Why this page. Jon has long held that no English translation is perfect. Every translation is a set of choices: Greek and Hebrew do not line up word for word with English, so at almost every verse a translator has to decide what to keep and what to let go. None of this makes the Bible unclear. The good news is plain in any honest translation. But the details matter, and some of them only show up in the original. Every example below is one this site has met in its own work, so each can be checked.
One word in Greek, two in English.Pistis and pisteuō are one word family, the noun and the verb. English splits them into “faith” and “believe,” so a reader can miss that “the spirit of faith” and “we believe” are the same thing said twice (2 Corinthians 4:13). This site often uses “trust” for both.
One word in English, several in Hebrew or Greek. “Love” has to cover both agapē and phileō; “word” covers both logos and rhēma. The Hebrew davar is both “word” and “thing.” And chesed has no English word at all: it is mercy, loyalty and kindness bound by covenant, all at once. Jon adds that it is the word of the psalms’ refrain: “Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; His chesed endures forever.” The Psalms use chesed 129 times, more than half of its 251 uses in the Hebrew Bible, and 54 of them are in the psalms headed “of David.” “His chesed endures forever” is in 42 verses, 34 of them in the Psalms, including every verse of Psalm 136, and the whole line, give thanks, for He is good, His chesed endures forever, six times (Psalms 106:1, 107:1, 118:1, 118:29, 136:1; 1 Chronicles 16:34). Chronicles ties it to David: it is in the song he appointed on the day the ark came to Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 16:7, 16:34), and the Levites sang it at Solomon’s temple on the instruments David had made (2 Chronicles 7:6). English has to pick one word for it each time.
Tense says what English cannot. At Galatians 5:4, dikaiousthe is present tense: “you who are trying to be made right by law.” Put in a simple English past or present, “who are justified by law,” it reads as if they had succeeded. At 2 Corinthians 4:13, “we believe, and therefore we speak” is ongoing: we keep believing, so we keep speaking.
Small words decide the meaning. At Revelation 3:10, “I will keep you ek the hour”: does ek mean out of it, or kept within it and through it? The Greek does not settle it, and English has to choose. At Psalm 116:10, Hebrew ki can be “I believed, for I spoke” or “I believed, even when I spoke.” At Romans 13:13, koitais is literally “beds”; an English word like “lewdness” there hides what Paul named.
Wordplay and names do not survive. Judah is named for praise (Genesis 29:35); Ephraim for fruitfulness (41:52), which is why “from me your fruit is found” lands so hard (Hosea 14:9); Jacob is the heel-grabber (Genesis 25:26). Lazarus is the Greek form of Eleazar, usually explained as “God has helped.” In English these are just names.
Numbers and phrases that go two ways. “Seventy times seven” at Matthew 18:22 is, in the Greek, word for word the Greek translation’s wording for Lamech’s seventy-seven at Genesis 4:24. Noah’s “seven seven” of the clean animals (Genesis 7:2) can be seven pairs or seven of each. A translation has to print one.
The Greek Old Testament already made choices. The apostles often quoted the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and that translation made its own decisions. At Proverbs 25:13 it drops “the cold of snow.” At Hosea 12:9 it turns Ephraim’s “wealth” into “refreshment.” At Isaiah 61:1 it has “sight to the blind,” where the Hebrew speaks of opening for the bound, and that is the wording Jesus reads at Nazareth (Luke 4:18). So some New Testament quotations follow a translation rather than the Hebrew.
The manuscripts differ in places. At 2 Peter 2:13 some copies read “love feasts” (agapais), others “deceptions” (apatais). Matthew 23:14 is in some copies and not in others. A translation has to choose, and most do not tell you which way they went.
Choices English forces. Greek has no capital “He,” so capitalizing a pronoun decides who is meant. English “you” hides whether the Greek is one person or many. “The LORD” in capitals stands in for the Name, YHWH. And older church words carry centuries of meaning the Greek did not: “repent,” where metanoeō is to change your mind.
What to do about it. Not distrust. The sense of scripture comes through in every faithful translation. But where it matters, go back to the words themselves. That is why this translation marks every translation decision and every unclear place in grey, so that you can see the choice and judge it for yourself.