New Believers Bible - Flipbook - Page 132
page
A59
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW LIVING TRANSLATION
been refined to preserve the essential formal elements of the original biblical texts,
while also creating a clear, understandable English text.
The New Living Translation was first published in 1996. Shortly after its initial
publication, the Bible Translation Committee began a process of further committee
review and translation refinement. The purpose of this continued revision was to
increase the level of precision without sacrificing the text’s easy-to-understand quality. This second-edition text was completed in 2004, and an additional update with
minor changes was subsequently introduced in 2007. This printing of the New
Living Translation reflects the updated 2007 text.
Written to Be Read Aloud. It is evident in Scripture that the biblical documents were
written to be read aloud, often in public worship (see Nehemiah 8; Luke 4:16-20;
1 Timothy 4:13; Revelation 1:3). It is still the case today that more people will hear
the Bible read aloud in church than are likely to read it for themselves. Therefore, a
new translation must communicate with clarity and power when it is read publicly.
Clarity was a primary goal for the NLT translators, not only to facilitate private reading and understanding, but also to ensure that it would be excellent for public reading and make an immediate and powerful impact on any listener.
The Texts behind the New Living Translation. The Old Testament translators used the
Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible as represented in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
(1977), with its extensive system of textual notes; this is an update of Rudolf Kittel’s
Biblia Hebraica (Stuttgart, 1937). The translators also further compared the Dead
Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint and other Greek manuscripts, the Samaritan Pentateuch,
the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, and any other versions or manuscripts that
shed light on the meaning of difficult passages.
The New Testament translators used the two standard editions of the Greek New
Testament: the Greek New Testament, published by the United Bible Societies (UBS,
fourth revised edition, 1993), and Novum Testamentum Graece, edited by Nestle and
Aland (NA, twenty-seventh edition, 1993). These two editions, which have the same
text but differ in punctuation and textual notes, represent, for the most part, the best
in modern textual scholarship. However, in cases where strong textual or other scholarly evidence supported the decision, the translators sometimes chose to differ from
the UBS and NA Greek texts and followed variant readings found in other ancient
witnesses. Significant textual variants of this sort are always noted in the textual
notes of the New Living Translation.
Translation Issues. The translators have made a conscious effort to provide a text that
can be easily understood by the typical reader of modern English. To this end, we
sought to use only vocabulary and language structures in common use today. We
avoided using language likely to become quickly dated or that reflects only a narrow
