9 answers
Verses everyone quotes wrong
The line on the mug, and the paragraph around it.
What this group of questions is
A verse on its own is a fragment of a letter, a poem or a speech, printed without the sentence that came before it. Sometimes that does not matter. Sometimes the sentence before it is the whole point, and removing it does not shorten the meaning — it reverses it.
This is the group of questions where a written page beats a sixty-second video most decisively, and the reason is mechanical. The correction is never “that verse means something else”. It is “here is the paragraph it sits in”, and a paragraph does not fit in a Short. Below each of these questions the surrounding passage is quoted in full, from the World English Bible, which is public domain — which is why this site can print nine consecutive verses where a site using a modern copyrighted translation would be capped at a fragment.
The four ways it goes wrong
Sorting them helps, because they need different corrections.
A word is missing. “Money is the root of all evil” is missing three words, and they are the three that carry the sentence: the love of. 1 Timothy 6:10 is about an appetite, not a substance, and the version everyone quotes condemns something the text does not mention.
The audience is wrong. Jeremiah 29:11 is one of the most-printed sentences in English. It was written to deportees, in a letter, telling them the exile would last seventy years and that most of them would die in Babylon. The promise is real and it is not addressed to an individual planning a career. Whether it can be applied to one is a genuine question. Whether it was written to one is not.
The clause after it is missing. “Judge not, lest ye be judged” is followed immediately by instructions on how to judge — get the beam out of your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck. The verse everyone quotes as a prohibition is the opening line of a passage about doing the thing properly.
It is not there at all. “God helps those who help themselves” is not in the Bible. It is in Aesop, then in Algernon Sidney in 1698, then in Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. Surveys have repeatedly found it is one of the sentences Americans are most likely to identify as scripture. There is a category of these, and knowing which category a sentence belongs to is most of the work.
Why this is not a “gotcha” section
It would be easy to write these pages as a list of things other people get wrong, and that would be both unpleasant and useless. Almost everyone who quotes these verses learned them the way they were handed to them. The person quoting Philippians 4:13 on a gym wall is not being dishonest; they are repeating a sentence that has been circulating detached from its paragraph for about a century.
So the pages here try to do two things at once. They print the context, which is the checkable part. And they take seriously the question of whether the popular use survives it — because sometimes it does. “I can do all things through him who strengthens me” is written by a man in prison, about contentment in scarcity, and it is not a promise of athletic success. It is also not only about hardship: the surrounding sentences say “in any and all circumstances”, and someone applying it to a hard thing they are attempting has not committed an outrage. The honest correction narrows the verse. It does not confiscate it.
Where the popular reading really is impossible, the pages say so plainly. Where it is a stretch rather than an error, they say that instead. Those are different verdicts and collapsing them into one is its own kind of misquotation.
What to expect on each page
The verse as it is usually quoted. The passage it comes from, in full. What changes. Then the part most treatments skip: where Christians who all agree about the context still disagree about the application, and what the page itself thinks, stated as a position rather than smuggled in as a fact.
If a page here ever tells you that a famous verse means the exact opposite of what everyone thinks, be suspicious of it. That happens, but it is rare. The more common finding is smaller and more useful: the verse means roughly what you thought, about a narrower thing than you thought, said to someone in a situation the quotation had removed.