Five Things Your Bible Translation May Have Decided For You

01

Which Method It Used, Before A Single Word Was Written

Nobody reads the Bible in the languages it was written in — Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. Every English Bible is a translation, and every team of translators had to choose a method before they began.

Both are done in good faith by serious scholars. The difference is who does the interpreting. In the first, the text is handed to you and the interpreting is yours. In the second, some of it has already been done before the page reaches you — and nothing on the page marks where.

02

What To Do With A Line You Have Known Since Childhood

Try it with a passage you know by heart. The Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6. Most people can recite the ending without thinking: for Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

That line is not found in the oldest manuscripts we have, so every translation has to decide what to do with it. Many modern Bibles move it out of the text and down into a footnote. The New American Standard keeps it on the page, set in brackets, with a note explaining the manuscript question.

That one choice shows the whole posture. Nothing quietly dropped, nothing smoothed over without telling you. You are shown the text, shown exactly where scholars disagree about it, and the judgment is left with the reader.

03

Which Manuscripts It Was Able To Work From

The King James is a word-for-word translation, and for four hundred years it has shaped how English speakers pray. Nothing here is against it, and nobody who loves it needs to give it up.

But its translators worked from the manuscripts available to them in 1611. A great many older ones have been found since — the Dead Sea Scrolls among them, in 1947. And it was written in the English of its day, thee and thou and hath and verily, which a modern reader quietly has to translate a second time in their head.

The New American Standard, completed in 1971 and revised in 1995, is word for word as well. It draws on those older manuscripts and renders them in English that does not need decoding. Plenty of lifelong King James readers keep theirs and read the NASB alongside it. Some rotate translations every year.

04

Whether You Had To Choose Between Accurate And Readable

That is usually the trade. The more closely a translation holds to the original, the harder it reads. The easier it reads, the more the translator has smoothed on your behalf.

The NASB is regularly named among the most literal English translations there is, and it still reads in plain modern sentences. One man described his grandfather — a King James reader his whole life — quietly admitting he wanted something easier to read, and asking for his grandson’s NASB.

Word for word does still ask something of a reader, though. Literal sentences can be dense, and dense sentences are exactly where attention slips. Which is why a literal translation is at its best with someone explaining it on the same page.

05

Whether The Explaining Was Kept Separate From The Scripture

That is the logic of a daily Bible built on the NASB. The scripture is left alone, word for word. Everything that explains it sits beside the text, clearly marked as commentary, never blended into it — so you always know which words are the Bible and which words are a teacher’s.

The teacher is Dr. Charles Stanley. Decades of plain Bible teaching, no theatrics. And the page is marked as you read:

• ✱An asterisk beside a verse means that verse carries a biblical promise.
• ➤An arrow points to a life lesson on that same page, going deeper into what you just read.
• §Every few days, a longer article answers a question that day’s reading raises.

Arranged by date: Old Testament, Psalms and Proverbs, New Testament. About fifteen minutes a morning, and the whole Bible in a year.