I love the NLT. It is one of my primary translations at home and at church, but this wasn't always the case.

The first Bible I ever used with any regularity was an NIV. The small Christian school that I attended in first through fourth grade allowed us to memorize Scripture from either the NIV or the KJV, and I went with the NIV since it was the pew Bible at my church. When I was in high school and began to get "serious" about Bible study, I made the switch over to the NASB. I also used other translations, including the NIV, NKJV, and KJV. In the church circles I was running in, literal was best. And it didn't get more literal than the NASB.

I got a lot of mileage out of the NASB, and in fact I still have the leatherbound, ultrathin reference edition that my future wife gave me for my birthday in 1998, all marked up from my first couple of years in Bible college.

I don't remember when I first learned about the NLT, but I do remember when my wife discovered it. She was in a study group, reading through the entire Old Testament for a survey class in our first semester at Moody Bible Institute. One of her friends had an NLT, and the group quickly decided to simply pass the NLT around rather than having everyone read from their own translation. She took note and made sure that her next Bible purchase would be an NLT. Despite her enthusiasm, I still wasn't convinced, and I stayed with the NASB. This was in the fall of 1998, and she has been an NLT gal ever since.

The first time I actually used the NLT for more than checking a verse occasionally was in the spring of 2001, when my wife and I led an evangelistic Bible study through the Gospel of John. Everyone in our college ministry was able to invite their friends to come and read through John together, one chapter each week, to discover Jesus for themselves. We chose the NLT as our group text, and the church generously provided a complete copy of the NLT for everyone that attended the study. It was a fun, and fruitful, experience.

While we were leading this group through John, I was also flexing my new--and still somewhat awkward--Greek skills by translating through myself, along with the NLT, NASB, NIV, and D.A. Carson's commentary. I certainly didn't agree with the NLT everywhere, but often I found that I agreed with the NLT over against another translation in a particular reading. By the end of the 21-week session, I was quite pleased with the NLT. I still didn't switch to it as my primary Bible translation, but I had very positive feelings about it. In fact, we used it again for a new group the next year.

Through my study of Greek, I spent a lot of time in class and on my own thinking and reading about translation and language. More and more, I became disillusioned with the way I used to read a "literal" translation, under the impression that I had virtually unfettered access to the Greek and Hebrew original. As a result, I was "converted," and became a very strong advocate of dynamic equivalency. I returned "home" to the NIV, looking forward to the publication of the TNIV.

At this point, I went through a stage in my journey where I was harshly critical of more formal translations. I took every opportunity to criticize the "poor English" of the NASB. I was vocally critical of the "essentially literal" argument surrounding the (then) new ESV. This was a time when my voice was changing, and I probably should have kept my mouth shut.

In retrospect, I realize that the problem was with the way I had understood the NASB, not the translation itself. I was overconfident in the ability of any English translation to give me a transparent view of the original text, right down to words and grammar. I took my erroneous assumptions about how to use such a translation and compounded the error by blaming the translation itself.

I was just getting settled with using the TNIV when I became aware of an open position on the Bible editorial team here at Tyndale House Publishers. My wife had been using the NLT as her primary Bible (and therefore my secondary Bible) for several years, and so I was excited by the opportunity. I came in for my interview and was surprised to learn that the NLT had received a facelift. In 2004, a second edition had been released, of which my wife and I were completely unaware. We had been reading the 1996 edition. I left that interview with a copy of the new edition and burgeoning interest in the NLT.

I went home that afternoon and spent several hours poring over the NLT second edition: comparing specific passages with the 1996 edition (and my TNIV), reading Galatians straight through, checking individual verses against the Greek and Hebrew, noticing that poetry was now set as poetry, etc. I was impressed. It seemed like every verse had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb and improved where necessary. Whether I got the job or not, I became an "NLT guy" on that day.

The picture on this post is of my Bible shelf at work, and you can probably identify several of the Bibles I mentioned thoughout the post. I carry an NLT and my Reader's Greek NT to church with me on most Sundays (so they're not in the picture), but I also make regular use of the NRSV, I listen the the TNIV on my iPod, and I read the KJV in my pocket edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. So even if I am an NLT guy, I'm not an NLT-Only guy.



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Labels: bible, Keith Williams, NLT, translation

What exactly does that mean? Hasn't that already been taken care of? Is it even, well, biblical?

I'm glad you asked. And trust me, I ask the same questions. A lot. We Bible publishers walk a fine line. We take very seriously the privilege and responsibility we have in publishing the Bible. Our goal, and on this I am pretty sure that the folks at the other major Bible publishers would agree, is to get the Word of God into the hands of those that need it (that would be all of us the last time I checked). We want people to pick up and read the Bible, to take it to heart, to hear from God and be transformed by it.

And here is where the line comes in. We are constantly asking ourselves what it takes to get people to 1) pick up the Bible, and 2) actually (here's the kicker) read it. Sometimes we get it right. Sometimes we get it wrong. It is very easy, even with the best of intentions to inadvertently turn the Bible into a widget. I am constantly asking myself not just can we create a Bible, but should we. I am not perfect, so I know that I have suggested things that I shouldn't have and have probably turned down others that I should have accepted. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

What does a "Director of Bibles and Bible Reference" do exactly (other than blogging and chasing down endless strings of e-mails)? Basically, my job is a combination of acquisitions and coordination of various departments here at Tyndale to create "new" Bibles and reference products (if you want to have some fun sometime tell someone you meet on a plane that you create Bibles. Interesting responses). This can be as simple as reviewing our Bibles to see if there is a hole (like "Select" a Bible we released last summer in a calfskin leather binding), to something as complex as working from the concept stage forward on a new study Bible. A given project may be a concept developed internally that we then take to writers to flesh out or it may be something that is brought to Tyndale that we review and determine whether or not to publish.

