The Bible Tree: A Guided Walk

Open two Bibles to Isaiah 53:11.

In the NIV (New International Version), the verse says the servant "will see the light of life." In the ESV (English Standard Version), it says only that he "shall see." Then you find a small footnote.

Did someone change the Bible? No. Something more interesting happened. The old copies of this verse do not all match.

Three very old Hebrew scrolls say "light." So does the old Greek Bible. The standard Hebrew text, copied later, does not. The NIV followed the older scrolls. The ESV kept the standard text and told you about the other wording in a footnote.

Both Bibles were honest about what the copies say. They made a different choice about which copy to trust.

To see why copies can differ, we have to ask where a Bible comes from. That is what the tree shows. We will start at the bottom, with the roots.

Nobody alive has seen the original pages of the Bible. The ink dried thousands of years ago. What we have are copies, and copies of copies, all made by hand.

Look at the roots of the tree. On the left are the Old Testament roots. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew. On the right are the New Testament roots. The New Testament was written in Greek. Each root tip is a group of old copies. The deeper the root, the older the copy.

On the Old Testament side, the Dead Sea Scrolls go deepest. They are Hebrew scrolls from about 250 BC to AD 68. The Septuagint is the Old Testament translated into Greek about 2,100 to 2,300 years ago. The Masoretic Text is the standard Hebrew text. Jewish scribes copied it with great care. A scribe is a person whose job was copying books by hand. The oldest complete copy of this text is from about AD 1008.

On the New Testament side, the oldest pieces are the earliest papyri, from about AD 125 to 250. Papyrus is an ancient kind of paper made from a plant. Next come the great codices, which are big books from the 300s. Last are the later Greek copies. Most of what survives is in that group.

After thousands of copies, you would expect small differences, and that is what we find. Most are tiny, like spelling. A few matter. Scholars treat them like detectives. They ask which copy is oldest, and which change makes sense. A scribe might write a helpful note in the margin. The next scribe might copy that note into the text. So the longer wording is often the later one.

Before 1947, the oldest big Hebrew copies of the Old Testament came from about nine hundred to a thousand years after Jesus. Then scrolls were found in caves near the Dead Sea, and more turned up over the next nine years.

Those scrolls pushed our oldest Hebrew copies back by a thousand years or more. The good news came first. The Great Isaiah Scroll, from about 125 BC, agrees closely with the standard Hebrew text. The scribes copied with great care.

Then came the surprise. The scrolls show that the Hebrew text was already being copied in more than one form. In a few places, they agree with the old Greek Bible against the standard Hebrew text.

Isaiah 53:11 is one place. Deuteronomy 32:8 is another. The standard Hebrew says the nations were divided by the number of the "sons of Israel." The scrolls say "sons of God." The Greek says "angels of God" in most copies. Both point to heavenly beings. Five modern Bibles put the older wording in their text: the ESV ("sons of God"), the NET ("heavenly assembly"), the NLT ("heavenly court"), the NRSV ("the gods") and the NABRE. The KJV (King James Version) follows the standard text with no note. The NIV, the NKJV, the CSB and the 2020 NASB follow it too, and they tell you about the older wording in a footnote.

In 2025, a team of scientists dated the scrolls again. They used carbon dating, which is a way to measure how old something is, on 30 manuscripts. Then they trained a computer program that studies handwriting and used it to date 135 more. They found that the old handwriting dates were often too young. Many scrolls are older than people thought.

What the scrolls do not do is show that the Bible was lost or changed. A few places where copies differ is what you would expect after two thousand years of copying by hand. The surprise would be if there were none. And the scrolls give us something priceless: older witnesses to compare.

On the tree, this is box 2.

Now move up from the roots to the trunk. This is the fourth century, the 300s.

By then, most churches had used nearly the same New Testament books for generations, though a few books, such as Hebrews and Revelation, were still debated in some places. In the year 367, a bishop named Athanasius wrote a letter that named exactly 27 books. They are the same 27 in your Bible today. Later, church councils in North Africa, at Hippo in 393 and at Carthage in 397 and 419, named the same 27. Those were regional councils, and the Hippo list survives only because Carthage repeated it.

Nobody voted the Bible into existence at one meeting. By the end of the 300s, the church had named a list it was already using. The word for that official list of books is the canon.

