"A virgin shall conceive." "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell." "The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand." You have heard every one quoted so often they have stopped needing a second look. But which Bible was the apostle reading when he quoted them? The Hebrew and the Greek do not always agree — and the difference decides what a verse can carry. This companion to The Book of Delusions puts twenty-eight of the most load-bearing passages in the Bible under the microscope, and it does not look away when the columns diverge. The passages span the whole prophetic spine of the Old Testament: Genesis 3:15 and the seed of the woman; Genesis 49:10, "until Shiloh come"; Deuteronomy 32:8–9, where the scrolls read "sons of God" and the later Hebrew reads "sons of Israel"; Psalm 2, Psalm 16, Psalm 22:16 — "they pierced my hands and my feet" — Psalm 45 and Psalm 110; Isaiah 7:14, the virgin, taken as the model case, and Isaiah 52:13–53:12, the Suffering Servant; Daniel's Son of Man and the seventy [...]

  Once saved, always saved. Cleanliness is next to godliness. God helps those who help themselves. A December twenty-fifth birth. Sunday as the Sabbath. Angels as departed believers. You have heard each of them from a pulpit, so often they have stopped needing a verse — and some of them cannot be found in the Bible at all, while others are found there saying something different from what we have made them say. Across fifteen chapters, Brother Michael Junker takes up the modern church's most settled beliefs one at a time, and asks the question nobody asks anymore: does the Bible actually say that? The chapters name names. One works through the common-beliefs inventory itself — faith alone, "we are all God's children," the idea that you can't or shouldn't question God. Another opens Genesis and asks where the apple came from, since the text never mentions one. Then come the sayings mistaken for Scripture — "this too shall pass," "the lion shall lie down with the lamb," "God won't give you more than you can handle" — and [...]