Every study Bible has small print at the bottom of the page saying things like some manuscripts read. This is what that print is telling you. None of it is secret, none of it is new, and meeting it calmly here is better than meeting it first from someone who wants to unsettle you with it.
Where the text came from
We do not have the originals
No autograph of any biblical book survives. What we have are copies, and a great many of them.
Papyrus and parchment do not last in a damp climate. Everything we have is a copy of a copy, which is true of every ancient text without exception. Caesar's Gallic War survives in around a dozen medieval manuscripts, the earliest roughly nine hundred years after he wrote. The New Testament survives in more than five thousand Greek manuscripts, some within a century or two of composition.
That abundance is a double-edged fact, and honest teachers say both edges. It means we are in an unusually strong position to work out what the text said, far stronger than for any other ancient work. It also means there are more copying differences to sort through than for a text preserved in twelve copies, simply because there is more material.
For the Old Testament the picture changed in 1947. Before the , the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts were medieval. The scrolls pushed the evidence back a thousand years, and the great Isaiah scroll turned out to be startlingly close to the text that had been copied ever since.
The Isaiah scroll
A complete copy of Isaiah from about 125 BC, found at Qumran, compared against the standard Hebrew text copied a thousand years later. The differences are mostly spelling and word order, and none changes the message of the book.
What a variant actually is
Most differences between manuscripts are spelling and word order. A small number matter, and translations tell you about those.
Scholars count hundreds of thousands of variants across the New Testament manuscripts, a number often quoted to alarming effect. What is rarely quoted alongside it is the breakdown. The overwhelming majority are spelling differences, or the presence or absence of the Greek definite article, or word order, which in Greek does not change meaning the way it does in English.
A much smaller set affect translation at all. A smaller set again are both meaningful and genuinely uncertain, and essentially all of those are footnoted in any modern Bible. Nothing hidden, nothing suppressed. The footnotes exist precisely so ordinary readers can see the working.
No Christian doctrine rests on a disputed reading. That claim is made by scholars across the spectrum of belief, and it is worth knowing because the alarming version of the variant statistic is very common online.
The three famous passages
Mark 16:9-20, John 7:53 to 8:11, and 1 John 5:7-8 are the best known contested passages. Every modern translation prints them with a note, and readers can see exactly what is at issue.
Christians differ here
Christians differ on how to treat them. Most modern translations mark them as absent from the earliest manuscripts. Those in the King James tradition argue the Byzantine text preserved them faithfully, and some hold that the traditional text should be preferred on principle.
Why the King James reads differently
It follows a different family of Greek manuscripts, assembled before the older ones had been found.
The New Testament of the King James rests on the Textus Receptus, a printed Greek text compiled by Erasmus in the sixteenth century from a handful of late medieval manuscripts. It was excellent work with the materials available, and those materials were the Byzantine tradition, which is numerous and comparatively late.
In the centuries since, older manuscripts came to light, including fourth-century codices and papyri from the second and third. Most modern translations use a critical text built by weighing all the evidence, which is why they footnote passages the King James prints without comment.
This is a genuine disagreement about method rather than a plot. One approach prioritizes the earliest surviving copies; another prioritizes the reading most widely attested across the tradition the church actually used for centuries. Both are arguable positions held by serious people.
Christians differ here
The King James Only movement holds a range of positions, from preferring the traditional text to regarding the 1611 translation itself as uniquely authoritative. Most Christians, including most who love the King James, hold the milder version or none of it.
Why translations differ
Word for word, or thought for thought
Every translation sits somewhere on a spectrum, and where it sits explains most of the differences you notice.
At one end is formal equivalence, which tries to match the original word by word and structure by structure. It preserves ambiguity and idiom, and can read stiffly. At the other end is dynamic or functional equivalence, which tries to reproduce the effect of the original in natural English, and reads more smoothly at the cost of interpreting more for you.
Neither is dishonest. Every translation interprets, because languages do not map cleanly onto one another. The literal end interprets less and asks more of the reader; the dynamic end does more work for the reader and makes more decisions on their behalf.
