The Ethiopian's confession, "If thou believest with all thine heart"

The eunuch's confession of faith before baptism is missing from the earliest Greek manuscripts, though it was already known and quoted in the second century, most likely as a line from the church's baptism service that found its way into the text.

What it changes: Something real, and it should be named: this is the clearest single verse in Acts showing a spoken confession of faith required before baptism, and congregations have built their baptismal practice on it. Losing the verse from the running text is a genuine loss of a proof text, not merely of a nice sentence.

The manuscripts, and the case each way →