Every tradition has a house translation - and behind the translation sits a choice of Greek text most people never know they've made. Find yours.
When a translation team sits down, they first decide which Greek New Testament to translate from. That single decision determines whether your Bible prints the long ending of Mark, the Trinity formula in 1 John, and the woman caught in adultery as plain scripture - or flags them as later additions.
NA28 / UBS5 - reconstructed from the earliest papyri and the great 4th-century codices. Disputed passages are kept but footnoted or bracketed. Behind the NIV, ESV, NRSV, NABRE, CSB, NLT, CEB.
Erasmus → Stephanus → Beza - a 16th-century printed text from late medieval manuscripts. Carries the long ending, the Comma, and the rest as unmarked scripture. Behind the KJV and NKJV.
Tendencies, not rules - congregations vary. The badge shows which side of the fault line the tradition's usual translation sits on.
No single house Bible. The NIV is the pew best-seller; the ESV dominates Reformed circles. A King-James-Only wing persists at the edges, and it sits on the other side of the line.
Mostly critical · KJV-only wing = TRRegion-dependent - England, Wales & Scotland moved the Mass readings to the ESV-CE in Advent 2024. Critical text plus the deuterocanon. The long ending is treated as canonical regardless of who wrote it: canonicity rests on the Church's reception, not authorship.
Critical text + deuterocanonHistorically the King James with the Book of Common Prayer, and that cadence still echoes in worship. Today most provinces authorise a range; the NRSV is the scholarly default, evangelical Anglicans lean NIV or ESV.
Critical textThe NRSV is the scholarly standard; the Common English Bible was produced with heavy Methodist involvement and is widely used in the UMC. The NIV is common in the pews.
Critical textSouthern Baptists produced and favour the CSB. But the King-James-Only movement is strongest precisely in independent fundamental Baptist churches - so the tradition straddles the line more than any other.
Mostly critical · KJV-only = TRThe official English Bible is the King James, with JST excerpts as a corrective - and held as the word of God "as far as it is translated correctly." The Bible is one of four standard works, alongside the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price.
Textus Receptus (KJV)The fault line above is an English-language, Protestant-and-Catholic story. In these six traditions the question changes shape completely - and several stop being about the Greek text at all, and become about which books are in the Bible in the first place.
The classic Syriac New Testament has 22 books, not 27. The Peshitta omits 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation, along with the woman caught in adultery and the Trinity formula in 1 John. A church in the Syriac tradition reads a genuinely shorter New Testament.
Narrowest NT - 22 booksThe Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church reads a canon of roughly 81 books, far wider than any Western Bible. It keeps 1 Enoch and Jubilees as Old Testament scripture and carries works no other church received. Here the question is not which Greek text, but which canon.
Broadest canon (~81 books)The Armenian New Testament once carried a third letter to the Corinthians as scripture, and its church did not accept Revelation into the canon until around the twelfth century. Its Old Testament also keeps books, such as the History of Joseph and Asenath, that the West never received.
Extra epistle; Revelation added lateThe Greek Orthodox Church reads the Byzantine, or Majority, text - so the long ending of Mark and the disputed passages are simply scripture, never footnotes. Its Old Testament is the full Septuagint, with Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 3 Maccabees that no Protestant Bible prints.
Byzantine text + full SeptuagintFor a thousand years the Western Bible was Jerome's Latin Vulgate. It fixed the Catholic deuterocanon, and it carried the Trinity formula in 1 John 5:7 - the verse that later crossed into the King James through the printed Greek text. The whole Western argument descends from it.
Source of the Western canon and the CommaCyril and Methodius translated the Bible into Slavonic from the Byzantine Greek in the ninth century, and that text still sounds through Slavic Orthodox worship. Byzantine New Testament, Septuagint Old Testament with the deuterocanon - the fault line of this guide barely applies.
Byzantine Bible of the Slavic worldHere's the cleanest way to feel the fault line. Read Mark's gospel to verse 8 - the women flee the empty tomb, afraid, and say nothing. Then ask the room what comes next. Half of Christendom stops there, with a footnote. The other half keeps reading to verse 20 - the resurrection appearances, the Great Commission, the snakes and poison - as if nothing were ever in question.
It isn't a Catholic-versus-Protestant split, or a liberal-versus-conservative one. A King-James-Only Baptist and a Latter-day Saint sit on the same side as each other and the opposite side from a Catholic, a Methodist, and most evangelicals - because the dividing line is a decision about a Greek text made centuries before any of their traditions existed.