Why some verses are in footnotes: textual basis explained

Open Matthew 17 in a KJV and verse 21 is there. Open it in an NIV and the text runs from 20 to 22, with 21 in a footnote. Nothing has been hidden, and nothing has been added. The two Bibles translate different printed Greek texts, and this guide explains where those texts come from and why the verse numbers show the gap.

Verse numbers came first

The New Testament’s verse numbers were added by the printer Robert Estienne, known as Stephanus, in his Greek edition of 1551. Chapter divisions are older still, usually credited to Stephen Langton around 1227. The numbers were fixed to the Greek text as printed then. When later editions of the Greek text left a verse out, the numbering was already in every Bible in Europe, so editors kept the numbers and showed the gap.

Two Greek texts

The Textus Receptus. The first printed Greek New Testament was Erasmus’s, in 1516, made from a handful of late medieval manuscripts available to him in Basel. Stephanus’s and Beza’s editions refined it, and a 1633 printing by the Elzevir family described it as the text “now received by all”, which gave it its name. The King James translators of 1611 worked from Beza’s and Stephanus’s editions. The NKJV (1982) and the Modern English Version keep the same base, and footnote where other texts differ. Reina and Valera’s Spanish Bible, revised in 1960, rests on it too.

The eclectic, or critical, text. From the eighteenth century onward, scholars collected and compared far older manuscripts, among them Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, the latter brought to light by Constantin von Tischendorf between 1844 and 1859. Westcott and Hort published a Greek text built on them in 1881. The line continued through Eberhard Nestle’s editions to today’s Nestle-Aland 28th edition (2012) and the United Bible Societies’ 5th edition (2014), which print the same text. Most modern translations, including the NIV, ESV, NASB, NLT, CSB, NRSV and NABRE, use it as their New Testament base and say so in their prefaces.

A third option, the Majority or Byzantine text, follows the reading found in the largest number of surviving Greek manuscripts. It is close to the Textus Receptus but not identical, and the World English Bible is a published translation that uses it.

Which verses

Sixteen whole verses printed in the KJV are absent from the main text of the critical editions and so appear as footnotes in translations based on them: Matthew 17:21, 18:11 and 23:14; Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46, 11:26 and 15:28; Luke 17:36 and 23:17; John 5:4; Acts 8:37, 15:34, 24:7 and 28:29; and Romans 16:24.

Three longer passages are handled differently. Mark 16:9 to 20 and John 7:53 to 8:11 are printed in nearly every modern translation but set off with brackets or a line and a note saying that the earliest manuscripts do not contain them. The words about the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit in 1 John 5:7 to 8, called the Comma Johanneum, were absent from Erasmus’s first editions, included from his third in 1522, and are footnoted in modern translations. Smaller differences, a word or a phrase, are footnoted verse by verse, and the NIV and ESV prefaces explain their conventions.

Who holds which position

Readers who hold to the Textus Receptus, including King James Only congregations and some Reformed churches that call it the confessional or ecclesiastical text, regard the critical text as an omission from Scripture the church has always received, and point out that the verses stand in the majority of manuscripts. The Spanish-speaking churches that read only the Reina-Valera 1960 hold a parallel position.

Editors of the critical text, and the translation committees that use it, regard the shorter readings as following the earliest and best witnesses, and hold that a verse found in later copies but not in the earliest ones was most likely added by a copyist. Many add that no Christian teaching rests on a disputed verse alone; readers on the other side reply that the question is which text is Scripture, not which teaching survives.

Both positions are held by serious people. On each translation’s page the Disputes and context panel describes the dispute with each side attributed, and the spec sheet names the base text with a source. We do not score it, and no number on this site is about it.

What to do with this

If the base text matters to you, the spec sheet’s “Textual basis, New Testament” row tells you what each translation uses, and the comparison pages put a Textus Receptus translation and a critical-text translation side by side. If it does not, read the footnotes when you meet one; every translation tells you, at the verse, what the other text has.

Sources

The prefaces of the NIV (2011), ESV and NKJV, cited on each translation’s spec sheet. Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), introduction. Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd edition (United Bible Societies, 1994). Cambridge University Press, on the textual basis of the KJV.