The Old Testament list was not settled so neatly. A scholar named Jerome made a famous Latin Bible, working from about 383 to 405. He said the Old Testament should be the books in the Hebrew Bible. A bishop named Augustine listed a longer set of Old Testament books, and the church kept using them. That disagreement ran for more than a thousand years. In the 1500s, Protestants chose Jerome's shorter list, and the Council of Trent confirmed the longer one. That is where the branches split.

So nearly every Christian Bible today has the same 27 New Testament books. The Old Testament is where they differ.

On the tree, this is box 1.

Look at the branches. Each one has its own Old Testament and its own number of books.

The Ethiopian branch. The church in Ethiopia put the Bible into its own language, called Geʿez, from the 300s to the 500s. It worked from the Greek Old Testament. The church counts 81 books, but that number is a tradition. No church council is known to have fixed it, and the lists of which books make up the 81 differ. The Book of Enoch, which survives in full only in Geʿez, is part of its Bible. The first bishop of Ethiopia, Frumentius, was consecrated by Athanasius, the same man who wrote the letter naming the 27 books.

The Orthodox branch. The Orthodox Church uses the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. Its Bibles have about 76 or 77 books, depending on the church. Scholars call its canon open, because it has no single fixed list.

The Catholic branch. The Catholic Church follows Jerome's Latin Bible and the longer Old Testament list. That makes 73 books. A church council at Trent, in 1546, stated the list. The English Catholic Bible used today is the NABRE, which stands for New American Bible, Revised Edition. A new one, the Catholic American Bible, is expected in 2027. Its publisher gives Ash Wednesday, February 10, as the date.

The Protestant branch. In the 1500s, Protestants went back to the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. They kept the Hebrew list for the Old Testament, which has 39 books, and added the 27 of the New. That makes 66. Luther put the longer-list books in a separate section, and the KJV of 1611 printed them between the Old and New Testaments.

Catholics and Orthodox say the longer list is the one the early church used. Protestants say the Hebrew list came first. Serious Christians still disagree here, and the tree shows all four branches.

The box at the left of the trunk. Find the box called "Where each branch gets its text." It answers one question for each family of Bibles: what did the translators work from? The first column is the Old Testament. The second is the New. Here is the box in words.

The Received Text line (the KJV, the NKJV and the Reina-Valera). The Old Testament follows the standard Hebrew text, the Masoretic Text. The KJV used the form that Daniel Bomberg printed in 1524 and 1525. The New Testament follows the later Greek copies, the line that starts with Erasmus's Greek of 1516. The NKJV names the same base for its New Testament. The first Reina-Valera, in 1569, used the same two kinds of text. It was made 42 years before the KJV and does not come from it. The Reina-Valera of 1960 revised that old Spanish Bible. The sources we could read describe its New Testament as the same Received Text, but we did not find the revisers' own statement of their base.

The revised and fresh Bibles (the ESV, NIV, NET, NLT and others). The Old Testament is still the Masoretic Text, but the translators check the Scrolls, the Septuagint and other old witnesses at hard spots. The ESV preface says it translates a hard Masoretic reading as it stands where it can, and turns to the other witnesses only in difficult cases. The NLT and the CEB name the same kind of base. The New Testament comes from Greek editions that weigh all the old copies, the early papyri and the great codices as well as the later ones. The NASB is a revision of the American Standard Version. Its preface says its Old Testament comes from Kittel's Hebrew Bible with help from the Scrolls, and that its New Testament mostly follows Nestle's Greek text.

The NET. Its Old Testament follows the standard Hebrew text, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and the translators sometimes corrected it from other manuscripts, from old translations and from the Scrolls. Its New Testament follows a Greek text that weighs all the copies. The preface says that text departs in places from the Nestle-Aland 27th edition and the United Bible Societies' fourth edition. Stop 8 comes back to it.

Older Catholic Bibles (the Douay-Rheims). Both columns say "Jerome's Latin Bible, itself a translation." These Bibles were made from the Latin, not straight from Hebrew and Greek. Jerome worked on the Latin Bible from about 383 to 405. He translated most of the Old Testament from Hebrew, and Tobit and Judith from Aramaic. The Psalter in Vulgate Bibles is the Gallican Psalter, which he made from the Greek. Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the Maccabees stayed in the older Latin text, which was made from Greek. The Latin New Testament is the older Latin text corrected against Greek copies. Jerome corrected the four Gospels, and we do not know who corrected the rest. So the Douay-Rheims is a translation of a translation, as Stop 7 says.