There are a whole lot of steps that are a part of the process: writing proposals, getting manufacturing costs, looking at sales trends, working with the design team, coordinating with the editorial team to make sure that what we intended to create is what we actually got (and if not does it work? is it better?). Thankfully I don't have to keep track of all of the details, but I am involved in some way in all of these steps.

I want to make sure that in the middle of details and pro formas, of analyzing the "market" (or maybe it's "THE market", I'm not sure really) that we don't lose site of why we are doing this in the first place. Way back when, Ken Taylor started working on the Living Bible for a simple reason - he wanted his kids to understand the Bible. As the father of three, I get that. It matters. More than just about anything else. And it matters for everyone, not just my kids. I have used a whole lot of translations over the years, I still do, but I chose to come to Tyndale because I believe that the NLT offers something unique.

Around Tyndale we use the tagline "the Truth made clear" in reference to the NLT. It's more than a nice marketing statement, more than something you can remember easily. I believe that it is a reflection of what the NLT aspires to be. It is the legacy of Ken Taylor and I am privileged to be a small part of it.

Labels: bible, development, Kevin O'Brien, NLT

One of the most common misconceptions about the NLT is that it is a paraphrase. It is not. The NLT is, in fact, a translation from Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic; it represents the work of nearly 100 scholars, specialists in the book(s) of Scripture to which they contributed.

The history of the NLT is one reason for the confusion, but another is related to other common misconceptions about Bible translation itself, specifically the philosophy known as dynamic equivalence. In the simplest terms possible, dynamic equivalence is a philosophy of translation that intends to communicate the meaning of the Bible, as it would have been understood in its original setting, as accurately as possible in today's language. This is often discussed in contrast with another philosophy of translation, formal correspondence or essentially literal. Again, simply, formal correspondence intends to communicate the words and word order of the original as closely as possible in the modern language. Of course, every translation of the Bible is more complex than those definitions imply. A strict formal correspondence translation would be unintelligible in any language, and a dynamic equivalent translation could become overly concerned with the limitations of its intended audience.

The juxtaposition of these two complementary translation philosophies, often with an eye to which of the two is "superior," often feeds some misconceptions about one philosophy or the other. This can happen from either side of the debate. In a recent post at Tim Challies' blog, some misconceptions about dynamic equivalence are presented, and I'd like to address them here.

The main idea of Challies' post is that words are of the utmost importance in any communication. At a basic level, that is certainly true. He begins his post with a few examples to illustrate the importance we often place on knowing and studying the exact words and not simply the message of important documents such as ransom notes, court transcripts, and love letters. Very true, but in all of the examples he cites, translation is not in view. If the kidnappers had written the ransom note in French, I'm sure any parent would insist on getting a fluent French speaker to translate the letter for them in language that made sense. And courts use on-the-fly interpreters to translate witness testimony into English for jurors. So, there isn't one-to-one correspondence between the emotional examples Challies begins with and the conclusions he makes about Bible translations.

But what about words in translation? First, it is important to understand that there is almost never a one-to-one correspondence between any word in one language and a word in another language (especially when one of the languages is ancient). To point to one example used in the post, machaira is a Greek word that refers to "a relatively short sword or other sharp instrument, sword, dagger" (BDAG), along with related metaphorical meanings. It is unlikely that any English reader, when given the word "sword," would conjure up the mental image of a 5-inch dagger. So the English word and the Greek word are similar--certainly related--but not equivalent.


So Challies' concern that the English word "sword" isn't present in the NLT and other dynamic equivalent translations isn't quite the problem he makes it out to be. To translate a metaphor in the original with an English phrase that captures its meaning, as the NLT does in Romans 13:4, is not "making a mockery of the words that were breathed out by God," as Challies characterized it. Rather, it is a transparent attempt to clearly communicate the force of the language to English readers today. When Paul wrote Romans, representatives of the government literally phorei machairan ("carried a sword"). This is no longer the case, at least not in most English-speaking areas of the world. It is appropriate to explain the metaphor in this context. In Acts 12:2, the word machaira is not being used metaphorically. James was probably literally killed with a sword. This doesn't display an inconsistency in the NLT translation philosophy; rather, it displays a deep commitment to communicate the meaning of Scripture as clearly as possible.

In Psalm 32:1, Challies compares the NLT to the ESV and wonders, "what has become of the word 'covered'? . . . Is 'covered' not one of the words God breathed out and wrote in His book?" Again, the assumption that an English word is inspired is suspect. The word in Hebrew is kesuh, and "put out of sight" is just as legitimate a translation as "covered."

More could be said about these issues, but I would like to close by pointing out some of the implicit and explicit claims about the value of dynamic equivalent translations of the Scriptures in Challies' post. Here is a sampling of his words:

Labels: bible, dynamic equivalence, essentially literal, Keith Williams, NLT, translation, words