Who Put John 5:4 into the Bible? What the Evidence Actually Proves

The question came to Wesley Huff from a Mormon missionary: Who took John 5:4 out of your Bible? Huff describes turning to the passage and finding verse 3 followed by verse 5. His answer reverses the accusation. The better question, he says, is who put John 5:4 into the Bible. He then gives a history with no visible uncertainty: the words began as a marginal commentary, moved into the text over time, and now survive mainly in notes at the bottom of modern Bible pages.¹

There is much to commend in the reversal. A verse number does not establish originality. Stephanus introduced the familiar New Testament verse divisions in the sixteenth century; a modern edition may therefore pass from the number 3 to the number 5 because it retains the inherited numbering while judging the numbered material secondary. The missing numeral is not an empty place in John’s autograph.

Nor is the shorter reading a recent contrivance. Important early Greek witnesses move from the sick people lying by the pool to verse 5 without the received explanation about the angel. The official online transcription of Codex Sinaiticus lists John 5:1, 2, 3, and then 5; verse 4 is not part of its fourth-century text.² Papyrus 66 and Papyrus 75 also omit the disputed material, as does Codex Vaticanus. The case for an early shorter form is substantial.

But Huff’s answer contains two different conclusions. The first is textual: the explanatory words were not original to the Gospel. The second is genetic: the words began as a note in the margin and later entered the text. Evidence may support the first conclusion more strongly than the second. The Martin Rule requires us to separate them.

What is actually in dispute

The received text at the end of John 5:3 describes the sick as “waiting for the moving of the water.” Verse 4 then explains:³

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

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1. Wesley Huff, “One Bible, Many Versions”, October 13, 2020, under “The Text of the Modern Translations”; see also Can I Trust the Bible?, Episode 2: “The Right Text”, where the study material describes the scribal notation as probably entering the text in the fourth century. ↩
2. Codex Sinaiticus, John 4:25–5:6, British Library folio 249, scribe A. The project’s verse navigation moves from John 5:3 to John 5:5. ↩
3. The Greek received reading may be consulted in F. H. A. Scrivener, ed., The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge, 1881), John 5:3–4. ↩

The longer reading supplies four pieces of information. An angel causes the disturbance. The descent occurs at appointed times. The first person to enter after the disturbance receives healing. The healing extends to whatever disease held him.

Without the disputed words, the narrative still contains a disturbance. In verse 7 the disabled man tells Jesus that he has no one to put him into the pool “when the water is troubled,” and that another descends before him. The shorter form therefore does not leave the reader ignorant of the man’s hope or of the need for assistance. It leaves the cause and terms of the disturbance unexplained.

That distinction matters. Some defenses of the longer reading say the story is unintelligible without verse 4. That is too strong. A narrative may mention a practice whose origin it does not explain. The man’s words may report a belief held by those at the pool, an intermittent phenomenon, or an event whose cause the evangelist leaves unstated. None of those possibilities proves the shorter text, but their availability defeats the claim that verse 4 is logically required.

Some defenses of the shorter reading make the opposite mistake. They say the disputed words add nothing because verse 7 already tells us the water was disturbed. That is also too strong. Verse 7 does not identify an angel, state a season, promise healing to the first entrant, or universalize the kinds of disease healed. The longer and shorter forms do not say the same thing.

The external evidence is similarly more complicated than a slogan. The explanatory unit is absent from several of the earliest surviving Greek witnesses. It is present in many later Greek manuscripts, in parts of the versional tradition, and in the church’s received text. The transmitted wording also varies. Some witnesses include the waiting clause at the end of verse 3 but not all of verse 4; some mark the words as doubtful; the longer forms contain smaller differences concerning the angel’s timing and action.⁴ Such variation can be evidence of textual growth. It can also show that scribes encountered and handled a disputed unit in more than one way.

No manuscript count can replace the historical question. A thousand late witnesses can descend from an earlier common form; one early witness can contain an early error. The shorter reading’s strength lies not merely in having old manuscripts but in the conjunction of early omission, diverse support, explanatory character, and variation within the longer tradition. That conjunction deserves more than dismissal.

The Martin ledger

The exact-proposition test prevents the case from being decided by a vague statement such as “John 5:4 is an addition.” Several propositions hide within that sentence, and they do not all receive the same grade.

This is not agnosticism about everything. The shorter reading has a serious, perhaps compelling, text-critical case. If one works within reasoned eclecticism, the explanatory character of the longer text and its instability reinforce the early omissions.⁵ The received-text defender must answer that evidence rather than treat the verse number as proof.

The ledger nevertheless exposes the excess in Huff’s wording. To say that we know the passage was initially a marginal note is to claim knowledge of the first stage in its expansion. Yet the evidence ordinarily cited is indirect: early witnesses without the words, later witnesses with them, and variation among the longer forms. Those facts are consistent with a marginal note entering the body. They are also consistent with an oral or liturgical explanation entering a copy directly, with expansion from another explanatory source, or with a longer form suffering omission in early lines of transmission. One may judge some alternatives less likely without pretending that the surviving manuscripts photograph the first alteration.

A genuine marginal transfer would require a more exact evidentiary bridge: an early witness with the explanation visibly in its margin, a related descendant with the same wording incorporated into the text, or historical testimony describing the act. Later marginal placement can show that scribes treated the material as comment or alternative; it does not necessarily establish where the wording originated. The closure test asks what the evidence fails to exclude. Here it fails to exclude more than one path by which the longer form could have arisen.

The right critical conclusion should therefore be expressed in degrees. The early shorter form is directly evidenced. The secondary character of the longer form is an inference from converging evidence. The marginal-gloss account is a plausible genetic explanation. The identity, place, and date of the originating act are unknown. A popular presentation may simplify, but it may not convert the last two sentences into the first.

