Heaven, earth, and sea of the old creation are gone now. As in Revelation 10, here we see heaven, earth, and sea as a statement of all creation. So here, a new creation is on the way as this text points to all creation being removed.

The KJV/TR reads "And I John saw the holy city"; John's name is not in the critical text of this verse, and the critical text also puts the verb after its object, reading καὶ τὴν πόλιν τὴν ἁγίαν Ἰερουσαλὴμ καινὴν εἶδον — "and the holy city, new Jerusalem, I saw." The draft follows that order.

The singular “his people” (λαός) is the reading of the Byzantine majority text. Both Textus Receptus editions read the plural — λαοὶ αὐτοῦ, “his peoples” — together with Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus and the critical editions, so this is not a Received Text difference at all. The King James' “they shall be his people” does not settle which it followed, since English “people” carries either number.

NA28 prints the verse's last two words inside its own brackets, [αὐτῶν θεός], and the draft's bracket follows that bracket — the same convention as the [seven] Spirits at 5:6 and the [ὅτι] clause at 21:4. The witnesses divide cleanly. Codex Alexandrinus and both Received Text editions carry the phrase, the Received Text transposing it to Θεὸς αὐτῶν, which is where the King James gets its closing clause. Sinaiticus, the Statistical Restoration, Westcott-Hort, SBL and the Byzantine Robinson-Pierpont text all end the verse without it. So the bracket keeps the covenant formula's final clause visible without asserting it: with the words, God is not only with them but theirs; without them, the sentence closes at his presence.

Two readings sit in this verse.

The subject: the Greek says only “he shall wipe away” (ἐξαλείψει), leaving the subject to be carried over. Codex Alexandrinus and the Received Text name it, ὁ θεός — which is where the King James gets “And God shall wipe away.” The brackets keep that named subject visible without asserting it, the same way the book's other supplied subjects are handled.

The last clause: Sinaiticus as corrected, Robinson-Pierpont and the Received Text open it with ὅτι, “for” or “because”; Alexandrinus, the Statistical Restoration, Westcott-Hort and SBL have no conjunction at all, and NA28 prints the word inside its own brackets, [ὅτι]. This study reads the clause as a statement standing on its own — “The first things have passed away.” — and not as the reason for what comes before it. The difference is worth seeing. With “for,” the passing of the first things is the explanation of why death and mourning and crying and pain are gone. Without it, the sentence is a declaration in its own right: the old order is simply over.

When Revelation 21:1 declares, "a new heaven and a new earth," and 21:5 records the Father — the One seated on the throne — saying, "Behold, I make all things new", the language can function both literally and idiomatically. The phrase does not require us to flatten every occurrence of "new heavens and new earth" in Scripture into the same moment of fulfillment. In Isaiah 65:17, the Lord says, "For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth," yet within that same context we read, "for the child shall die an hundred years old" (Isaiah 65:20). If Isaiah 65 were identical in scope to Revelation 21:1–5, a tension would arise, since Revelation explicitly states, "there shall be death no more" (Revelation 21:4). This suggests that in Isaiah the expression may function as covenantal renewal language — a decreation–recreation idiom describing radical restoration — while still ultimately pointing forward to its fullest and final realization. The idiom can point to a literal consummation without every immediate context requiring that consummation to be present in full. Just as "a thief in the night" is an idiom describing unexpected arrival while still referring to a real event, so "new heavens and new earth" may describe profound renewal in Isaiah's prophetic horizon while Revelation 21 reveals the ultimate, deathless fulfillment of that promise. In this way, Scripture maintains theological consistency without forcing two distinct prophetic contexts into one identical timeframe.

The KJV/TR reads λέγει μοι — "said unto me"; the critical text reads λέγει — "said" — without "unto me."

γέγοναν (gegonan) is the perfect of γίνομαι, “to become,” “to come to pass” — a completed act whose result stands. It does not say “finished”; it says a thing has come to be and now is so.

It is also plural, and that is the difference from 16:17, where the same verb is singular (γέγονεν, “it has become”). Nothing names the subject; the plural reaches back to what was just said — “Behold, I make all things new.” The KJV, NASB 1995, ESV and NIV all read “It is done” at both verses, which levels the number and reads as completion rather than as coming to be.

The KJV/TR reads "there came unto me"; the critical text reads ἦλθεν εἷς ἐκ τῶν ἑπτὰ ἀγγέλων — "there came one of the seven messengers" — without the goal phrase "unto me" that the Received Text supplies.

The KJV/TR reads "that great city, the holy Jerusalem"; the critical text reads τὴν πόλιν τὴν ἁγίαν Ἰερουσαλήμ — the holy city — without "great."

“messenger” (ἀγγέλου) in Greek does not mean an angelic being. The text here says “to the measure of a man, that is, of a messenger,” but the NASB renders the measurement as being angelic: “by human measurements, which are also angelic measurements”. We later learn that a messenger can be a human as in 22:9, “I am your fellowservant, and of your brethren the prophets.” So, when the text here says “the measure of a man” it is making the messenger out to be a man anf not an angelic being in the tradisional sense.

The KJV/TR opens with καί — "And the foundations"; the critical text reads οἱ θεμέλιοι τοῦ τείχους — "the foundations of the wall" — without the conjunction.

Greek: ἀνὰ εἷς ἕκαστος τῶν πυλώνων. Distributive ἀνά ("apiece") ordinarily takes the accusative; here εἷς stands in the nominative. Grammars often treat this distributive ἀνά as functioning adverbially. Sense: the gates taken one by one, each single gate of one pearl.

"Which are saved" (KJV) renders τῶν σῳζομένων, and the evidence is narrower than a preference among critical texts: the phrase stands in the two Received Text editions alone — Stephanus and the King James Textus Receptus. Sinaiticus (original hand and corrected), Alexandrinus, the Statistical Restoration, Westcott-Hort, NA28, SBL and the Byzantine Robinson-Pierpont text all lack it, so the Majority Text omits it as well; ESV follows the omission. This only affects whether the nations' salvation status is explicit or inferred from context.

The KJV/TR also reads "glory and honour" here; the critical text reads τὴν δόξαν αὐτῶν — "their glory" — while both glory and honour stand in the critical text at 21:26.

“Unconsecrated” is κοινός — literally “common”: in the ritual sense, what is ordinary and not set apart (the word of Acts 10:14, “I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean”). It is a different word from μολύνω “defile” (3:4, 14:4) and from ἀκάθαρτος “unclean” (17:4, 18:2): what is barred from the holy city is not only the defiled and the unclean, but whatever was never consecrated at all.