Is Matthew 18:11 Missing from Some Bibles?

If you open two Bibles to Matthew 18, one may run straight from verse 10 to verse 12. The other will have a verse 11 in between: “For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost.”

This is a real textual difference, and it is the kind this project exists to explain plainly rather than argue about at length. Here is where the evidence stands, and here is what changes.

Where the Verse Is Found

The sentence is present in the King James Version, in the Textus Receptus, in Robinson–Pierpont’s Byzantine text, and in Hodges and Farstad’s Majority Text.

That last one has been checked directly for this project, in the printed second edition. It reads:

Ἦλθε γὰρ ὁ Υἱὸς τοῦ Ἀνθρώπου σῶσαι τὸ ἀπολωλός.

Its apparatus records the omission among the opposing witnesses.

The verse is absent from the Tyndale House Greek New Testament and from modern translations following the same textual judgment. That is the whole of the disagreement, and it accounts for the gap in the numbering.

Does the Difference Change the Teaching?

It changes what Matthew states outright. It does not reverse the argument around it.

Remove verse 11, and verses 12–14 still give you a sheep that goes astray, a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine to look for it, joy at the recovery, and the Father’s declared will that not one of these little ones should perish. The shepherding concern is fully present either way.

Include verse 11, and Matthew supplies the Christological reason for that concern. The Father’s will is not an abstract preference; the Son of man came to accomplish it. The verse names the mission that the parable then illustrates.

This gateway includes the verse, because its corpus deliberately covers the union of the principal Greek texts and the KJV tradition, and because it is directly verified in Hodges–Farstad. Where it stands, it teaches something worth understanding.

Who Are “These Little Ones”?

Everything in this paragraph depends on getting this right, and the chapter has already answered it.

Matthew 18 opens with the disciples asking who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus sets a child in the middle of them and says that unless they turn and become like little children they will not enter at all. Then He speaks of receiving such a little one in His name.

By verse 6 the phrase has expanded: “these little ones which believe in me.” So the expression cannot be limited to children, though it certainly protects them. The child is the governing picture for a wider group—Christ’s humble, dependent, unimpressive, easily disregarded disciples.

Which makes the warning in verse 10 sharp and specific. Jesus is speaking to men who had just been arguing about rank. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones. The person your community finds easiest to overlook is a person the Son of man came to save.

Lost, in What Sense?

“That which was lost” translates a perfect participle of a verb that covers being lost, ruined, destroyed, or perishing. The parable supplies the picture: one sheep out of a hundred has wandered off.

Notice that the sheep belongs to the flock before it strays. It is not an animal from elsewhere; it is one of the hundred. And the danger is stated at the end: the Father’s will is that not one of these little ones perish.

So the language holds two things together. The sheep is lost because it wandered, and if it stays lost, the wandering ends badly. Saving here means reversing that movement—finding it and bringing it back under the Shepherd’s care.

Matthew does not tell us why this particular sheep strayed. The verses just before warn against causing little ones to stumble; the verses just after deal with a brother who sins. The cause may be someone else’s offence, the disciple’s own fault, or both. The Shepherd’s concern is the same either way.

Is This the Same as the Lost Sheep in Luke?

Same image, different setting, and the settings matter.

In Luke 15, the lost sheep answers the complaint that Jesus receives sinners and eats with them. There the emphasis falls naturally on God’s joy over a sinner who repents.

In Matthew 18, the same image sits inside a discourse about believers—about offences, stumbling, wandering, correction, forgiveness, and restoration. The sheep is one of the hundred, and Jesus keeps calling the endangered person “one of these little ones.”

These are not competing interpretations. The saving Shepherd both brings lost sinners in and goes after those already in His care when they wander off. The literary context tells you which face of that work is in view, and in Matthew it is plainly the second.

Does This Mean a Believer Can Be Lost?

The passage describes danger, wandering, seeking, and recovery. It does not describe someone who possessed Christ’s life, ceased to possess it, and later received it again.

But the warning should not be softened either. The straying is real. The perishing is named as the outcome the Father sets Himself against. And Jesus is plainly not offering His disciples a reason to be relaxed about a wandering brother.

What secures the sheep in this parable is not that wandering is harmless. It is that the Shepherd goes out after it, and that the Father does not regard its destruction casually. Security is located in the Shepherd’s pursuit, not in the sheep’s stability.

This parable is not a complete treatment of perseverance, and it should not be made to carry one. Its purpose is narrower and more immediate: to govern how a community treats one vulnerable, straying disciple.

Joy Out of Proportion

“He rejoiceth more of that sheep, than of the ninety and nine which went not astray.”

The comparison is not a judgment on the ninety-nine, who are presumably doing exactly what sheep should do. It is a statement about the worth of the one in danger, made to men who had been ranking each other by greatness an hour earlier.

And the point lands on the community, not merely on the Shepherd. You may not despise the person your Shepherd would leave ninety-nine to go and find.

Correction as Recovery

Matthew’s next paragraph follows directly from this one, and the connection is easy to miss: “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.”

Gained him. Not won the argument, not protected the institution’s reputation, not resolved a difficulty. The stated goal of correction is the same as the stated goal of the shepherd going into the mountains.

Which is why contempt is treated so seriously here. To write off the wandering, immature, or inconvenient believer is to take lightly someone the Father does not will to perish, and someone the Son of man came to save. Restoration is not the church’s administrative housekeeping. It participates in the saving concern of Christ Himself.

This study is part of What Does It Mean to Be Saved?, an examination of every New Testament use of saving language in context, within Resource Cluster 3: Life in Christ. 24 of 92 passage studies are complete — see every occurrence.