The practical advice most teachers give is to read one of each. Where two translations from opposite ends agree, the meaning is not in doubt. Where they diverge, you have found a place worth looking into, and the footnotes usually tell you why.
A Hebrew idiom
The phrase rendered literally as he covered his feet in some older translations is a euphemism for relieving himself. A formal translation preserves the words and puzzles the reader; a dynamic one says plainly what happened and loses the delicacy of the original.
Which manuscripts a translation used
Two translations can differ not because they read the Greek differently but because they started from different Greek.
This is the second and less obvious source of difference. Before a translator makes a single choice about English, someone has decided which underlying text to translate. That decision is why some Bibles include a verse others put in a footnote.
It also explains apparent omissions that get quoted as evidence of tampering. When a modern translation footnotes a verse, it is not removing something. It is reporting that the earliest copies do not have it, and letting the reader see the evidence.
The honest way to describe it is the way the footnotes do: this reading is absent from the earliest manuscripts. Saying it was removed, or that it was added later, both smuggle in a conclusion the evidence alone does not force.
English moves, and old translations stay still
Some King James difficulty is not depth. It is four hundred years of English drifting.
Thee and thou were once the familiar forms, used with family and close friends, while you was formal. The effect is now exactly reversed: modern readers hear thee as lofty when it was originally intimate.
Individual words have moved further. Conversation in 1611 meant conduct or manner of life. Prevent meant to go before. Suffer meant allow, which is why the line about suffering the little children is so often misheard. Charity in 1 Corinthians 13 meant love in its fullest sense, not almsgiving.
This is not an argument against reading the King James, which is one of the great works of English prose and shaped the language more than any other book. It is an argument for reading it with a glossary, or alongside something modern.
Study to shew thyself approved
In 2 Timothy 2:15 the King James says study, which in 1611 meant be diligent or make every effort. It does not mean sit down with books, though it has been preached that way for generations.
See it for yourself
Both of these editions are public domain and both are on this site in full. Some of these passages differ because the translators made different calls about the same words. Others differ because the manuscripts behind them are not identical. Each card says which, and where the two editions here agree but the wider argument does not, a third rendering is quoted.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only born Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
King James Version
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
What is going on: The best-known verse in the Bible, and a clean case with no textual dispute at all. The Greek monogenes was long rendered only begotten; most modern work takes it to mean one of a kind or only, which is why renderings differ. Both are translating the same word from the same manuscripts.
But now faith, hope, and love remain—these three. The greatest of these is love.
King James Version
And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.
What is going on: Charity and love translate one Greek word, agape. This is English drifting rather than translators disagreeing: in 1611 charity carried the full sense of self-giving love, and it has since narrowed to mean almsgiving.
Give diligence to present yourself approved by God, a workman who doesn't need to be ashamed, properly handling the Word of Truth.
King James Version
Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
What is going on: Study in 1611 meant be diligent or make every effort. The modern rendering is closer to what the King James translators intended, and generations of sermons have been preached on a meaning the word did not have when it was chosen.
But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, being small among the clans of Judah, out of you one will come out to me who is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings out are from of old, from ancient times.
King James Version
But thou, Beth–lehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.
What is going on: Thousands or clans. The Hebrew eleph can mean a literal thousand or a clan, a subdivision of a tribe, and the choice changes the picture from a population count to a family grouping. A good example of a decision a translator has to make where the text itself is genuinely open.
Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
King James Version
Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Jewish Publication Society, 1917
Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign: behold, the young woman shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
A Jewish translation from the Hebrew, in the public domain. It renders almah directly and does not import the Septuagint's parthenos.
