Every verse
shows its work.
Three ways to read. One source text. Every difference explained.
Literal · Everyday · Conversational
See the grammar, the alternatives, the textual questions and the decision behind every verse.
Specimen — four verses
Most translations can’t show you the whole decision process. Scholia can.
Every translation of the Bible is a chain of decisions. A word carries three senses and one must be chosen. A clause can attach two ways. A pronoun’s referent is genuinely unclear. Those decisions are ordinarily made carefully, by capable people — but a printed page has room for the result, not the reasoning.
Scholia keeps the reasoning. Each rendering carries a note stating what was decided and why: which sense was taken, what the grammar permitted, where the registers diverge and on what grounds. Where the evidence genuinely does not settle the matter, the question is written down and left open rather than smoothed away.
A translation shows its work. The evidence has work to show too.
Scholia keeps the reasoning behind every rendering. The claim graph does the same thing one layer down — for the questions that reasoning rests on.
Behind a translator’s decision sits a body of evidence: manuscripts that disagree, traditions that divide, arguments that were strong once and are not any more. Most of it never reaches the reader, and what does arrives as a verdict with the working removed.
The claim graph records the questions themselves. Each one carries the evidence that supports it, the evidence that cuts against it, the step taken from evidence to conclusion, and a plain statement of what the claim may not be stretched into. Where a claim has failed, it stays in the record with the reason it failed.
Jonah 16 CLAIMS
One of them is wrong, and is still there. Forty-eight verses, with every disputed point marked where it occurs.
Philippians 7 CLAIMS
Opening on the single Greek word at 2:6 that eight English Bibles answer four different ways.
Isaiah 53 5 CLAIMS
The suffering servant. The oldest live disagreement about any passage in the Hebrew Bible, shown pulling both ways — including a claim of ours that failed.
The reading text on these pages is the World English Bible, in the public domain — not the Scholia translation, which is still in review with no rendering yet signed. Until one is, the claim graph runs on a text that is already free to use.
None of these books has been systematically reviewed. Every page states its own coverage. An unmarked verse means nobody has looked yet — not that nothing is disputed.
Three registers, not one compromise.
One translation cannot be maximally literal, maximally readable and maximally conversational at the same time. Scholia keeps all three — and shows the trade-offs.
A translation usually picks a single point on the line between the words of the original and the language people actually speak, and every reader adjusts to it. Scholia renders every verse three times and lets the reader choose.
Literal WORD ORDER PRESERVED
Follows the shape of the Hebrew or Greek as closely as English allows. Keeps ambiguity ambiguous rather than resolving it silently.
Everyday READ ALOUD
Plain modern English, formal enough for public reading, with nothing archaic left standing merely because it is familiar.
Conversational SPOKEN
How one person would say it to another. Where the original is already plain, this register does not manufacture a difference.
Any difference between the three must be justified in the note. A register may not drift for the sake of sounding different.
Drafted from the original languages.
Not revised from an existing English Bible. Every verse was drafted against the tagged Hebrew and Greek — lemma, morphology, and lexical range in view — using the STEP Bible tagged texts, with Strong’s and Brown‑Driver‑Briggs for lexical data.
The base text is named, not blended. The base text of the New Testament is the SBL Greek New Testament. Passages it marks as later additions — the long ending of Mark, the woman taken in adultery — are printed in brackets and identified, never dropped without a word and never presented as though undisputed. The Old Testament follows the Leningrad Codex, with Ketiv/Qere carried at word level; where a word is supplied from another witness, that is recorded against the verse.
Where every verse stands
First draft, complete. Now in review.
A complete draft is not a finished Bible. Every rendering passes through three states, and none is marked reviewed until a named reviewer signs it.