As explained in the Introduction, many other English Bible translations break the text and put section headings right across the column. This can tend to encourage the reader to read the text in unnatural chunks that were never divided by the author. The OET on the other hand wants to educate readers that the narratives and prophecies and letters, etc., were written as contiguous documents. Hence our section headings are designed not to break the text any more than necessary.
Well, it’s close, in fact you could debate all day about what a paraphrase is. The short answer is that we don’t regard the RV as a paraphrase, but rather as a modern language translation. Our goal with the RV is to take both the words and cultural background of the original authors, and express the meaning in the modern language of our generation. We’ve tried to avoid Bible jargon (words that you’d only hear in church), and to think carefully about how we might explain it on the street. So we’ve done the hard work for you to make the Bible accessible and understandable to the average person. And always remember that the OET provides a Literal Version that’s intended be referred to alongside this Readers’ Version if you’d really like a word-for-word rendering of the Hebrew or Greek. (Having both does mean that we were able to break away from ancient/traditional Bible wording and think carefully about how we’d say that these days.)
Oh, that probably means that you’re already accustomed to more traditional Bible translations that sometimes propogate decisions made in the 1500s by William Tyndale, or even back in the 1300s by John Wycliffe. Now those early English translators did many things very well, and we’re not here to criticise more modern English translations either, but nevertheless it’s a sad fact that established traditions can make it hard for anyone to make improvements. For example, most Christians don’t even blink at the title often printed on Bible covers: “God’s Word”. That’s because in Christian circles, ‘word’ often means ‘statement’, ‘account’, or ‘message’. Only someone on the street might wonder which ‘word’ it means. (Generally these days, a ‘word’ is something on a page like this one.) It’s because we’ve become so accustomed to this unusual or quaint (or archaic?) use of language that a Bible that actually uses natural English sounds so ‘informal’ to many readers.
Ha, we don’t think so, but if you find any slip-ups,
please do contact us.
Certainly we will have lost some readers by replacing ‘baptism’ (transliterated from the Greek word)
with ‘immersion’, but that’s primarily a translation decision
to use the regular meaning of the word rather than to put Greek into our English.
We certainly don’t have any intentional theological agenda in creating the RV
other than trying to use as little as possible of the language and terms
that you would only hear in church circles
and which don’t correspond with how other people would normally talk in the 2020s.
In other words, the RV is aimed at sharing the Good Message
with non-churched people without having to speak ‘Church English’ (or jargon) to them.
A side-effect is to express the message of the Biblical texts with fresh phrasing
that’s different from many traditional English translations
and thus encourage (or maybe even, shock) regular Bible readers
into seriously thinking about what the original writers were trying to communicate.
As explained in the Key, the bold text indicates the use of Nomina Sacra on the original manuscripts. These are special markings and abbreviations done by the scribes, and in the earliest manuscripts, highlight words that are assumed to relate to God.
These web pages are a very preliminary preview into a work still in progress. The OET Readers’ Version is not yet finished, and not yet publicly released, but we need to have it available online for easy access for our checkers and reviewers. If you’re reading this and have questions that aren’t discussed here, please do contact us by email. Also if there’s something that we didn’t explain in this introduction, or didn’t explain very well. Thanks.
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