Missing Pages of the Bible

So today I was reading on the subject of Christianity’s Hebrew heritage and I wanted to consult a Scripture reference made in the book. I grabbed the most convenient copy of the Bible where I was in my office, the New Living Translation. I don’t remember the circumstances, but I obtained this Bible in May of 1997. In all the intervening years, I never opened this book. I literally had to blow the dust off it! So I turned to Luke 1:73.

It wasn’t there. Neither were any of the other verses between Mark 7:31 and Luke 9:7. Thirty-three pages are missing. The missing pages recount the most compressed version of the Passion of Jesus and the most extensive account of the birth of Jesus. These things matter.

I’m not worried about the orthodoxy of Tyndale House Publishers, who inscribed the front cover of this edition with the words “Easy to Understand, Relevant for Today.”

It made me mindful of the contemporary relevance of ALL of Scripture. And of the compelling evidence we have that extant manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments are reliable copies of the original autographs.

But it struck me as odd, as such things always do, that on the one occasion when I turn to this edition of the Bible, the passage I seek simply cannot be found. Time, now, to look up Matthew 7:7.

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