Modern Catholic Bibles (the NABRE). These go back to the roots. The NABRE's Old Testament follows the Masoretic Text, with some corrections from the Septuagint and the Scrolls. The books in the longer list follow the Greek Old Testament, and the Scrolls where they survive. Its New Testament follows the United Bible Societies Greek text, third edition, with the Nestle-Aland 26th edition consulted.

Orthodox Bibles. The Old Testament is the Septuagint. The New Testament is the Byzantine text, the Greek of the later copies. In 1904 the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople published a standard edition of it, called the Patriarchal Text. One scholar counts 116 manuscripts behind it, all used in Orthodox worship, and they come mostly from the 900s to the 1300s. No single Greek New Testament is accepted by every Orthodox church.

The Ethiopian Bible. The New Testament was translated from Greek. So was the Old Testament, from the Greek Old Testament, between the 300s and the 500s. It was revised later, most likely in the 1300s, against Arabic Bibles.

What the tree leaves out. The tree does not show the Syriac, Coptic or Armenian Bibles, or many other English Bibles. It maps the Bibles on this shelf, not every Bible.

How the box was checked. Every line in the box was checked against the sources listed on the sources page. Where we could read only a summary and not the publisher's own words, that page says so.

Follow the Protestant branch to the top. It splits into three twigs. Each leaf is one translation.

First, learn how to read a leaf. A leaf can be a revision. A revision grows from an older English Bible. The NKJV is a revision of the KJV. A leaf can also be a fresh translation. A fresh translation is made straight from Hebrew and Greek, with no English Bible in between. Leaves on the same twig share roots. They are not copies of each other.

The Received Text line (left twig). In 1516, a scholar named Erasmus published the first Greek New Testament. He worked fast, from a handful of late Greek copies. The KJV was finished in 1611 by 47 scholars. For the New Testament, it used Erasmus's Greek. For the Old Testament, it used the standard Hebrew text. The scholars also read earlier English Bibles, such as Tyndale's.

That is the KJV's whole root: two tips on the tree, the standard Hebrew text and the later Greek copies. It never saw the Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947. It also lacked the great Greek codices as scholars use them today. Codex Sinaiticus was found in 1844 and 1859. Codex Vaticanus sat in the Vatican library, but it was closed to most scholars until the 1800s. Codex Alexandrinus reached England in 1627, after the KJV was done. That is no fault of the translators. Those books were out of their reach. His Greek, called the Received Text, stayed the standard Greek New Testament for more than three hundred years. The NKJV and the Spanish Reina-Valera follow the same roots.

The Revised line (middle twig). These Bibles grow from the American Standard Version of 1901, which came from the Revised Version of 1881. The RSV of 1952 revised the ASV. The NRSV of 1989 and the ESV of 2001 revised the RSV. The NASB of 1971 revised the ASV directly. The Amplified Bible and the Living Bible are also built on the ASV. Their translators used the older Greek copies found after the KJV, and the later ones check the Scrolls at hard spots.

Fresh translations (right twig). The NIV (New International Version), the NET (New English Translation), the NLT, the CEB and others were made new from Hebrew and Greek. Like the revised line, they weigh all the Greek copies and check the Scrolls. Two leaves on this twig are later editions, not new translations: the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) revises the HCSB, which was new in 2004, and the NIV Reader's Edition rewrites the NIV at an easier reading level. The NET sits at the top of this twig. We will come back to it.

The other leaves on the tree. The tree has more leaves than we have named. Here is what each one is.

Now you can read a footnote like a detective. Here are three cases.

Case 1: Mark 16:9 to 20. These are the last twelve verses of Mark. The two oldest big Greek books, from the 300s, stop at verse 8. Almost all of the later Greek copies have the twelve verses. Today’s major English Bibles keep them, but every one except the KJV sets them apart with brackets, a line or a footnote. The KJV prints them with no mark at all. What does not change is the story of the resurrection, which all four Gospels tell. The footnote is not hiding anything. It is telling you what the oldest copies show.

Case 2: 1 John 5:7 and 8. The KJV has a longer wording here that names the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit "in heaven." Newer Bibles leave it out of the text. It shows up in Latin copies and a few late Greek ones, and Erasmus left it out of his first two editions. It was added centuries after John wrote. What does not change is the teaching of the Trinity, which the Bible gives in many other places. Matthew 28:19 is one, where Jesus names the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The NET, NIV, NASB, CSB, NLT and NRSV leave it out of the text and put it in a footnote. The ESV and the NABRE leave it out and say nothing about it. The NKJV keeps it in the text and adds a footnote saying other Greek texts omit it.

