Why the wording differs between translations

No original manuscript of any biblical book survives. What survives is a very large number of copies, and they differ from one another in small ways.

Translations follow different reconstructions of the earliest text. Where the older manuscripts lack a passage the later ones contain, some translations omit it, some bracket it, and some keep it with a footnote. Luke 17:36 and Acts 8:37 are the best-known cases.

The scale is worth stating plainly: the overwhelming majority of these differences are spelling, word order or a repeated line, and the passages under genuine discussion are few and well documented.

Ancient Hebrew and Greek words, like English ones, often have a range of meanings that no single English word covers. A translator has to pick one, and reasonable translators pick differently.

This is why comparing translations is useful. Where they diverge, there is usually something in the original that English cannot hold in one word.

Hebrew and Greek idioms rarely survive a literal rendering. A formal translation may keep the image and leave the reader to work it out; a dynamic one may replace it with an English equivalent.

The earliest manuscripts have no punctuation, no paragraph breaks and no quotation marks. Every one you see was added by an editor.

That occasionally changes the sense substantially — most famously where a translator must decide where a quoted speech ends.

The Hebrew Bible uses a personal name for God, written with four consonants. Translations handle it differently: most render it as “the LORD” in small capitals, some transliterate it, and some use a different form again.

The two editions of the World English Bible offered on this site differ on exactly this point, as well as in spelling. Comparing a psalm between them shows the difference clearly.