Same Verse, Different Words: Comparing Translations
Every English Bible translates the same underlying Hebrew and Greek, yet on some verses they don’t agree — sometimes over a single disputed word, sometimes over an entire clause present in one manuscript tradition and absent from another. The eight verses below are among the most consequential examples. To keep this page copyright-clean, every full verse quoted here comes from a translation in the public domain: the King James Version (1611), the American Standard Version (1901), Young’s Literal Translation (1862/1898), the World English Bible (2000), and, where it adds something the others don’t, the Douay-Rheims (1899 American edition). Modern translations still under copyright — the NIV, ESV, NASB, and NRSV — are described below in prose, not quoted at length.
Formal vs. Dynamic Equivalence
Translations sit on a spectrum between two philosophies. Formal equivalence (sometimes called “word-for-word”) tries to preserve the source language’s exact words, word order, and grammatical structure as closely as English allows — the KJV, ASV, YLT, NASB, and ESV all lean this way, with YLT the most extreme case (Robert Young reportedly refused even to normalize Hebrew verb tenses into natural-sounding English past/future). Dynamic or functional equivalence (“thought-for-thought”) instead asks what effect the original had on its first readers and tries to reproduce that effect in natural modern English, even where it means departing from the source's literal wording — the NLT, GNT, and CEV sit here, with The Message further still, as a deliberate paraphrase rather than a translation in the strict sense. The NIV describes its own approach as “optimal equivalence,” explicitly balancing both goals; the NRSV and CSB make similar mediating claims. Neither approach is simply “more accurate” — formal equivalence can obscure an idiom's meaning by rendering it too literally, while dynamic equivalence can quietly resolve an ambiguity the original left open, substituting the translator's judgment for the reader's own. Comparing translations, as this page does, is one of the few ways a reader without Hebrew or Greek can see where that judgment gets exercised.
Eight Verses Worth Comparing
Isaiah 7:14 — “Virgin” or “young woman”?
The Hebrew word here, almah, means a young woman of marriageable age — it doesn’t specify virginity the way the Hebrew betulah does. The ancient Greek Septuagint rendered it parthenos (“virgin”), which is the word Matthew 1:23 quotes when applying this verse to Jesus’s birth, and which every public-domain English translation above follows. When the RSV broke with that tradition in 1952 and rendered it “young woman,” the choice caused a public controversy still remembered in translation history. The NRSV keeps “young woman” in its main text (with “virgin” footnoted); the NIV and ESV, weighing the Isaiah–Matthew connection more heavily, both retain “virgin.”
Isaiah 7:14 is read by Christian tradition as a messianic prophecy of the virgin birth; in its own 8th-century-BC context, most historical-critical scholars read it as a sign about King Ahaz’s own lifetime, with the child a contemporary birth rather than a prediction seven centuries out. See Isaiah 7:14 and messianic prophecy for both readings in full.
Genesis 1:1–2 — An absolute beginning, or God shaping existing chaos?
Most readers assume “In the beginning God created” is a complete sentence describing creation from nothing (ex nihilo). But the Hebrew grammar genuinely allows verse 1 to be read as an introductory temporal clause instead — “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth being formless and void…” — with the main action starting only at verse 3, “Then God said, Let there be light.” On that reading, God is depicted shaping pre-existing formless matter rather than making it from nothing. The NRSV and the Jewish Publication Society translation both adopt this temporal-clause reading; notably, so — over a century earlier — did Young’s famously literal 1862 translation, shown above. The medieval Jewish commentator Rashi raised the same grammatical point in the 11th century, so this isn’t a modern innovation; it’s a live grammatical ambiguity in the Hebrew itself.
The distinction matters for the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, a load-bearing concept in classical theism. See creation and pentateuch authorship for the wider debate over these opening chapters.
Psalm 22:16 — “Pierced” my hands and feet, or “like a lion” at my hands and feet?
ASV footnote: So the Septuagint, Vulgate, and Syriac. The Hebrew text as pointed reads, Like a lion, my etc.
This is a genuine one-letter textual crux, not a translation-philosophy choice. The Hebrew consonants as written (the kethib) can be read ka'ari, “like a lion,” while the ancient Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the Syriac Peshitta all reflect a text read as ka'aru, “they pierced” — a single letter's difference in the unvocalized consonantal text. The Dead Sea Scrolls' Psalms manuscript from Nahal Hever supports the “pierced” reading, which is why even the fiercely literal YLT follows it, as the ASV’s own footnote (quoted above) explains directly. Jewish translations following the Masoretic vocalization, such as the JPS Tanakh, render it closer to “like a lion, [they are at] my hands and feet.”
Christian tradition reads “pierced” as a striking prophetic anticipation of crucifixion, centuries before Rome used it as an execution method. See messianic prophecy and textual criticism for how scholars weigh manuscript evidence like this.
John 1:1 — “The Word was God” — near-universal agreement, with one well-known outlier
This verse is unusual on this page for how little the mainstream translations disagree: public-domain and modern copyrighted translations alike — KJV, ASV, YLT, WEB, and also NIV, ESV, NASB, NRSV — all render the clause “the Word was God.” The one well-known outlier is the New World Translation, produced by and for Jehovah's Witnesses, which renders it “the Word was a god,” based on the Greek theos lacking the definite article here. The vast majority of Greek scholars, including many outside any Trinitarian tradition, regard the missing article as ordinary Greek predicate-noun grammar (a predicate noun before the verb routinely drops the article) rather than evidence of a lesser or indefinite divinity, which is why essentially no other translation follows the NWT's rendering here.
