An angel came down and stirred the water at the pool of Bethesda, and whoever got in first was healed.

The verse appears in John 5, right before the healing of the paralyzed man: an angel supposedly stirred the pool, and whoever stepped in first was cured. But it's absent from the earliest and most reliable manuscripts: Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus don't have it, and neither do the best Western witnesses. It shows up mainly in the later Byzantine manuscript tradition, and in roughly two dozen manuscripts that do include it, scribes marked it with asterisks warning the next copyist that the verse was doubtful. The vocabulary is also a tell: several of its Greek words never appear anywhere else in John's writing.

Modern translations reflect this. The NIV, ESV, NRSV, NLT, and NET all omit verse 4 from the main text (some put a note about it in the margin); the NKJV keeps it with a footnote saying it's missing from many Greek manuscripts; the NASB brackets it as doubtful. This is the same category of issue as the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11) or the Trinitarian gloss added to 1 John 5:7, a passage that entered the manuscript tradition after the original text was written, most likely as a scribal note explaining verse 7 that eventually got copied into the body of the text itself.

Here's the payoff: the story is actually sharper without it. Take out the angel and the stirring, and the paralyzed man's answer to Jesus in verse 7, "I have no one to put me into the pool," reads as exactly what it is, an excuse rooted in a competition he can never win. Jesus doesn't engage the mechanism at all. He doesn't ask who wins the race to the water; He just heals him. Knowing the textual history here doesn't destabilize the passage; it clarifies what the passage was doing all along, healing that runs on Jesus's word, not on a superstition about who's fastest.