Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
"Heresies" listed among the works of the flesh means holding incorrect theological beliefs
"Heresies" meant forming a faction or sect through stubborn self-will: the sin is the division, not the doctrine.
Galatians 5:20, in every translation this tool compares.
Galatians 5:20's "heresies" translates the Greek "hairesis," literally "a choosing," which came to mean a party, sect, or faction. Paul's complaint is about people who split the church by insisting on their own opinion and gathering followers around it. What's condemned is the wrongness of the resulting divide, not necessarily the truth or falsehood of the belief itself.
Today "heresy" means almost exclusively false doctrine, full stop, with no necessary connection to factionalism. That shift happened later, once church history made "heretical groups" and "doctrinally wrong groups" nearly synonymous, but the KJV word itself is naming the divisiveness.