This verse anchors historic Christian claims about the divinity of Christ and his relationship to God the Father. See the Trinity for how this and related verses fit into that doctrine's development.
Romans 9:5 — Does Paul call Christ “God over all”? It comes down to punctuation.
The original Greek manuscripts have no punctuation at all, so where a translator places a period or comma here is itself an interpretive act, not a neutral rendering. Read as one continuous clause — the choice every public-domain translation above makes, and the choice the NIV, ESV, and NASB also make — the verse directly calls Christ “God over all.” The NRSV instead places a full stop after “flesh” and starts a new sentence, printing something closer to “God who is over all be blessed forever” as a separate doxology addressed to the Father rather than a description of Christ. Both punctuation choices are grammatically defensible from the unpunctuated Greek; which one a translator picks tends to track that translator's prior view of Paul's Christology as much as it settles it.
This is one of the strongest candidate verses in Paul's letters for a direct identification of Jesus as God. See the Trinity for the broader case built from verses like this one.
1 Timothy 3:16 — “God was manifest in the flesh” — or “He who was manifested”?
ASV footnote: The word God, in place of He who, rests on no sufficient ancient evidence. Some ancient authorities read which.
This is a manuscript-family split, not a stylistic one. The KJV, YLT, and WEB all read “God” here, following the Byzantine/Majority Greek text tradition (the textual base underlying the KJV and, per its own stated method, the WEB's New Testament). The ASV instead reads “He who,” following the older Alexandrian manuscripts its translators favored — and its own footnote (quoted above) explains exactly why. In the unspaced, abbreviated uncial Greek script of the earliest manuscripts, the word for “God” was customarily contracted to two letters with a line over them (nomina sacra); that abbreviation and the Greek relative pronoun differ by a single stroke, which is almost certainly how one reading turned into the other during copying, however long ago it happened. The NIV, ESV, and NASB all follow the ASV's “he who” / “he who was revealed” reading (rendered as “he appeared” in some), consistent with their shared critical-text base.
Along with 1 John 5:7–8 below, this is one of the two verses most often cited in disputes over whether translation choices have shifted the New Testament's explicit statements about Christ's deity. See textual criticism and the Trinity.
1 John 5:7–8 — The “Three Heavenly Witnesses” — in the KJV, missing everywhere else
This is the single clearest case on this page of a translation difference caused entirely by manuscript history, not wording choice. The italicized clause in the KJV above — naming the Father, Word, and Holy Ghost explicitly as the “three that bear record in heaven” — appears in no Greek manuscript earlier than the 14th century, and in only a small handful even then; it's absent from every Church Father's citation of this passage in the trinitarian controversies of the 3rd and 4th centuries, which would have been the single most useful verse available to them had it existed. The clause (known as the Comma Johanneum) seems to have originated as a marginal theological gloss in Latin manuscripts that was later copied into the main text, then entered the Greek printed tradition when Erasmus, under pressure, included it in the third edition of his 1522 Greek New Testament after omitting it from his first two — and from there into the Textus Receptus underlying the KJV. Essentially every translation since, including modern ones still under copyright (NIV, ESV, NASB, NRSV), follows the ASV here and omits it, typically with a footnote explaining why.
This is the most direct textual evidence anywhere in the New Testament for how a scribal addition can shape a doctrinal debate; the passage was, for centuries, cited as the clearest explicit biblical prooftext for the Trinity, without ever having been part of the original text. See textual criticism and the Trinity.
Mark 16:9–20 — The Gospel's ending — twelve verses long, or two?
The two oldest complete Greek manuscripts of Mark (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both 4th century) end the Gospel at 16:8, with the women fleeing the empty tomb “afraid.” The familiar resurrection appearances, the Great Commission, and the references to handling snakes and drinking poison unharmed in verses 9–20 (the “longer ending”) appear in the vast majority of later Greek manuscripts and in the KJV without any note at all. A small number of other manuscripts instead have a much shorter, different two-sentence ending; a few have both endings; and a few omit any ending past verse 8 entirely. The ASV prints the longer ending but with a note flagging that the oldest authorities omit it; modern translations (NIV, ESV, NASB, NRSV) typically print it set apart with brackets or a subheading and an editorial note explaining the manuscript evidence, rather than silently including or excluding it.
Because the longer ending contains the only Gospel reference to snake-handling and poison-drinking as a sign of faith, and because it's widely regarded by textual scholars as a later addition rather than Mark's own writing, this is a frequently cited example of how translation and textual criticism intersect with a Gospel's actual authorship. See textual criticism and Gospel authorship.
Sources & Further Reading
- Bible Gateway (biblegateway.com) — KJV, ASV, YLT, WEB, and DRA texts quoted above, verified directly against source
- Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed. (1994)
- Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (1993) — on 1 Timothy 3:16 and the Comma Johanneum
- Grantley McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe: Erasmus, the Johannine Comma, and Trinitarian Debate (2016)
- Jason David BeDuhn, Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament (2003) — on John 1:1