I want to teach you something that will protect you for the rest of your life as a reader, and it is not a fact. It is a skill.

Here is the situation that catches people. You are shown two Bibles side by side. The wording is different. And somebody standing next to you says, "See? They changed it." And because the difference is right there in front of your eyes, it feels like proof.

Sometimes it is proof. I have written about a case where a group deliberately altered the text to defend a doctrine, and I went through the manuscripts to show it. But most of the time, a difference between two English Bibles is not corruption. It is translation. And if you cannot tell the two apart, you will either be fooled by someone, or you will accuse an honest translator of something he did not do.

So let us practice on the safest possible case: two English translations of the exact same Greek.

The setup

The Old Testament reader gives you a translation menu. Two of the options translate the Greek Septuagint tradition. One is the classic Brenton Septuagint, made in the nineteenth century, the one most quoted in English Orthodox writing. The other is LXX2012, a modern rendering.

Same source. Same Greek. Two men, two centuries apart, doing the same job.

Open any chapter you like in the Old Testament, then switch the translation menu back and forth and watch what moves. The book and chapter stay where they are, so you are not losing your place while you compare.

What you will see, and what it means

You will notice three kinds of difference, and they are not equally interesting.

The first is vocabulary. One says "thou," the other says "you." One reaches for a formal word, the other for a plain one. This tells you about English, not about the Bible. Brenton was writing for readers in the eighteen hundreds. A modern translator is writing for you. Nothing has changed in the Greek at all.

The second is sentence shape. Greek can pile clauses in an order English will not tolerate. Every translator has to break it up and put it back together, and there is more than one honest way to do that. One translator keeps the Greek order and sounds a bit stiff. Another rearranges it and sounds smooth. Both are being faithful. They have made different judgments about what faithfulness costs.

The third is genuine ambiguity. Sometimes a Greek word or construction really can carry more than one sense, and the translator has to pick. This is the interesting one. When two careful translators split here, they are telling you something true: the text has a real question in it.

That third kind is where you should slow down. The first two are noise. The third is signal.

How to tell them apart

Here is the actual method, and it is not complicated.

When you spot a difference, do not immediately ask "which one is right." Ask "what is the Greek doing?" Because both translators were looking at the same Greek, and it is sitting right there on your screen underneath the English.

Read the Greek line. Find the word the two translations handle differently. Click it, and the Greek Lexicon opens with the book, chapter and verse still attached, so you are looking at the word in the sentence where it lives instead of in a dictionary vacuum.

Nine times out of ten you will find that the Greek word has a range, and one translator took one end of the range and the other took the other end, and both were inside the fence. That is not corruption. That is what translation is.

Then check the footnotes. The translator's notes for the chapter sit right under the text and record where the Greek differs from the English rendering or admits more than one reading. A good translator tells you when he had to choose. Read what he says.

The mistake almost everybody makes

Do not compare single words. Compare sentences, and preferably paragraphs.

I cannot stress this enough. Almost every bad argument about Bible translation I have ever seen came from someone holding up one isolated word. Word counts prove nothing. A translator who renders a word three different ways in three different sentences may be doing his job perfectly, because the word is doing three different things in those three sentences.

Read the whole sentence in both. Then the whole paragraph. If the meaning of the paragraph is the same in both, you have found a translation choice. If the meaning of the paragraph actually changes, now you have something worth investigating, and now you go to the Greek and the footnotes and the Fathers.

Why I want you to have this skill

Because the people who will try to shake your faith with a Bible comparison are counting on you not having it.

They will show you two columns. They will point at a difference. They will let you draw the conclusion yourself, which is more effective than telling you, and they will move on before you can check. It works because checking used to be hard. You needed the Greek, a lexicon, a critical apparatus, and a seminary library.

You do not need any of that now. The Greek is on the screen under the English. The lexicon is one click away and it remembers what verse you came from. The footnotes are on the same page. The Fathers are attached to the verse.

The whole reason those tools are built the way they are is so that "go check it yourself" stops being advice and starts being something you can actually do in ninety seconds.

Try it now

Pick a chapter you know well. Genesis 1 is a good one, or Isaiah 53 if you want something with real theological weight.

Do that once and you will read differently forever. Do it three times and nobody will ever fool you with a side by side comparison again.

Full details on how the translation controls work are on the features page.