Case 3: Psalm 22:16. The KJV says, "they pierced my hands and my feet." The NIV ("pierce"), the ESV and the CSB ("pierced") read the same way. The standard Hebrew text says "like a lion" my hands and feet. So does an old Jewish Bible, the Jewish Publication Society version of 1917. The old Greek Bible and the Latin Bible say "dug," which is often translated "pierced." A Hebrew scroll from Nahal Hever, from about AD 50 to 68, may say "pierced," but scholars still argue about how to read it. What does not change is the rest of the psalm. The Gospels quote its other lines, such as "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Here is the rule. A footnote like these is the translators showing you their evidence. A Bible that shows you where the copies disagree is not weaker. It is asking you to look for yourself.

Put four Bibles side by side: a Catholic Bible, the KJV, the NIV and the NET. For the Catholic Bible we used the NABRE, the New American Bible Revised Edition, whose text the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference posts online. Where the old Catholic English Bible, the Douay-Rheims, says something different, we say so.

Why would they differ at all? There are three reasons, and each one belongs to a part of the tree. Sometimes the copies themselves differ. Sometimes the translators chose different English words for the same Greek or Hebrew. And sometimes an old Latin Bible stood in the middle. The Douay-Rheims was made from the Latin Bible, not straight from Hebrew and Greek.

One warning about the Douay-Rheims: it is a translation of a translation. Jerome turned the Hebrew and Greek into Latin around the year 400. Then the English scholars at Rheims and Douay turned that Latin into English. Their title pages say it was translated "out of the authentical Latin" and checked against the Greek, and for the Old Testament against the Hebrew. Every step loses some fidelity. Most people read Challoner's revision of 1749 to 1752, which borrowed much of its wording from the KJV and was checked against the Latin, so the tables below are not pure 1582 English. So when the Douay-Rheims differs from the others, it tells you what the Latin said. It does not always tell you what the Hebrew or Greek said. The NABRE is not made this way. Look for the label "(from Latin)" in the tables below.

Who crushes the serpent's head? (Genesis 3:15)

The Hebrew word here is "he." The old Latin Bible had "she," and the Douay-Rheims followed the Latin. Many Catholics link the "woman" to Mary. The Latin Bible the Vatican approved in 1979, the Nova Vulgata, reads "ipsum," which is neuter and agrees with the Latin word for "offspring." The NABRE uses "they."

Virgin or young woman? (Isaiah 7:14)

The Hebrew word means a young woman. The Greek Old Testament translated it "virgin," and Matthew quotes it that way in his first chapter. So this difference is a choice between two roots. The NET adds a note saying the young woman was probably someone present at the scene.

Repent or do penance? (Matthew 3:2)

Here the Catholic and the Protestant Bibles do not split. The old Douay-Rheims stands alone, because the Latin Bible said "do penance." The Greek word means a change of mind. The modern Catholic Bible says "Repent," like the rest.

The gates of hell? (Matthew 16:18)

The Greek word is Hades, the place of the dead. The KJV and the Douay-Rheims both said "hell." The newer Bibles keep "Hades" or say "netherworld." Notice what does not change. All four Bibles read "on this rock I will build my church." The fight over who the rock is comes from how people read the verse, not from how the Bibles translate it.

Prayer and fasting? (Mark 9:29)

A father brings his son to Jesus. The disciples could not cast out the demon. Jesus tells them how it is done.

Here the KJV and the old Catholic Bible agree, and the modern Catholic Bible sides with the NIV and the NET. (In the Douay-Rheims this verse is numbered Mark 9:28.) The reason is the copies. Codex Vaticanus and the first writer of Codex Sinaiticus, two of the oldest big Greek Bibles, did not have "and fasting." A later hand added it in Sinaiticus. Other Greek copies have it, among them Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Bezae, and so does Jerome's Latin Bible. The KJV follows the later Greek. The Douay-Rheims follows the Latin. The NIV, the NET and the NABRE follow the older Greek. The Latin is still useful as a witness, because it shows what kind of copies Jerome had. But it cannot show us the Greek word for word.

