The New Testament, side by side

In this book, the translation is the doctrine. Move one word and a belief held by two billion people stands or falls. The clearest place to watch it happen is the opening sentence of the Gospel of John, in the most-translated book ever written, a line that after two thousand years still cannot quite agree with itself.

For four hundred years the English barely moves. Then it cracks. Hart leaves the Greek word untranslated, Logos, and lowercases the final god. The New World Translation, the Bible of the Jehovah's Witnesses, adds one English word the Greek does not have, a, and a whole church's picture of Jesus turns on it. The fight is real and it is tiny: in the Greek, that last God has no the in front of it. To almost every scholar that is simply how the grammar works, and the Word is God. To the Witnesses it means the Word was a god, something less. One missing article, two religions.

This page is the New Testament read at that magnification. Not the whole thing, which runs to nearly 8,000 verses, but sixteen keystone passages, the ones the rest of it leans on, each shown in the original Greek and then stacked against nine English translations from Tyndale to Hart, with a plain breakdown of what it says and where the translators split. It picks the load-bearing passages over the merely famous, and follows a single spine the whole way down. It assumes you have read the Hebrew Bible post, because the New Testament reads itself as the second half of that book.

How this book came into English

No one has the original of a single book of the New Testament. What survives is copies: roughly 5,800 Greek manuscripts, written by hand across fourteen centuries, and no two are exactly alike. Most of the differences are spelling and slips of the pen. A few of them move a doctrine. So before anyone translates a word, someone has to decide which Greek to translate, and that choice already sorts the English versions into two families.

Tyndale and the King James men worked from the Textus Receptus, the "received text," a Greek New Testament the Dutch scholar Erasmus rushed into print in 1516 out of a handful of late medieval copies. The modern versions, the RSV through the ESV, work from a critical text rebuilt over the last century and a half from the oldest manuscripts we have, fourth-century codices and papyrus scraps that predate Erasmus's sources by a thousand years. That is why the King James carries lines the modern versions drop to a footnote: the ringing end of the Lord's Prayer, the last twelve verses of Mark, the woman caught in adultery. They are in the later manuscripts and missing from the earliest. The footnote is not the modern translators editing Jesus. It is them showing their work.

The English itself runs through one man. John Wycliffe's followers had copied an English Bible by hand in the 1380s, but from the Latin, and the church banned it and dug up his bones to burn them. Tyndale was the first to go back to the Greek and the first to print, in 1526, smuggling New Testaments into England inside bales of cloth. It got him hunted across Europe and, in 1536, strangled and burned near Brussels. His last words, by one account, were a prayer that the king of England's eyes would open. Within seventy-five years they had: when the King James appeared in 1611, an estimated 83 percent of its New Testament was Tyndale, word for word. The cadence the English-speaking world still calls "biblical," the sound of the thing, is one executed man's ear.

After that the translations never stop coming, because every translation is a choice between two losses. Stay close to the Greek word order and you get accuracy that reads like furniture-assembly instructions. Smooth it into real English and you have decided, on the reader's behalf, what the Greek meant. N.T. Wright leans warm and readable. David Bentley Hart leans so literal it goes strange on purpose, scraping four centuries of familiarity off lines you long ago stopped hearing. Both are honest. They just pay the bill on opposite sides, which is the whole reason to read them together.

Whose New Testament

There is no such thing as "the Bible," exactly. There are Bibles, and they do not hold the same books.

The 27 books of the New Testament were not handed down as a boxed set. For the first few centuries the churches argued over the edges. Some wanted to keep the Shepherd of Hermas or the Apocalypse of Peter; some wanted Revelation, Hebrews, and James thrown out. The first list that matches our 27 exactly is a festal letter from Athanasius of Alexandria in the year 367. The canon was a slow agreement, not a delivery.

The wider split is in the Old Testament, and it is the main reason a Catholic Bible is fatter than a Protestant one. Protestant Bibles carry 66 books. Catholic Bibles carry 73, including seven the Protestants leave out: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees, the deuterocanon. The Eastern Orthodox keep more still; the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, the widest in the world, takes in First Enoch and Jubilees. It traces back to which Hebrew Bible the early church grew up on. The Greek translation it used, the Septuagint, included the extra books; the Hebrew canon the rabbis settled did not. Luther, translating in the 1520s, sided with the Hebrew and moved the extras into an appendix he labeled "Apocrypha," worth reading, not Scripture. The Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent in 1546, made them Scripture in reply. Same history, three sizes of Bible.

And then there is the argument inside the New Testament, the one that split Western Christianity down the middle. Paul writes that a person is put right with God by faith, as a gift, "not by works, so that no one can boast." James writes, in the same New Testament, that "faith without works is dead," and that "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone." Luther read Paul, built the Reformation on faith alone, and disliked James enough to call it "an epistle of straw" and shove it to the back of his Bible. Trent read both and ruled for faith and works together. In this reader the two sit four passages apart, Romans and Ephesians on one side, James on the other; you can put them side by side and decide for yourself.

Most scholars now think the two men were answering different questions: Paul, how a person gets in (a gift, not a wage); James, what a real faith does once it is in (it acts, or it was never alive). A newer reading of Paul argues that "the works of the Law" he attacks were Jewish identity markers, circumcision and food laws, not kindness and charity, which softens the old clash further. But the seam is real, and the churches that grew up along it, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant, are still standing on their own sides of it, reading the same Greek.

Where the text comes from

Every English translation here is reproduced exactly, its own punctuation and all, for comparison and study, and every translator is named. Nothing was paraphrased or smoothed by hand.

• The Greek is the SBL Greek New Testament (ed. Michael Holmes, Society of Biblical Literature), an openly licensed critical text, pulled verbatim from Bible Gateway.
• Tyndale is his 1534 revision in the original spelling, so "the povre in sprete" really is what he set in type, from textusreceptusbibles.com. The King James (1611) and the Catholic Douay-Rheims (translated from the Latin Vulgate) are public domain.
• The Revised Standard (1952), New Revised Standard (the 2021 updated edition), New International (2011), English Standard (2016), and N.T. Wright's translation (published as the New Testament for Everyone) are quoted from Bible Gateway.
• David Bentley Hart's deliberately strange 2017 translation (Yale) is quoted, where its exact wording could be confirmed, from published reviews and excerpts; it appears on the passages where that was possible and is absent where it was not.

The breakdowns are mine. They lean on standard scholarship for the contested lines, and where the experts genuinely disagree (the grammar of John 1:1, the virgin of Isaiah 7:14, Paul against James) I have tried to show the disagreement rather than pick a side and bury it. This post stays inside the New Testament and the way it re-reads the Hebrew scriptures; the shared ground of Genesis and Exodus is handled in the Hebrew Bible post, on its own terms.

The painting on the homepage card is Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son (about 1668, the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg), the moment from Luke 15 when the father runs to the son. It is in the public domain.