What is lost when the verse is removed

The doctrinal question must be handled with the same restraint. John 5:4 does not supply an indispensable premise of the Trinity, the incarnation, justification by faith, or the resurrection. The critical corpus teaches angelic agency, divine healing, and Christ’s sovereign power in many other places. It would be an abuse of this case to declare that omitting the verse destroys a central article of Christianity.

That does not make the variant empty. The received reading makes a specific historical and providential assertion: an angel troubled this water at appointed times, and the first entrant was healed of whatever disease afflicted him. The critical form does not state that proposition. It retains the disabled man’s report about troubled water and his inability to enter first, but it leaves the cause and efficacy open.

The greatest conclusion warranted by the shorter text is therefore narrower. Sick people waited at the pool; the water was at times disturbed; the man believed prompt entry mattered; his disability and lack of assistance prevented him; Jesus healed him by command without putting him into the water. The shorter text does not tell us whether the pool’s reputed power was true, superstitious, natural, providential, or misunderstood.

One sometimes hears that the omission improves the theology because Jesus, not a magical pool, becomes the center. That is an aesthetic judgment masquerading as textual evidence. The received reading does not rival Christ’s power. The angelic disturbance is limited and mediated; Christ heals directly and sovereignly. He asks no race to the water, needs no recurring season, and commands the man to rise. The contrast is sharpened, not obscured, by the longer account.

The opposite apologetic excess says that the shorter reading attacks miracles or angels. It does not. Its wider corpus contains both. The local loss must be named locally: cause, timing, priority, and comprehensive healing at Bethesda are no longer asserted in the main text.

This is a useful negative control for the series. If the received-text case cannot admit that an important early omission may support a shorter reading, it has become immune to evidence. If the critical-text case cannot admit that a shorter reading removes real information, it has become immune to meaning. The Martin Rule refuses both immunities.

Who took, who put, and who knows

Huff’s reversal of the missionary’s question is memorable because it moves the burden of proof. The verse number cannot demand that modern editors retain words simply because an English reader expects them. But the new question—who put the verse in?—carries a burden of its own. If the answer is a specific history of marginal origin, the history must be proved.

The most honest answer is less theatrical:

We do not know who first introduced the explanatory material or exactly how it entered the transmission. Several early witnesses attest the shorter form. The explanatory nature and variable transmission of the longer form support the judgment that it is secondary. A marginal gloss is a plausible mechanism, not a directly witnessed origin story.

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1. Wesley Huff, “One Bible, Many Versions”, October 13, 2020, under “The Text of the Modern Translations”; see also Can I Trust the Bible?, Episode 2: “The Right Text”, where the study material describes the scribal notation as probably entering the text in the fourth century. ↩
2. Codex Sinaiticus, John 4:25–5:6, British Library folio 249, scribe A. The project’s verse navigation moves from John 5:3 to John 5:5. ↩
3. The Greek received reading may be consulted in F. H. A. Scrivener, ed., The New Testament in the Original Greek according to the Text Followed in the Authorised Version (Cambridge, 1881), John 5:3–4. ↩
4. Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), apparatus at John 5:3–4. The apparatus distinguishes the omission of the waiting clause and verse 4 from the several transmitted forms of the longer reading. ↩
5. For a lecture presenting the standard modern critical case, see Daniel B. Wallace, “Some Famous Textual Problems: John 5:3b–4”. Its use here identifies the argument to be assessed, not an authority exempt from the entailment test. ↩

That answer still challenges the authenticity of the received reading. It simply distinguishes artifact, inference, and hypothesis. Such distinctions strengthen rather than weaken an apologetic, because a reader who later discovers the evidentiary gap has not been taught to confuse confidence with omniscience.

The case also clarifies what preservation must explain. The critical account can offer a strong reconstruction: early witnesses and internal considerations point to the shorter form. The confessional account asks an additional question: how does a reading received, preached, and printed across centuries relate to the promise that the Greek text was kept pure? The answer cannot be “the verse number proves it.” Neither can the question be dissolved by saying the words were available in a footnote. A critical note preserves evidence of the reading; it does not grant the reading textual authority.

The ordinary reader deserves the same candor. A pulpit should not announce that an inspired verse was certainly stolen merely because the Authorized Version prints it. Neither should a study Bible tell him that scholars know the private route by which the words entered the text when the surviving evidence gives no such eyewitness account. He can be told that the witnesses divide, that several early copies have the shorter form, that the longer explanation is ancient and widespread, and that its explanatory character weighs in the critical judgment. That is enough information for instruction without pretending that pastoral confidence requires the suppression of evidentiary degrees.

At John 5:4, then, the verdict is divided. Huff is right to resist the naïve charge that a modern editor simply stole an inspired verse. He is right that early manuscript evidence creates a serious case for omission. He is not entitled to present the marginal-commentary account as an observed fact. And neither side is entitled to pretend that the longer and shorter forms have identical content.

This is what an exact audit looks like when it does not know in advance which side must win every point. The shorter form may be text-critically stronger while one popular defense of it remains historically overstated. The variant may be meaningful without overturning a major confession. A plausible story may remain a plausible story even when told by a scholar we respect.

I began this series by saying I would rather lose a dramatic argument than keep it by exaggeration. John 5:4 requires that payment. The verse cannot carry the doctrinal catastrophe sometimes placed upon it. Huff’s preferred origin story cannot carry the certainty he places upon it. What remains is more modest and more durable: early evidence for the shorter text, real content in the longer text, and an unresolved history between them.

Notes and Further Reading

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