι πίωσινkan thanasimon ti piōsinand if they drink anything deadly

οὐ μὴ αὐτοὺς βλάψῃou mē autous blapsēit will by no means harm them

Mark 16:18, from the longer ending

That verse is the entire biblical basis for snake handling churches. It is also absent from the oldest copies of Mark, and the early church knew it. Eusebius, writing in the early 300s, told a man named Marinus that "the accurate copies" end Mark at "for they were afraid," and that "in almost all copies of the Gospel according to Mark, comes the end." Jerome, a century later, said nearly the same thing: "almost all the Greek codices" lack the passage. Codex Vaticanus does something it does nowhere else in the New Testament: after 16:8 the scribe left an entire blank column, as if he knew more existed and chose not to copy it.

So when was it added? Early. Irenaeus, around AD 180, quotes "after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was received up into heaven" and says it comes from the end of Mark. That means the longer ending was circulating in the second century. It reads like exactly what it is: a summary stitched together from the resurrection accounts in Matthew, Luke, John, and Acts, written by someone who could not leave Mark hanging. The vocabulary shifts, Mary Magdalene is reintroduced as if we have never met her, and the whole thing has a different rhythm. Another manuscript, Codex Washingtonianus, even has an extra paragraph wedged inside it that nobody else has, which tells you people kept tinkering.

The ending that circulated was not malicious. It was a pastor's instinct: do not leave the people in fear, tell them he rose and he reigns. Fine. But "they shall take up serpents" is not a command of Jesus, and nobody should be holding a rattlesnake on a Sunday because of a second century postscript. Mark ended at the empty tomb on purpose. The fear is the point. The reader is supposed to finish the sentence by going to Galilee themselves.

The pattern

A hard ending gets smoothed. A good motive still produces words Jesus did not say, and those words end up carrying weight they were never meant to carry.

Example three

The Trinity Verse That Is Not In The Greek

If you grew up on the King James, you know 1 John 5:7: "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." It is the clearest one verse statement of the Trinity in the whole Bible. It is also not in any Greek manuscript written before the fourteenth century. What follows is what John actually wrote, and what was inserted into the middle of it:

ὅτι τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντεςoriginalfor there are three that testify

ἐν τῷ οὐρανῷ, ὁ πατήρ, ὁ λόγος, καὶ τὸ ἅγιον πνεῦμα· καὶ οὗτοι οἱ τρεῖς ἕν εἰσιaddedin heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one

καὶ τρεῖς εἰσιν οἱ μαρτυροῦντες ἐν τῇ γῇaddedand there are three that testify on earth

τὸ πνεῦμα καὶ τὸ ὕδωρ καὶ τὸ αἷμα, καὶ οἱ τρεῖς εἰς τὸ ἕν εἰσινoriginalthe Spirit, the water, and the blood, and the three agree as one

Green top bar is what John wrote. Orange is the later insertion

Strip out the orange and you have John's sentence: three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood, all pointing the same direction at Jesus. That is what every Greek copy says for the first thirteen hundred years. The added words first appear in Latin, in a work by Priscillian of Avila around AD 380. The seed was probably planted a century earlier: Cyprian, a North African bishop, read "the three are one" as a picture of the Trinity, and somebody later wrote that interpretation beside the verse. Margin became text. Over the next few centuries it worked its way into Latin Bibles.

How did it get into the Greek and then into the King James? Erasmus. When he published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516, he left the words out because his Greek manuscripts did not have them. He left them out again in 1519. Churchmen attacked him for it, and one accused him of opening the door to Arianism. In 1522 he put the words in, citing a Greek manuscript that had surfaced in England, now known as Codex Montfortianus, a copy most scholars believe was written around 1520 with the Latin reading translated into it. Erasmus himself remained convinced the passage was not original. He said he included it so no one would have occasion to slander him. The old story that he made a promise to include it if a single Greek copy was found is a legend; the Dutch scholar H.J. de Jonge traced it and found no such promise anywhere in Erasmus's writings.

Erasmus's 1522 text became the basis of the Textus Receptus, the Textus Receptus became the basis of the King James, and so a Latin margin note from the 300s became "Scripture" in English in 1611. If you want the rest of that story, I lay it out in whether the King James is the most accurate Bible.

Does this hurt the Trinity?

Not even a little. Sound of Heaven holds the Trinity with both hands: one God, three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each fully God. We did not get that from 1 John 5:7. We got it from Jesus being called God (John 1:1, John 20:28), from "baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19), from Paul's blessing in 2 Corinthians 13:14, from the Spirit who searches the deep things of God in 1 Corinthians 2, and from the whole shape of the story. The church confessed the full deity of Christ at Nicaea in 325 and the Trinity at Constantinople in 381 without this verse in their Greek Bibles. A doctrine that needs a forged proof text is weak. The Trinity never needed one.

