A hypocrite was an actor
someone who says one thing and does another
ὑποκριτής a stage actor, playing a part behind a mask
Today a hypocrite is someone who says one thing and does another. But the Greek word Jesus used, hypokritēs, meant a stage actor. In Greek theatre, actors played their parts behind masks.
So when Jesus warns against giving, praying and fasting to be seen by others (Matthew 6) and calls the religious leaders hypocrites, the picture is a performance: righteousness worn like a mask, played for an audience. They are whitewashed tombs, he says, beautiful outside and full of dead men's bones within (Matthew 23:27).
This is semantic drift: words slowly change their meaning over the centuries. In the King James Bible, “prevent” meant to go before (1 Thessalonians 4:15) and “conversation” meant a whole way of life (Philippians 1:27). Read with today's meanings, verses quietly say things their writers never meant, and those readings spread into sermons, arguments and the wider culture.
Drift Bible reads every verse in the words its first hearers knew.