The same saying shows up in Matthew 17:21. The KJV has it. The NIV leaves out the whole verse, and many scholars think a copyist added it to Matthew from Mark. None of this takes fasting out of the Bible. Jesus talks about fasting in Matthew 6:16 to 18, in every one of these Bibles. What changes is whether Jesus said it here, at this healing.

Where the copies differ, not just the words. These are the verses from Stop 6 and the tracer. At 1 John 5:7 and 8 and at Acts 8:37, the KJV has words that the NIV and the NET leave out. At Deuteronomy 32:8, the KJV and the NIV follow the standard Hebrew, and the NET follows the older reading, "heavenly assembly." At Isaiah 53:11, the NIV follows the Scrolls and the Greek, and the KJV and the NET follow the standard Hebrew. The NABRE follows the older reading at Deuteronomy 32:8 and at Isaiah 53:11, and its notes at Isaiah 53:11 do not tell you about it.

One difference is not about words. The Catholic Bible has 73 books, and the KJV, the NIV and the NET have 66. The extra books are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees, plus additions to Esther and Daniel.

So what does the shelf show? Most of the differences people argue about are not Catholic against Protestant. Many come from old Latin against modern translation. Others come from a choice between two roots. A few come from the copies themselves. Knowing which kind of difference you are looking at is half the answer.

Now go back to the top of the right-hand twig and find the gold leaf. This is the NET, the New English Translation.

The NET is a fresh translation. More than twenty-five scholars made it from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. No older English Bible stands between it and the roots. For the Old Testament, it uses the standard Hebrew text and keeps the Greek Old Testament in view. For the New Testament, it uses a modern Greek text that weighs the old copies. That puts it in the same family as the NIV, the ESV and the CSB. It is not a different Bible underneath.

What sets the NET apart is its notes. A translator's note is a short note at the bottom of the page where the translators explain a choice. The NET has close to 60,000 of them. Think of a student who shows their work in math class. You can follow the steps, and you can check them.

We tested that. We compared the NET with other Bibles at eight verses where the copies disagree. Here is what we found.

The NET does show its work. Its notes are far longer than most footnotes. At Isaiah 53:11 the NET has four notes, about 450 words in all. The ESV has one footnote there of nine words. At Psalm 22:16 a single NET note runs about 500 words. It names the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Greek and the Syriac, and it explains why the NET keeps "like a lion."

At several verses, the NET also tells you where the copies disagree. Psalm 22:16 is one. Deuteronomy 32:8 is another.

But at Isaiah 53:11, something is missing. The NET follows the standard Hebrew text there. Its four notes explain grammar and meaning. They do not mention the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Greek Old Testament, which both read "light." The NIV and ESV footnotes do mention them. So the NET shows its work, but not always all of it.

One more thing we learned. An older version of the NET's note at Psalm 22:16 was shorter, about 260 words, and left out the Scrolls. The current note, about 500 words, adds them. The notes are still being improved.

So here is a fair summary. The NET is a fresh translation with unusually deep notes. It is not a better text than its cousins, and it does not tell you everything. That is a good reason to read its notes next to another Bible's footnotes.

On the tree, this is box 3.

Here is the whole tree in one breath. The roots are old hand-made copies, Hebrew on one side and Greek on the other. The trunk is the fourth century, when the church named its 27 New Testament books. Four branches grew from it: Ethiopian, Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant. The Protestant branch splits into three twigs, and every leaf is a translation.

When you pick up any Bible, ask three questions.

First, which roots does it draw from? Is its Old Testament the standard Hebrew text, the Greek Old Testament, or both? Does its New Testament use the later Greek copies, or does it weigh all the copies?

Second, is it a revision or a fresh translation? A revision grows from an older English Bible. A fresh translation goes straight to the roots.

Third, does it tell you where the copies disagree? A Bible that shows you is not weaker. It is giving you the chance to look for yourself.

Now the hard question. Is this still God's Word? Christians believe the original writings were God's Word, without error. Nobody has those pages. So the work of comparing copies is how we get as close to them as we can. That work has gone well. The copies agree almost everywhere. The places where they differ are known, and good Bibles mark them. Nothing here means the Bible was lost. It means we have more witnesses than any other ancient book, and we can check them.

One last thing. The Bible is not the point. It is the tool. Jesus said what the point is, in the night before He died.

"Now this is eternal life—that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent." — John 17:3 (NET)

The text is the instrument. The Person is the life.

Soli Deo Gloria.