Bible translations compared: why the verses change

Open two Bibles at the same verse and you will sometimes find two different sentences. That is not evidence of tampering and it is rarely evidence of bias. It is the visible result of three separate decisions every translation team has to make: which manuscripts to translate from, how literal to be, and what to do when the receiving language will not hold the shape of the original.

A note about what follows. This site publishes only openly licensed Scripture — the World English Bible in English, which is in the public domain, and the Bíblia Livre in Portuguese, released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Modern versions such as the NIV, ESV, NLT, NASB, CSB and the King James in its current typeset editions are named and described below, but their text is not reproduced anywhere on this site, because we do not hold the rights to redistribute it. The examples are therefore drawn from the two translations we can quote in full — which is enough, because the same three forces are at work in all of them.

Reason 1: the base text

Before anything is translated, someone has to decide what to translate. There is no single surviving original of any biblical book; there are thousands of manuscripts, and they differ in small ways.

For the Old Testament, nearly every modern translation works from the Masoretic Hebrew text, usually in the edition known as the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, consulting the ancient Greek translation and the Dead Sea Scrolls where the Hebrew is difficult.

For the New Testament there are two main families of choice:

• Eclectic or critical texts, which weigh the oldest surviving manuscripts heavily. Most twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations follow one of these.
• The Byzantine Majority Text or the Textus Receptus, which follow the reading found in the largest number of manuscripts. The King James tradition follows the Textus Receptus; the World English Bible follows the Byzantine Majority Text, on the reasoning that independent scribes are unlikely to make the same mistake in the same place.

You can see the consequence without knowing a word of Greek. In the World English Bible, Acts 8 runs verse 36, then verse 37 with no text at all, then verse 38. The verse number is kept so that references and cross-references still work; the sentence traditionally numbered 8:37 is judged not to belong to the earliest text. That is what a "missing verse" is in practice — not a deletion, but a numbering system preserved around a gap.

The same mechanism runs the other way. Matthew 17:21 is present in the World English Bible:

21 But this kind doesn’t go out except by prayer and fasting.”

Translations that follow a critical text usually place that sentence in a footnote instead. Neither team is hiding anything; they are following different manuscript families, and both say so in their prefaces.

Reason 2: how literal to be

The second decision is a spectrum, not a binary. At one end, formal equivalence tries to keep the words and grammatical structures of the original, accepting some awkwardness. At the other, dynamic or functional equivalence tries to reproduce the effect of the sentence in natural English, accepting more interpretation. Beyond that end sit paraphrases, which restate rather than translate.

Those placements are approximate; every team describes its own method, and most modern committees say they aim for a balance rather than a pole. The World English Bible's own notes describe an attempt to hold meaning, individual word senses, grammatical nuance, tone and style together rather than optimizing for one of them.

Here is the spectrum in one verse. The Greek of Colossians 3:12 contains an idiom whose literal sense is roughly "bowels of compassion" — the ancients located feeling in the gut. Almost nobody translates it that way, because in English it means something else entirely:

12 Put on therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, a heart of compassion, kindness, lowliness, humility, and perseverance;

The Portuguese Bíblia Livre renders the same phrase as sentimentos de misericórdia — "feelings of mercy". Both teams made the same call: keep the meaning, drop the anatomy. A strictly formal translation that kept the anatomy would be more literal and less accurate, which is the whole problem in miniature.

Reason 3: the receiving language forces a choice

Some differences have nothing to do with theology. They exist because two languages do not offer the same options.

The clearest example in our two translations is the opening of John 1. In Greek, logos — Word — is grammatically masculine. In English the translator can simply use "him". In Portuguese, Palavra is feminine, so the pronouns that follow must be feminine too:

3 All things were made through him. Without him, nothing was made that has been made.

The Bíblia Livre, at João 1:3, has: Por esta foram feitas todas as coisas, e sem ela não se fez coisa nenhuma do que foi feito. — "through this one were all things made, and without her nothing was made". A reader who does not know Portuguese grammar could conclude that the Portuguese Bible teaches something different about the Word. It does not. It is obeying an agreement rule, and it had no other option.

A second example is the last line of Psalm 23. The Hebrew ends with a phrase meaning something like "for length of days":

6 Surely goodness and loving kindness shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in Yahweh’s house forever.

The Bíblia Livre ends the same verse e habitarei na casa do SENHOR por muitos e muitos dias — "and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for many and many days". One team read the Hebrew idiom as reaching to eternity; the other kept it inside a lifetime. Both readings are defensible from the Hebrew, and the difference in feel is enormous.

The divine name

The Old Testament writes God's personal name with four Hebrew consonants, usually transliterated YHWH. Ancient Jewish practice was to avoid pronouncing it, saying "Adonai" — my Lord — instead, and most English translations follow that custom by printing LORD in small capitals.

The World English Bible does not. It prints the name:

2 My help comes from Yahweh, who made heaven and earth.

That is Psalm 121:2. The Bíblia Livre follows the traditional route with SENHOR. And several editions derived from the World English Bible — the British-spelling and Messianic editions among them — revert to LORD, precisely because the choice is contested. This single decision changes the appearance of several thousand verses and involves no disagreement whatsoever about what the Hebrew says.

What this does not mean

• It does not mean the Bible has been changed over time. The differences between manuscript families are known, catalogued and footnoted in every serious edition. They are visible precisely because nothing was quietly harmonized away.
• It does not mean one translation is the true one. Claims that a single English version is uniquely authorized are a modern position, not an ancient one, and the version usually named for that role is itself a revision of earlier English translations.
• It does not mean you need the original languages. Comparing two careful translations tells you where the difficulty is. That is most of the benefit, at none of the cost.
• And it does not mean differences are hidden. Every major translation publishes a preface stating its base text and its philosophy. Reading that preface once is more useful than a dozen arguments about versions.

How to choose, and how to compare

Pick a main translation you understand without effort, and a second one from a different point on the spectrum. Read from the first; consult the second when a sentence seems odd. Where they diverge, ask which of the three reasons above is at work — manuscript, literalness, or a constraint of the receiving language. Nine times out of ten you can tell.

On this site the text is the World English Bible throughout, and our translations and licenses page sets out exactly what we publish and why. If you want the comparison habit built into a routine, the reading plan gives you a fixed daily passage to run it on, and how to study the Bible on your own puts translation comparison in its place as step six of seven.