Contested verses
Where Bibles differ, and why
The verses where translations famously disagree: the original words, the ancient translations and manuscripts, and how each tradition reads them. The facts are the same in both lenses.
Genesis 1:1–2
"In the beginning", a plural word for God, and Spirit or wind
Three small Hebrew questions sit in the Bible's first two verses: whether 1:1 is a headline ("In the beginning") or a time clause ("When God began to create"), why the word for God, ʾĕlōhîm, is plural in form though its verb is singular, and whether rûaḥ ʾĕlōhîm is God's Spirit or a wind from God. Jewish and Christian readers, ancient and modern, have answered each in more than one way, and the Hebrew allows each answer.
Draft · being fact-checkedDeuteronomy 32:8
Sons of Israel, or sons of God?
The Hebrew text most Bibles follow says God fixed the nations' borders "according to the number of the children of Israel", while a Dead Sea Scroll and the Septuagint read "sons of God" or "angels of God", which the textual critic Emanuel Tov and the scholars he cites judge the older reading, as do the Göttingen Septuagint and the NRSV and BSB translators. Jewish tradition (Rashi) reads the first as the seventy of Jacob's family; Christian interpreters have read the second as the angels set over the nations.
Draft · being fact-checkedJob 19:25–26
"My Redeemer" or "my Vindicator"?
Job's gōʾēl is the kinsman who steps in for a relative: the one who buys back, avenges, or defends. Christian tradition has heard in these verses the risen Redeemer and the resurrection of the body, a reading the Latin Vulgate makes explicit, beyond what the Hebrew requires; Rashi and the 1970 Catholic NAB take the gōʾēl to be God, who will vindicate Job; some modern scholars, such as John Walton, think Job means a heavenly advocate.
Draft · being fact-checkedPsalms 22:16
"They pierced" or "like a lion"?
Many Christian Bibles (KJV, BSB and others) read "they pierced my hands and my feet", with the Septuagint ("they dug") and a first-century Hebrew fragment from the Judean desert, and Christians have long read the psalm in the light of the crucifixion. The standard Hebrew text reads "like a lion"; the line is hard in every form, and the Gospels quote other lines of this psalm but not this one.
Draft · being fact-checkedIsaiah 7:14
Virgin or young woman?
Isaiah's Hebrew word ʿalmâ means a young woman of marriageable age; the Greek Septuagint rendered it parthenos ("virgin"), and Matthew 1:23 quotes that Greek to read the sign as fulfilled in Mary. The sign was first given to King Ahaz, with a timeline in his own day (7:16), so Christian readers speak of its fullest fulfilment in Christ. Older and many Christian Bibles say "virgin"; Jewish and several modern versions, including the Catholic NABRE, "young woman".
Draft · being fact-checkedIsaiah 9:6
"Mighty God": titles of the child, or a sentence about God?
Christians have read the child of Isaiah 9 as the Messiah and the names (Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace) as titles of Christ; the Aramaic Targum also calls the child "the Messiah". Jewish commentators read it differently: Rashi takes most of the name as a description of God, who names the royal child Hezekiah "prince of peace", while Ibn Ezra takes all of it as Hezekiah's name. The Hebrew verbs are in the perfect, the form used for completed action ("has been born"), and the Septuagint has only "Messenger of great counsel".
Draft · being fact-checkedMark 16:9–20
Mark's longer ending: original, added, or both?
Mark 16:9–20 is in the great majority of manuscripts and was known by the second century (Irenaeus quotes it). It is printed in Catholic and Protestant Bibles and in the Orthodox Church's Greek text, and is read at Orthodox Sunday Matins and on Ascension; the Catholic Church holds it canonical. At the same time, the two oldest Greek manuscripts end the Gospel at 16:8, Eusebius and Jerome knew copies without it, and most scholars, including the editors of the Catholic NAB, think another hand wrote these verses.
Draft · being fact-checkedJohn 1:1
"The Word was God" or "a god"?
There is no manuscript question here. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches read John 1:1 as "the Word was God", meaning that the Word shares fully in what God is while being distinct from the Father ("with God"). The Jehovah's Witnesses' New World Translation reads "a god", arguing from the Greek's missing article. Grammarians who reject "a god" answer in two ways: some (Colwell, Metzger) argue that a predicate noun placed before the verb can be definite without the article; others (Harner) that it marks a quality, "the same nature as God", not "one god among others".
Draft · being fact-checkedJohn 7:53–8:11
The woman caught in adultery: part of John?
The story of the woman caught in adultery is accepted as Scripture by the Catholic Church, printed in the Orthodox Church's Greek text and in Protestant Bibles, and has been read in worship since at least the fifth century; scholars of every tradition call it a genuinely ancient story about Jesus. Its place in John is later: the earliest Greek manuscripts of John lack it, and other copies put it elsewhere, even in Luke.
Draft · being fact-checked1 John 5:7–8
"Three that bear record in heaven": the Comma Johanneum
The words "in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one" in the KJV's 1 John 5:7 entered the text from Latin tradition. They are absent from the Greek manuscripts for over a thousand years and never quoted by the Greek Fathers, and they reached the KJV through the printed Greek editions of the 16th century. Catholic and most Protestant scholarship agree on this, though some defenders of the Textus Receptus still argue for the words and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchal text of 1904 prints them; the Church's Trinitarian faith was defined without this verse.
Draft · being fact-checked