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.
"She constantly affirmed that it was even so" (Acts 12:15): sounds like Rhoda kept saying it nonstop for hours
"Constantly" in 1611 English meant firmly and insistently, not "nonstop over time."
Acts 12:15, in every translation this tool compares.
In Acts 12:15, after the servant girl Rhoda recognizes Peter's voice at the gate and the praying believers tell her she's out of her mind, the text says, "But she constantly affirmed that it was even so." A modern reader pictures Rhoda repeating herself over and over for an extended stretch of time, since today "constantly" means "continuously, without stopping." But the 1611 sense of "constant" is closer to its Latin root constans ("standing firm"), meaning she held her ground and insisted with unwavering certainty, not that she literally kept talking nonstop.
Modern translations bring this out as "she kept insisting that it was so" (ESV, NIV), which captures firm conviction under pushback rather than a marathon of repetition. The same shift shows up in Titus 3:8, where believers are told to be careful to "affirm constantly" good works, again firmly and resolutely, not endlessly.
