The Missing Sixteen

“No doctrine is affected” is a claim, and a claim can be tested. Below are all sixteen excisions. Each one is shown the way a modern reader meets it: the verse before it and the verse after it still standing, and between them a number the text steps over. Touch one and the King James verse returns to its place between them. Under each restored verse you will find what went with it. Fasting. Hell. Forgiveness. A fulfilled prophecy. The confession before baptism. Grace. Then decide for yourself whether nothing was affected, and who it was that decided these were expendable.

A clean cut leaves no scar. These cuts are not clean, because the surrounding verses keep quoting what the knife took. In John 5, the impotent man still explains that he has no man to put him into the pool when the water is troubled, but the verse that troubled the water is gone. In Acts 24, Tertullus still tells Felix to examine the man who made the arrest, but the verse naming Lysias and his violence is gone, so the sentence points at the wrong man. In Acts 15, Paul chooses Silas at Antioch five verses after the modern text sent Silas home to Jerusalem. In Mark 9, the Lord's warning stands at verse 48 in every version, which is a strange thing to keep if the same words two verses earlier were never Scripture.

This is the internal evidence: the pages themselves remember the verses they lost. And the external evidence is arithmetic. The footnote says “the earliest and most reliable manuscripts” lack these verses. It means, overwhelmingly, two: Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, set against the thousands of witnesses that carry them. Who crowned those two, and why, is a case of its own.