The earliest manuscripts of the New Testament were written in capital letters, often with no spaces between words, very little punctuation and no quotation marks at all. The commas, full stops, question marks and quotation marks in every modern Bible, in every language, were put there by editors and translators.
Most of the time this raises no difficulty. The grammar makes it plain where one sentence ends and the next begins. But now and then a comma decides what a verse says. Open Word Bible records these choices as meaning decisions in the category punctuation, and marks the hard ones uncertain.
Romans 9:5: a comma or a full stop?
Paul lists what belongs to Israel: the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the worship, the promises, the patriarchs, and finally the Messiah himself. Then come these words:
ὁ χριστὸς τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων, θεὸς εὐλογητὸς εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας· ἀμήν
Word for word: “the Christ according to the flesh, the one being over all, God blessed to the ages, amen.” Where you put the punctuation changes who is called God.
- With a comma after “flesh”, the rest describes the Messiah: “the Messiah, who is God over all, blessed forever.”
- With a full stop after “flesh”, the rest becomes a separate praise of God: “May God, who is over all, be blessed forever.”
The SBL Greek New Testament, which Open Word Bible follows, has the comma, and so does the translation:
I could even wish that I myself were under a curse, cut off from Christ, on behalf of my brothers and sisters, my own people by human descent. They are Israelites. Theirs is the adoption as God’s children, theirs the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises. The patriarchs are theirs, and from them, by human descent, comes Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.
The record gives three reasons. The words “who is” most naturally refer to the person just named. “According to the flesh” leads the reader to expect what the Messiah is beyond his human descent, as in Romans 1:3. And when Paul blesses God in a separate sentence, “blessed” normally comes first (“Blessed be the God and Father”, 2 Corinthians 1:3), while here it follows the one just named, as in Romans 1:25.
The record also states the other side honestly. Paul nowhere else plainly calls Christ “God”, and some manuscripts and many readers put a full stop after “flesh”. So the decision is marked uncertain, and a footnote gives both alternatives.
John 3: where does Jesus stop speaking?
Quotation marks raise the same kind of question. In John 3, Jesus speaks with Nicodemus. At some point the words stop being Jesus’s and become John’s own comment, and the manuscripts do not say where.
Some scholars end the quotation at verse 15. From verse 16 the verbs move to the past (“God loved”, “he gave”), Nicodemus is not addressed again, and some of the phrases are ones John uses in his own voice elsewhere. Others carry it on to the end of verse 21. Verse 16 begins with “For”, tying it to what Jesus has just said, and the themes run on without a break.
Open Word Bible keeps the quotation open to the end of verse 21, marks the decision uncertain, and gives the other view in a footnote. The same question comes up again in John 3:31–36. See “For God so loved the world” for the rest of that verse.
Why it is a meaning decision
Punctuation might look like a question of style, the kind of thing each language could settle for itself. It is not. Whether Romans 9:5 calls the Messiah God is a question about what Paul meant, and every language has to give the same answer. So the decision is made once, in the meaning layer, and every translation follows it. Where the decision is close, every reader in every language sees the same uncertain label and the same footnote.