Why Is Acts 8:37 Missing From My Bible?

Open almost any Bible printed in the last century to Acts 8 and count the verses. The chariot comes to water at verse 36. The eunuch asks what prevents him from being baptized. Then verse 38: Philip orders the chariot to stop and baptizes him. Verse 37 is not there. Some editions print the number and leave the line blank. Some drop the number entirely. Most put the missing words in a footnote with a short note that "some manuscripts" include them.

The King James Version does have that verse, and it says: "And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."

If you grew up on the King James, that verse is the one you remember from the story. It is the only place in the New Testament where someone states a baptismal confession in so many words. So the question people wonder is a fair one: why would anyone take it out?

The short answer is that no one took it out. It was added early, for understandable reasons, and the editors who removed it were restoring the text the oldest copies have. The longer answer is worth a few minutes, because this verse is one of the easiest places in the Bible to demonstrate how we know what the text says.

What the oldest copies say

The earliest surviving manuscripts of Acts are a papyrus from the third century (P45), another from the seventh (P74), and the two great fourth-century codices, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, followed by Alexandrinus in the fifth. None of them has verse 37. The story runs from the eunuch's question straight to the chariot stopping.

That by itself would be strong evidence, but there's more. The Byzantine text, the majority of Greek manuscripts from the medieval period and the tradition that is otherwise most generous about keeping extra material, does not have it either. The verse is also missing not only from the old Alexandrian witnesses that critical editions prefer but from the great mass of later copies that the King James tradition usually leans on. Westcott and Hort left it out. Tregelles left it out. The current Nestle-Aland edition leaves it out. The Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine text leaves it out.

When the earliest manuscripts and the majority of later ones agree that a verse is absent, the editors of a Greek New Testament do not have much of a choice.

So where did it come from?

The confession is old. Irenaeus, writing in Lyon around the year 180, quotes it in Against Heresies when he describes Philip's preaching to the eunuch. That is earlier than any manuscript of Acts we possess. Cyprian of Carthage knew it in the third century. It appears in the Western text of Acts, the stream of early witnesses that has a habit of filling in details the narrative leaves to the reader. It turns up in Latin copies and in the sixth-century Codex Laudianus, the Greek-Latin manuscript that Bede used in Northumbria.

The reason is not hard to see. The eunuch asks what prevents his baptism, and Luke records no answer before Philip baptizes him. By the second century the church had a baptismal rite in which the candidate was asked a question and gave a confession before going into the water.

Bruce Metzger's Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, the standard companion to the critical text, calls the verse a Western addition and explains it as a copyist supplying what the church was already saying at every baptism: a question about belief with the whole heart, and the answer, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." Nothing shows the moment it happened, so that part is inference. What the evidence does show is that the words are ancient (Irenaeus and Cyprian quote them), that the church prayed them at baptism, and that the earliest copies of Acts do not have them.

How it got into the King James

Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament in 1516 (the Complutensian was printed earlier but released later). He worked from a handful of late manuscripts, and in his own annotation on the verse he says that he found Acts 8:37 in none of their texts, only written in the margin of one (the minuscule now numbered 4). He judged that scribes had carelessly dropped it, since the Latin Bible and the fathers had it, and he printed it.

Metzger's Textual Commentary records both the margin and Erasmus's reasoning in its entry on the verse. Erasmus's edition became the ancestor of the Textus Receptus; Robert Estienne (Stephanus) divided that text into numbered verses in his 1551 edition, and the translators of 1611 worked from the editions of Stephanus and Beza. The number 37 was assigned to a sentence that was already in the Greek Bible on the desk.

When later editors removed the sentence, they kept the numbering so that references would still line up across editions. So your Bible can skip from 36 to 38 without anything having been lost from the count.

What the Anselm Project Bible does with it

At Acts 8:37 the APB's translation committee kept the shorter text. Its note says the passage "is not in the earliest copies of the text," that the external evidence "strongly favors absence," and that the internal evidence marks it as "a likely explanatory expansion." That is the same conclusion the printed editions reached.

The APB does not delete the verse. It prints it in brackets:

Then, as they were traveling along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, "Look! Water! What prevents me from being baptized?" [Then Philip said, "If you believe with all your heart, it is permitted." Then he answered, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."] And he ordered the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, both Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized him.

The brackets say what a footnote says, but they say it on the page, where the reader is. The wording is kept because it is part of the history of this story and because the words themselves are true. The reasoning at this verse is public in the Crux Registry.

Does it change anything?

It does not change a doctrine. Acts 8:37 is not the only verse that leads people to baptize on a confession of faith. The scene without the verse still has a man who heard the gospel from Isaiah 53 and wanted to be baptized that same hour. Philip's preaching, the eunuch's question, the water, the going down and coming up are all in the oldest text. The longer reading adds the explicit question and answer. The shorter reading keeps Luke's silence: the eunuch asks what prevents him, and nothing does.

It does change how a reader should think about missing verses in general. The verse is not missing because translators are hostile to it. It is left out because the people who copied Acts for the first three centuries did not have it, and the people who copied it for the next thousand mostly did not either. The copies that have it are the later ones, and the editors who removed it did so because the oldest copies do not have it.

The witness list for this verse is in the Crux Registry, and the passage reads with the brackets in place.