THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:
There are two reasons, translations, and texts, both of which have cropped up in the news of religion this year. The venerable King James Version (KJV) appeared without changes over centuries. But today, experts continually reconsider the best available evidence to improve our English Bibles. Publishers periodically issue new updated Bible editions to incorporate their findings in the sacred text itself or footnotes that explain options and issues.
Regarding translations, scholars well-versed in ancient languages and cultures need to decide what present-day English words best convey to current culture the meaning of the ancient Hebrew and Greek, whether by word-for-word or thought-by-thought translation, or a mixture. Regarding “textual criticism,” specialists compare a passage in various available ancient manuscripts; though most differences they assess are minor, some are significant.
A summary by the late textual critic Bruce Metzger said revised editions are necessary for three reasons: ongoing manuscript discoveries, “further investigation of linguistic features of the text,” and “changes in preferred English usage.”
Turning first to texts: Consider this from the doctrinal basis of America’s conservative Evangelical Theological Society: “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.” That last word refers to the inspired texts as first written down. Since these have not survived, technical scholarship must discern which manuscript option most likely preserves what the original version would have said.
Trump Cuts
President Trump’s sweeping budget cuts have reached the National Endowment for the Humanities. reducing the staff by two-thirds and cancelling some 1,500 academic projects previously approved for grants. On April 25, Religion News Service reported that newly-killed projects in the religion field include Duke University Divinity School’s major project to produce a definitive Hebrew text of biblical Psalms. NEH would provide $300,000 on condition that Duke raise an additional $150,000, which it has done. Duke was to re-examine the first 50 Psalms while other grantees covered the rest of the biblical book.
As with the Duke effort, modern translations — whether under supposedly conservative or liberal or Protestant or Catholic auspices — are “eclectic.” The experts ponder varied ancient texts and fragments in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac or Latin, etc., many of which have only become available in modern times. The beloved 17th Century KJV’s limited resources lacked for instance such major manuscripts as the 4th Century Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. A standard compilation from eclectic texts of the Old Testament and New Testament is regularly updated by the German Bible Society.
Such scholarship was reshaped beginning in 1947 when the rediscovered “Dead Sea Scrolls” provided manuscripts from all books in the Old Testament (a.k.a. Jewish Bible) except Esther. The scrolls were written a thousand years earlier than the medieval Leningrad Codex and Aleppo Codex that preserved Judaism’s authoritative Masoretic text tradition from early medieval times. The scrolls demonstrated the remarkable accuracy of Jewish scribes in transmitting texts across centuries, but some differences tweak modern Bible passages and produce footnotes.
Inserting the Trinity
Here’s a classic textual question. For centuries the KJV and Catholics’ standard Douay-Rheims version printed 1 John 5:7 as “there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” Modern translations omit that wording because experts agree it turned up very late in a few texts of dubious authenticity. Presumably some scribe(s) inserted language to profess Christianity’s doctrine of the Trinity, one God in three Persons.
Secondly, we turn to translations, underscored February 11 in an announcement about the English Standard Version (ESV). Its publisher, Crossway Bibles, says 315 million copies are in print. The ESV competes in the all-important evangelical market especially with the New International Version (NIV), whose owner Zondervan proclaims it the worldwide best-seller among modern English translations.
Crossway said it is changing 42 ESV verses and 57 footnotes, to be applied in various editions from now through the fall of 2026. This is rather remarkable because in August, 2016, Crossway bucked the practice of periodic updates, saying “the text of the ESV Bible will remain unchanged in all future editions” and freezing the2016 wording “for generations to come.”
But within weeks Crossway repented and apologized for this “mistake.” The company would not “establish a permanent text” but instead “allow for ongoing periodic updating of the text to reflect the realities of biblical scholarship such as textual discoveries or changes in English over time.” Such “updates will be minimal and infrequent, but fidelity to Scripture requires that we remain open in principle to such changes.”
Eve’s Desire
Most of the 2025 ESV alterations are trivial (see details in a link off of https://www.crossway.org/articles/esv-bible-translation-update/). But there’s an intriguing fuss over one word in one verse, Genesis 3:16, and proper translation of the Hebrew preposition ‘el. In the 2025 update, God proclaims to Eve that after the sinful Fall in the Garden of Eden “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” A footnote says that instead of “for” the preposition could mean “to, or toward, or against” and likewise in Genesis 4:7.
The now-discarded 2016 ESV rendition says “your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you,” with a footnote listing “toward” as an alternative for “contrary to.” That disagreed with the ESV’s own first edition and its new 2025 wording, the NIV, the KJV, and William Tyndale’s pioneering English translation of 1530, which said “thy lust shall pertain unto thy husband.”
Patheos.com columnist Scot McKnight, New Testament professor at Northern Seminary in Illinois, said though the 2016 “contrary to” is a possible translation of ‘el, it is incorrect in this context per usage in other Bible passages. For McKnight, the “dangerously wrong” 2016 ESV depicted a power struggle that suggested uppity women would resist God’s will, instead of sexual desire. He also contended that God here is being “descriptive” about what the Fall will produce, not “prescriptive” in defining his design for humanity.
King James Examples
Another challenge with translation is that the meaning of a word may change over time as per a fun list of 39 examples from the KJV posted at https://carm.org/king-james-onlyism/the-king-james-version-and-the-changing-use-of-words/. Among them:
In Romans 11:20, Paul tells Christians, “be not highminded,” odd to us for whom that old-fashioned word means “principled” or “honest,” but for the KJV’s 17th Century readers it meant “conceited” or “arrogant.”
Genesis 1:29-30 says fruits are “meat,” confusing because today the word means animal flesh whereas for a 17th Century audience it meant “food” of any sort.
1 Peter 3:8 tells believers to “be pitiful,” which for us means sadly pathetic, while the original KJV meant “sympathetic” or “merciful.”
And you probably know that when Jesus (Matthew 19:14) says “suffer little children” he doesn’t mean kids were in pain or adults found them irritating but that the disciples should “allow’ them access to him.
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