Misquoting the Bible

Over the last twenty-five years, I have had many occasions where a passage from the Bible jumped out at me and altered my thinking. These experiences usually make me laugh or are accompanied by great joy and I feel like I have to call my friend Tom, and share the newfound gem. But recently, I experienced one of these moments and it made me very angry. I became enraged that the verse had been so often misquoted that the true meaning was hidden. It is one thing to take a verse out of context and develop a doctrine out of it. That has been going on almost since the beginning of Christianity. But it is quite another to change the words in such a way as to hide their true meaning.

Recently, I heard someone say a Bible verse and they misquoted it. So I got out my Bible and tried to look it up. The verse is one that has always been popular in fundamentalist/evangelical circles.

“Where sin doth abound, grace doth much more abound.”

Turning to Romans 5:20, I read the verse from the Bible. It said,

“But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound.”

I thought that the past tense version I found in Romans 5:20 had to be a similar verse. But there surely was a present tense verse somewhere in the Bible. After all, I had heard the present tense version quoted hundreds of times in my life. A search of my Strong’s Concordance turned up nothing. I spent almost an hour trying to find the present tense version of the verse in my Bible. I tried different versions. I tried the internet.

I found a sermon by Charles Spurgeon with the present tense words. (I think he might have been the first to popularize this quote.) I found this “Bible verse” in the present tense, quoted hundreds of times on hundreds of websites. At this point, I began to shake my head in disbelief. The verse in the present tense does not exist. But it makes a nice sounding quote when making an altar call.