What is going on: Both editions here read virgin, so this one needs a third voice to show what is at issue. The Hebrew almah means a young woman of marriageable age. The usual word for virgin is betulah. The Greek Septuagint, translated by Jewish scholars a couple of centuries before Christ, rendered it parthenos, which does mean virgin, and that Greek text is what Matthew quotes. Translations working from the Hebrew often say young woman; translations following Matthew's Greek say virgin. When the Revised Standard Version printed young woman in 1952, some pastors burned copies of it from the pulpit. It is worth being plain about what is and is not at stake. The virgin birth rests on Matthew 1 and Luke 1, which state it directly, and no rendering of Isaiah changes those accounts. What is actually in question is whether Isaiah's sign to King Ahaz was itself about a virgin birth, or whether Matthew is showing a fuller meaning in it that Ahaz and his court would not have seen.
For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
What is going on: The Johannine Comma, and the clearest single example of the text-family difference. The King James carries an explicitly Trinitarian formula that appears in no Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century. Erasmus left it out of his first two editions and added it under pressure. The doctrine of the Trinity does not depend on it, which is why its absence changes no Christian confession.
This edition does not contain this verse. The numbering continues without it.
King James Version (v37)
And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
What is going on: The Ethiopian official's confession of faith before baptism. It is absent from the earliest manuscripts and this edition of the World English Bible omits it entirely, which shifts every following verse number by one. That is worth seeing: when a translation drops a verse, it does not leave a gap, so verse numbers between editions can stop lining up.
He said, "Who are you, Lord?" The Lord said, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
King James Version
And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.
What is going on: It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks appears in the King James here and not in modern editions. The line is genuinely in Scripture, in Paul's own retelling at Acts 26:14; the question is only whether it also belonged in this earlier account, and the earliest manuscripts of chapter 9 do not have it.
Renderings from editions not carried here in full are quoted for comparison and comment, with the edition named. The World English Bible, the King James Version, and the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation are all in the public domain.
How the canon was recognized
The canon was recognized more than it was decided
No council invented the list. The debate was about which books the churches were already treating as Scripture.
The popular story, that a council voted on which books to include and suppressed the rest, does not match the evidence. By the second century the four Gospels and Paul's letters were already being read as authoritative across widely separated churches, long before any council addressed the question.
What the councils did was ratify and settle edges. The books that were argued about were mostly the short ones at the margins: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Revelation. The core was never seriously in question.
The rough tests applied were apostolic connection, wide use across the churches rather than one region, and consistency with the faith already received. Athanasius listed the twenty-seven New Testament books in a letter of AD 367, and the lists that follow largely match.
The Muratorian fragment
A damaged list of accepted books, usually dated to the late second century, naming most of the New Testament. It shows the question being worked out well before any council took it up.
What about the other gospels
Texts like the Gospel of Thomas are real and worth knowing about. They are also later, and they are different in kind.
The Nag Hammadi library, found in Egypt in 1945, included a number of texts calling themselves gospels. They exist, they were not burned, and anyone can read them in translation.
The reason they were not received is not conspiracy but chronology and content. They are generally second century or later, they lack the connection to eyewitnesses the four claim, and most carry a theology in which the material world is a mistake and salvation is secret knowledge, which is close to the opposite of a faith built on and bodily .
Scholars across the spectrum of belief agree on the dating. What a person makes of it depends on other commitments, but the timeline is not seriously contested.
Why Old Testaments differ in length
Christian traditions inherited different lists, which is why Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Bibles are different sizes.
Greek-speaking Jews used a collection that included books not in the Hebrew settled later. The early church, reading in Greek, used that broader collection, and the Latin Bible carried it into the West.
At the Reformation, Protestants returned to the Hebrew canon for the Old Testament, moving the extra books to a separate section called the , which the original 1611 King James printed between the Testaments. Trent, in 1546, affirmed them as canonical for . canons are broader still.
So a Protestant Old Testament has thirty-nine books, a Catholic one forty-six, and Orthodox Bibles more. All three agree entirely on the New Testament's twenty-seven.
Christians differ here
Every tradition here has reasons it considers good. The Library shelves the disputed books openly and labels who receives them, rather than quietly including or omitting them.
Nothing on this page is disputed between believing and unbelieving scholars. What people make of it differs, and where it does, this page says who holds what.
