Is there really sixteen chapters missing out of the bible?

Answer 1

It really depends on what you mean by "Bible" and "missing." Among the various religious traditions of the world, there are various beliefs about the "Bible" (I assume you mean the Christian Scriptures).

For example, Jews don't believe that any of the New Covenant books are divinely inspired. Muslims go even further, holding that much of the Old Covenant has been corrupted (only to be restored in the Qu'ran). Among Jews there is dispute over which parts of the Old Covenant tradition is divinely inspired as well (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Jewish pseudepigrapha, the works of the mystics, &c).

Furthermore, among Christians there is not a universal agreement on the canon of Scripture either. Protestants believe that the deutrocanonical books ("apocrypha") are not part of sacred Scripture, while most Orthodox churches and the Roman Catholic Church believe they are. Yet still, several Orthodox churches hold books to be inspired which are not recognized by the Roman Catholic church. And of course, there have also always been the Christian pseudepigraphal works as well (as exemplified by the [mainly] Gnostic corpus discovered at Nag Hammadi).

All of this does not preclude, of course, the possibility of a single, completely accurate canon (nor even necessarily preclude one from the knowledge of such a canon by purely human means); this is just to say that the words "Bible" and "missing" carry a *huge* amount of baggage that needs to be sorted before the question can be answered properly.

I will assume you mean something along the lines of "are there really sixteen chapters missing from [some major Protestant Bible translation as compared to some other major Protestant Bible translation]?" This is commonly asserted by those who believe that all modern Protestant Bible translations are in some way inferior to the 1611 edition of the King James translation, and is the only context which makes sense to me, given the above considerations.

If that is the intent of the question, the answer is that it is very possibly true (or it could be said the other way, i.e., the one translation "inserts" 16 chapters, rather than the other "missing" them). The reasons for this are complex, and essentially come down to choices the translators had to make when they encountered different ancient manuscripts of the same passage, which had different readings from each other regarding some word or phrase, or where one lacked (or included) some bit that was present (or missing) in the other. These differences are called "variant readings" (or just "variants" for short), and the act of choosing between two or more variants to arrive at a reading is known as "collation."

The science behind this collation process is known as "Textual Criticism" (probably a poor choice of words, since it has nothing to do with "Higher Criticism," which is actually *critical* of the historical truth and accuracy of the Christian traditions). This science is used by everyone trying to reconstruct any ancient text from multiple fragments / editions. That means that the same principles for selecting between variants are used to determine what Plato originally wrote, as are used to determine what the evangelist Mark originally wrote.

So long answer short--some Protestant Bible translations omit (or include, depending on your perspective) certain words, phrases, or even entire sections of text (e.g., the last portion of Mark 16), because the translators of that version believed those textual choices best represented the original text as the authors wrote it. The issue is complicated, and to properly explain it would take a book-length treatment (of which there are several), dealing with issues such as manuscript families, individual manuscript pedigree, common scribal practice and errors, &c. Suffice it to say that no Protestant Bible translation willingly omits any portion of text that another translation includes, unless the translators felt it was not part of the original text as penned by an inspired writer, based on rigorous Textual Critical analysis.