why are there are several verses missing from the niv bible?

There are many manuscripts that people use to translate the Bible. It seems that some of the better manuscripts do not have this verse so they omitted it in the NIV. It doesn't make an NIV invalid because the main message of the Bible is unchanged. This is why most Bible scholars rely upon a variety of Bibles and also concordances so they can research the original Hebrew and Greek also....Show more

The first answer is correct - though very terse.

Very brief history:

a - New Testament Bible documents written in Greek

b - over the following centuries, a few additions are made to those documents (unauthentic verses added by someone other than the authors centuries after the authors had died)

c - someone assigns verse numbers to the Greek New Testament in the 1500s - and he assigns verse numbers to all of the verses, both authentic and unauthentic, because he doesn't know that some verses have been added over the centuries. This verse numbering system becomes the standard.

d - the KJV New Testamenat is translated from those Greek documents - again, including the unauthentic verses because the translators did not realize that verses had been added over the centuries

e - in the 1800s, scholars discover - by comparing hundreds of copies of the Greek New Testament - that several verses have been added (those verses don't appear in *any* of the oldest copies, and instead begin appearing in copies only centuries after the authors had died).

f - Because of the discovery made in [e], beginning in the late 1800s scholars start producing Bibles that do not include those unauthentic verses. They still use the standard verse numbering system, though - so, when they do not include an unauthentic verse, they also do not include the verse number. This makes it seems to someone who doesn't know better that the verse is missing - but, instead, what is true is that the verse was never part of the original Bible document, and it is omitted because it does not actually belong in the Bible.


- Jim, http://www.BibleSelector.com/...Show more

Some who embrace the King James Version as their bible of choice object to the NIV (and often to all other recent translations). They maintain that the NIV has "changed" or "removed" certain verses. That, of course, is based upon the unproven assumption that the four-century-old King James has the best textual sources.

That line of thinking completely overlooks the fact that recent Bible translations, like the NIV, have all the same manuscripts the King James translators used, plus many other helpful manuscript discoveries since the KJV was published.

Some King-James-only people claim that the NIV has altered verses to diminish the proof of the deity of Jesus. I have studied that topic out at great length for decades. I can without hesitation assert that the NIV does a BETTER job proving the deity of Jesus Christ than the King James does....Show more

There are more than 200 verses missing from the NIV, plus over 6000 changes. An example of what is missing: Acts 8:37.

The NIV has been derived from the corrupt Alexandrian manuscripts. There is evidence that all of these verses existed before Vaticanus and Sinaicus but liberal theologians have chose to ignore that evidence.

Here are just a few examples of what has been changed....
1) "Miracles" has been changed to "signs" 20 places
2) "Master" has been changed to "teacher"
3) "Sodomite" has been changed to "temple prostitute" 4 places
4) "Worship" has been changed to "bow down" only when refering to Jesus Christ but left "worship" when refering to Satan, devils, beast and idolatry
5) "Hell", which appeared 54 times in the KJV, appears in the modern Bibles as few as 12 times.

Choose the KJV if you want God's true Word....Show more

Because the manuscripts the NIV used are actually poor copies of ancient texts used in Egyptian churches and were copied quickly and words got lost. Two of the texts used disagree over 4,000 times in the gospels alone.

The KJV used a pure text known as the Textus Recptus and that was the traditional text used by true Christians back to the apostles. That text did not remove any words and was carefully translated with the work of over 500 men over the decades. The text was the only acceptable text for use of translating the KJV as they rejected the texts used for the NIV because of the missing words....Show more