MARK 9:28-29: PRAYER AND FASTING

Some Bible teachers you will encounter make a big deal of the fact that liberal theologians have removed parts of the Bible in their modern translations, even whole verses that are found in the KJV.  (See a listing at the end of this post). However, the real question to ask is whether those words were even part of the Bible to start with. This is the whole subject of textual criticism, a subject too large to tackle at this point. Textual criticism is a comparison of all the available manuscripts in order to make an evaluation as to which reading best represents the original writings. There are many criteria that go into this evaluation, one of which is the relative ages of differing manuscripts.

When the KJV was written, the scholars of the time relied on the Majority Text. This was the reading seen in most of the available manuscripts. It is a good example of the classic fallacy of counting evidence instead of weighing it. In other words, there may be many more manuscripts that all say one particular thing, but if they all copied the same errors over and over from one another, shear numbers don't count for much. Instead, modern translators tend to assign much higher weight to the earliest manuscripts since they are closer in time to the original writing with not as much time for errors to arise and accumulate.

By the way, if this whole discussion worries you and you now doubt whether you can trust any translation, keep in mind that the vast majority of differences in manuscripts have no effect whatsoever on any Christian doctrines. In addition, we are much much more certain of the NT text than we are of comparably ancient documents in terms of the number of manuscripts we have to compare and the relatively short amount of transpired time between the original writings and copies we have. Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell is a popular and helpful treatment of this subject.

Here is an example: When he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” He said to them, “This kind can come out only through prayer (and fasting).” (Mark 9:28-29)

The phrade "and fasting" is in KJV and some minor translations that rely on later manuscripts rather than the earliest ones which do not have this word. Famous commentators of a previous generation who relied on the KJV exclusively assumed that “and fasting” was in the original and commented appropriately. For example, Spurgeon wrote: “He that would overcome the devil in certain instances must first overcome heaven by prayer, and conquer himself by self-denial.” This is a great thought but based on a phrase that probably wasn't in the original. 

Here is the most logical way this addition arose in the first place. To a hand-written document, an early scribe added his own comments in the margin. The next person copying this manuscript may have thought that the previous scribe had inadvertently left the words out and then squeezed it into the margin. So when he, in turn, copied the document, he inserted the word into the text itself, where he thought it must have belonged.

The opposite scenario has a scribe purposely removing the problem words at some later point because he did not believe in fasting. This is highly unlikely since church history teaches us that the practice of fasting became more and more important with the progress of time, not less.

APPENDIX 1: Whole verses found in KJV but deleted in most modern translations:

Matthew 17:21, 18:11, 23:14; Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46, 11:26, 15:28; Luke 17:36, 23:17; John 5:4; Acts 8:37, 15:34, 24:7, 28:29; Romans 16:24