Before printing, every copy of the New Testament was made by hand. Thousands of those copies survive, and no two of them are exactly alike. Most of the differences are small: a spelling, a word order, a “the” added or left out. A few are larger. Scholars call these differences variants, and the work of weighing them textual criticism.
A translation has to decide which words it is translating. This article explains how Open Word Bible does it.
One fixed text
Open Word Bible translates a single published edition of the Greek: the SBL Greek New Testament, pinned to an exact version. Its editors weighed the manuscripts and printed the text they judged most likely to be original. Starting from a fixed edition means every word of the translation can be traced to a known source text, and every result can be checked again later. See Why we never type Greek or Hebrew by hand.
Following an edition is not the same as hiding its choices. Where the manuscripts differ in a way a reader might notice, the record for the sentence has a meaning decision in the category text variant. It names the reading followed, gives the alternatives, and explains the evidence in plain language.
When there is a footnote
Not every variant needs a footnote. In John 3:16 many manuscripts read “his Son” where the oldest have “the Son”. English needs “his” anyway, the meaning is the same, and the record notes the variant without a footnote.
When a variant changes what a reader would understand, there is a footnote. Ephesians 1:1 is an example. Almost all later manuscripts address the letter to the believers ἐν Ἐφέσῳ, “in Ephesus”. Some of the earliest do not have the words. The translation follows the SBL edition and keeps “in Ephesus”, and a footnote gives the shorter reading. The record adds that the letter has no personal greetings and speaks of the readers’ faith as something Paul has heard about, so it may have been written for several churches in the province, with Ephesus as the chief city.
John 5:4: a verse that is not there
Readers of older Bibles sometimes find that John 5 skips from verse 3 to verse 5. The missing verse tells of an angel who stirred the water of the pool at Bethesda, so that the first sick person into the water was healed.
Many sick people used to lie in these porticoes: the blind, the lame and the paralyzed.
The record explains why the verse is not in the text. The oldest manuscripts do not have it. Some later ones have only part of it, others mark it as doubtful, and its wording varies a good deal from copy to copy. It seems to have been added to explain what the sick man says in verse 7. The verse number stays empty, so that references still match other Bibles, and a footnote gives the added words in full.
John 7:53–8:11: a story set apart
The story of the woman caught in adultery is the largest case. It is missing from the earliest manuscripts of John and first appears in a manuscript from the fifth century. In later copies it turns up in different places: here, after John 7:36 or 7:44, at the end of John, or in Luke. Its style and vocabulary differ from the rest of John.
Many scholars hold that it is an old and true account of Jesus that was handed down outside John and later written into the Gospel. Open Word Bible prints it in its usual place, set off in square brackets that open at 7:53 and close at the end of 8:11:
[Then each of them went home. But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
The record is careful about what the evidence shows. It shows that the passage was not part of the earliest copies of John. It does not decide whether the events took place.
Reviewed against the evidence
Most text variant decisions end with a request: a reviewer should check this against the apparatus, the scholarly list of manuscript readings. The first drafts are AI-assisted, and summaries of manuscript evidence are exactly the kind of thing a human scholar should verify. Until a named reviewer does, the record stays a draft. See AI-assisted translation and human review.