Example four

The Ending Of The Lord's Prayer

"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen." If you have ever prayed the Lord's Prayer in a room full of people, you know Catholics praying it on their own stop at "deliver us from evil" and Protestants keep going. There is a reason, and it is not denominational stubbornness. Jesus did not say the last line. The Greek:

ὅτι σοῦ ἐστινhoti sou estinfor yours is

ἡ βασιλείαhē basileiathe kingdom

καὶ ἡ δύναμιςkai hē dynamisand the power

καὶ ἡ δόξαkai hē doxaand the glory

εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. ἀμήνeis tous aiōnas. amēninto the ages. Amen

Matthew 6:13b, absent from the earliest copies of Matthew

Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus do not have it. Codex Bezae does not have it. The Old Latin and Jerome's Vulgate do not have it, which is why the Roman Catholic prayer stops where it stops. Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian each wrote whole commentaries on the Lord's Prayer in the 200s and never mention the line. The first Greek manuscript of Matthew to include it is Codex Washingtonianus from the 400s, and from there it spreads through the Byzantine copies that fed the King James.

So where did it come from? Church. The Didache, a Christian handbook written around AD 100, tells believers to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day and gives the text, ending with ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, "for yours is the power and the glory into the ages." No kingdom, no amen. A shorter form, already in use. Jewish prayer always closed with a line of praise to God, and David's prayer in 1 Chronicles 29:11 has almost these exact words: "Thine, O LORD, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory... thine is the kingdom." Christians were never going to end a prayer on "evil." So they borrowed David's praise, and within a few generations the line everyone said in worship got copied into the Gospel where everyone read it. Liturgy flowed backward into the text.

Is the line true? Every word of it. Is it a good way to end a prayer? It is a great way. Did Jesus say it on the hillside? No. And that is exactly the kind of distinction a healthy Christian can hold without panic. You can keep praying it. Just know whose words they are.

The pattern again

The habits of worship are strong enough to reshape a manuscript. What a church sings every week eventually looks like what the apostle wrote.

Zooming out

Why Did This Happen At All?

Four passages, four different motives, one human story. Put them together and you get a short list of how Scripture picked up extra words over the centuries.

Margins became text

A note beside the column, a cross reference, a cherished story, copied into the body by the next scribe who could not tell the difference. John 8 and 1 John 5:7 both got in this way.

Rough edges got sanded

Mark's ending felt unfinished, so someone finished it. Harmonizing one Gospel with another was a kindness in the scribe's mind, and a change in the text.

Worship flowed backward

What the church prayed every Sunday ended up in the Gospel it read every Sunday. The doxology on the Lord's Prayer is the clearest case.

Doctrine got defended

When a verse could be sharpened to settle an argument, especially about the nature of Christ, the sharper version tended to survive. The Trinity insertion is the prime example.

Notice what is not on the list. Nobody rewrote the resurrection. Nobody inserted the deity of Christ; it is on every page of John from the first verse. Nobody added the cross. The additions are at the seams and in the margins, they are small, and we have found them. If people were secretly editing the Bible to control the masses, they did a remarkably bad job, because the paper trail that exposes them is the Bible's own manuscript tradition. This is the same point I make when people ask who chose the books of the Bible: the process was human, visible, and messy, and God worked through it anyway.

I also want to be fair to the scribes. These were believers copying by hand, by lamplight, for years, so that a church three towns over could have a Gospel. They were not villains. They loved the text so much that they occasionally loved it into a slightly different shape. We get to see that because they also preserved it well enough for us to notice. Both things are true, and both things are grace.

Where this lands

We Were Never Told To Worship A Book

This is the part that matters more than any manuscript. The reason some Christians panic when they hear "things were added to the Bible" is that, without saying so out loud, they have been treating the Bible as the thing itself. The object of faith. The fourth member of the Trinity. And the Bible will not let you do that to it, because the Bible keeps pointing past itself.

"You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life."

John 5:39 to 40

Jesus said that to the most Bible saturated people on earth. The Pharisees had memorized the Scriptures. They had copied them, counted the letters, argued over every jot. And Jesus told them they had missed the entire point of the book, because the book was a witness and they were worshiping the witness instead of the one it testified about. The Scriptures bear witness. Jesus gives life.

John says it even more sharply at the start of his Gospel. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." The Word of God is a person before it is a page. When the Bible calls itself God breathed in 2 Timothy 3:16, it says the writings are profitable, useful, able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. Useful for. Pointing to. The Scriptures are the signpost; Jesus is the destination. You do not hug the sign on the LIE that says Deer Park. You take the exit.

