A COVENANT — and the word that named both halves of this Bible, by a route worth knowing. In ordinary Greek a diathēkē is a WILL, the document by which a man disposes of his estate; that is the sense Latin caught with testamentum, and through Latin English got TESTAMENT, and through that the titles Old Testament and New Testament. But in the Greek Old Testament diathēkē is the standing rendering of Hebrew berit, a sworn bond between parties, and that is unmistakably the sense at Matthew 26:28 — blood, a Passover meal, and an echo of Exodus 24:8. ⚠ So the two Testaments on every shelf in the world are named from the reading the shelf has since abandoned: KJV and Douay read 'testament' at 26:28 (Douay because it translates the Vulgate, which is the Latin route itself), while ASV, NIV and NWT all read 'covenant.' ⚠ A second dispute sits in the same verse: the earliest text reads 'my blood OF THE COVENANT' and the Byzantine tradition adds kainēs, 'of the NEW covenant' — which is where the KJV's famous phrasing comes from. Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25 read 'new covenant' with no dispute at all, so a copyist had two familiar parallels pulling the adjective in, and the next verse hands it to him outright. → first discussed at Matt 26:28