People pass rattlesnakes down the pew because of twelve verses somebody added.

Every Bible in print today is a copy of a copy of a copy. No original manuscript exists anywhere on earth. So when someone says the Bible is the infallible word of God, Leah and Malaine want to ask the obvious follow-up question: which Bible, and which version?

This episode walks through what actually happened to the text. Twelve verses added to the end of Mark that produced snake-handling churches. A Trinity verse that appears in no early Greek manuscript. A King James translator who ran out of Greek and filled the gap by translating backwards from Latin. What the Council of Nicaea was actually about. And why the doctrine of infallibility traces back to Paul describing a collection of writings that did not yet include the New Testament.

Leah and Malaine love the Bible, read it daily, and stand on it. They also think you deserve to know its history before someone weaponizes a verse at you.

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"Before you go cherry-picking scripture and weaponizing it against somebody, make sure that you really understand: is that the earliest translation we have of that verse, and does it mean what you think it means?"

-Leah Steele Barnett

Key Takeaways

• Every Bible in existence is a copy of a copy. No original manuscripts survive, which means every version you can buy is the product of translation decisions somebody made.
• Mark's gospel originally ended at chapter 16 verse 8, with the women fleeing the empty tomb. The final twelve verses were added later by someone unknown. Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the two oldest complete Bibles we have, both stop at verse 8.
• Those added verses contain the promise about handling serpents and drinking deadly poison unharmed. Congregations across Appalachia built an entire practice on that sentence, and people have died doing it.
• The clearest Trinity verse in scripture, 1 John 5:7-8, appears in no early Greek manuscript. It entered the Greek text in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Greek church fathers never taught from it during the Trinitarian controversies when they most needed it.
• The Council of Nicaea did not canonize the Bible. It was convened over the Trinity and the nature of Christ. That distinction takes five seconds to verify and gets repeated wrongly constantly.
• The King James New Testament rests on manuscripts no older than the 10th century. Erasmus was missing the final page of Revelation, so he translated the Latin Vulgate back into Greek to fill it. Revelation 22:19 says book of life in the KJV where every Greek manuscript says tree of life.
• Modern readers have access to roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, plus Codex Sinaiticus found in 1844, Codex Vaticanus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls from 1947. None of it existed for the KJV translators.
• Paul is the source of the infallibility doctrine, and he was describing the Septuagint. The New Testament had not been written when he wrote it.
• Be cautious with study Bible commentary. Most English Bible footnotes trace back to the Scofield Reference Bible, which carried a political agenda.

Featured Scripture

John 1:1, 14

"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, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."

Application: John identifies the Word as a person before anyone bound a page. Scripture points to Him, carries His voice, and gets used by God to speak, and it was never meant to occupy the seat that belongs to Jesus. Holding the text with open hands rather than a clenched fist changes nothing about its power. It simply keeps the object of worship where it belongs.

Timestamps

00:00 — Every Bible Is a Copy of a Copy
05:01 — Which Bible and Which Canon?
07:56 — Reading Genesis After Enoch and Jasher
12:33 — Who Actually Wrote the Gospels?
15:05 — The 12 Verses Added to the End of Mark
17:20 — Why Churches Handle Snakes and Drink Poison
21:02 — The Trinity Verse With No Early Manuscript
22:39 — What the Council of Nicaea Was Really About
27:22 — Where We Land on the Trinity
38:56 — The King James Problem: Erasmus and 1611
41:13 — Book of Life or Tree of Life? Revelation
43:23 — What Translation Should You Actually Read? 
46:50 — The Scofield Commentary Warning
52:14 — Weaponizing Verses You Cannot Verify

Resources and Connect

Leah is posting a full research dossier covering this episode, plus material not covered here, inside The Fringe on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/thefringeonfb

NET Bible (New English Translation), free online with over 60,000 translator footnotes:

https://netbible.org

Books referenced in this episode:

The Book of Enoch

The Book of Jasher

The Epic of Esau

All books available in the Faith on the Fringe Amazon Bookstore: https://amzn.to/3WscgNe

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Historical and Textual References

Codex Sinaiticus. A fourth century Greek manuscript containing the oldest complete New Testament in existence. Found at St. Catherine's Monastery on Mount Sinai in 1844, long after the King James translators had finished their work. It ends Mark at chapter 16 verse 8.

Codex Vaticanus. A fourth century Greek manuscript held in the Vatican Library and one of the two oldest near-complete Bibles known. It sat inaccessible to outside scholars for centuries. It also ends Mark at verse 8.

Erasmus and the Textus Receptus. Erasmus published a printed Greek New Testament in 1516 using six or seven manuscripts he could physically obtain, most from the twelfth century and none older than the tenth. That edition became the basis of the Textus Receptus, the Greek text behind the King James Version.

Irenaeus. A bishop writing around 180 AD. Scholars use his quotations to date when passages were already circulating, and he quotes from the longer ending of Mark, which places its addition sometime in the second century.

The Dead Sea Scrolls. Manuscripts found in caves near Qumran starting in 1947, containing the oldest known copies of Hebrew scripture. They pushed the available evidence back roughly a thousand years.

The Septuagint. The Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures made a few centuries before Christ. It was the version most New Testament writers quoted, and it is what Paul was describing when he wrote about scripture being God-breathed.

The Scofield Reference Bible. Published in 1909 by C.I. Scofield, the first widely distributed study Bible to print interpretive notes beside the text. Its footnotes shaped most English study Bible commentary that followed.

The Ethiopian canon. The biblical canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, the largest in Christianity at roughly 81 books. It includes Enoch and Jubilees, which other traditions removed.

Scriptures for Further Study

John 1:1, 14. The Word was with God, was God, and became flesh.

Mark 16:8. The women flee the empty tomb, where the oldest manuscripts end the gospel.

Mark 16:17-18. Believers will take up serpents and drink deadly things unharmed.

1 John 5:7-8. The three that bear record in heaven, absent from early Greek manuscripts.

Revelation 22:19. The KJV reads book of life where Greek manuscripts read tree of life.

2 Timothy 3:16. All scripture is God-breathed, written before the New Testament existed as a collection.

John 14:9. Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

2 Timothy 1:7. God gave a spirit of power, love, and a sound mind rather than fear.

Open your Bible this week and read the footnotes you have been skipping. Most modern translations already bracket Mark 16:9-20 and flag 1 John 5:7. The information has been sitting in your own Bible the whole time.

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