This is also why Sound of Heaven reads the whole Bible through Jesus. The Bible is God breathed and it came to us through real human hands, in real cultures, over a very long time, and it was fully and finally clarified in Jesus. He is the final revelation of the Father. When something in the text seems to cut against his character, we do not flatten him to fit the page; we read the page in his light. If that sounds bold, it is only what Hebrews says: God spoke in many ways through the prophets, and then he spoke in a Son. I unpack that more in what Jesus set straight about the God of the Old Testament.

So what do a dozen added verses do to your faith? If your faith is in the paper, they crack it. If your faith is in Jesus, they do nothing to it at all, because Jesus is not in danger. He rose from the dead whether or not Mark's scribe added a summary. He is God whether or not a Latin monk sharpened 1 John 5:7. He forgives sinners and tells them to go and sin no more whether or not that story was in John's first draft, because he said it in John 5 and he has been saying it to people like you and me ever since.

My encouragement is simple. Read your Bible more, not less. Read the footnotes. Learn why there are so many translations and why that is a strength. Let the manuscripts make you a more careful reader. And then do what the Scriptures were written to make you do: come to Jesus. He is the one Thomas fell down in front of and called "my Lord and my God." Nobody in the Bible ever said that to a scroll.

The whole article in one line

The Bible is the most trustworthy witness in history, and a witness is not the one on trial. Worship the one it points to.

Let us pray with you

Carrying A Question Like This?

Maybe something in here rattled you, or maybe it finally put words to a doubt you have been afraid to say in church. Either way, you do not have to sort it out alone. Our pastors pray over every request that comes through this form, and we would be honored to pray over yours. If you would rather talk than type, you can also reach us through our prayer page or call 631-818-1919.

Common questions

Were Things Added To The Bible FAQ

Were things added to the Bible?+

Yes. A small number of passages in the New Testament were not in the earliest manuscripts and entered the text later, usually from margin notes, worship practice, or attempts to smooth a rough ending. The best known are the story of the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53 to 8:11), the longer ending of Mark (16:9 to 20), the Trinity line in 1 John 5:7, and the closing doxology of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:13. Modern Bibles flag each of these in footnotes or brackets.

Was "go, and sin no more" in the original Gospel of John?+

No. John 8:11 belongs to the story of the woman caught in adultery, which is missing from the two oldest papyri of John (around AD 200), from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus (300s), and from several fifth century manuscripts. The first Greek manuscript to include it is Codex Bezae in the 400s, and in other manuscripts the story floats to different locations, including after Luke 21:38. Jesus does say "sin no more" in John 5:14, which is in every manuscript.

Is Mark 16:9 to 20 in the original Gospel of Mark?+

Almost certainly not. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus end Mark at 16:8 with "for they were afraid." Eusebius in the early 300s and Jerome around 400 both reported that the accurate copies ended there and that almost all Greek copies lacked the longer ending. The passage was in circulation by about AD 180, since Irenaeus quotes it, so it was added early, probably as a summary of the resurrection appearances from the other Gospels. The line about taking up serpents and drinking poison is part of this addition.

Is 1 John 5:7 in the original Greek?+

No. The words "in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one" appear in no Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century. They first show up in Latin around AD 380. Erasmus left them out of his 1516 and 1519 Greek New Testaments, added them under pressure in 1522, and that edition fed the Textus Receptus and the King James Version. The Trinity does not depend on this verse; it rests on the whole witness of the New Testament.

If things were added to the Bible, can I still trust it?+

Yes, and the additions are part of the reason why. They were discovered because the New Testament survives in more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts plus early translations and quotations, enough to trace exactly how the text was copied. None of the known additions touches the resurrection, the deity of Christ, or the gospel. The Bible is a trustworthy witness to Jesus. Our faith rests on Jesus, the Word made flesh, whom the Scriptures point to.

Codex Sinaiticus Project (British Library, Leipzig University Library, St Catherine's Monastery, National Library of Russia): codexsinaiticus.org, full digitized manuscript with transcription.
Eusebius of Caesarea, Gospel Problems and Solutions (To Marinus), translated by David J.D. Miller, edited by Roger Pearse, 2010: full text PDF.
Augustine, De adulterinis coniugiis 2.6 to 7, on the removal of the adulteress passage: Text and Translation.
H.J. de Jonge, "Erasmus and the Comma Johanneum," Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56 (1980).
Didache 8, Greek and English: Bibliothek der Kirchenväter, University of Fribourg.
The Dig In Podcast with Dr. Dirk Jongkind, Tyndale House, Cambridge: watch the episode.