Open English Translation (OET) Development

Very preliminary in-progress still-private test version

OT v0.00

Genesis   Exodus   Leviticus   Numbers   Deuteronomy
Yəhōshūʼa/Joshua   Leaders/Judges   Rūt/Ruth
Shəmūʼēl/Samuel 1   Shəmūʼēl/Samuel 2   Kings 1   Kings 2   Accounts/Chronicles 1   Accounts/Chronicles 2
ʼEzərāʼ/Ezra   Nəḩeməyāh/Nehemiah   ʼEşəttēr/Esther
ʼYuōv/Job   Songs/Psalms   Sayings/Proverbs   Orator/Ecclesiastes   Song of /Solomon
Yəshaʼəyāh/Isaiah   Yirəməyāh/Jeremiah   Wailings/Lamentations   Yəḩezəqēʼl/Ezekiel
Dāniyyēʼl/Daniel   Hōshēʼa/Hosea   Yōʼēl/Joel   ʼĀmōʦ/Amos
ʼOvadəyāh/Obadiah   Yōnāh/Jonah   Mīkāh/Micah   Naḩūm/Nahum
Ḩavaqqūq/Habakkuk   Tsəfanəyāh/Zephaniah   Ḩaggay/Haggai   Zəkarəyāh/Zechariah   Maləʼākī/Malachi

NT v0.01

Note that the OET places Yōannēs/John and Markos/Mark before Matthaios/Matthew.

Yōannēs/John   Markos/Mark   Matthaios/Matthew   Loukas/Luke   Acts
Romans   Corinthians 1   Corinthians 2
Galatians   Ephesians   Philippians   Colossians
Thessalonians 1   Thessalonians 2   Timotheos/Timothy 1   Timotheos/Timothy 2   Titos/Titus
Filēmoni/Philemon
Hebrews
Yakōbos/Jacob/James
Petros/Peter 1   Petros/Peter 2
Yōannēs/John 1   Yōannēs/John 2   Yōannēs/John 3
Youdas/Jude
Revelation

Introduction

The Open English Translation of the Bible (OET)

The Readers’ Version (OET-RV) and the Literal Version (OET-LV) side-by-side, together make up the OET.

So why two versions? Well, many people ask the question: Which English Bible translation should I use? And often the answer is that there’s no single Bible translation which can meet all of the needs of the thoughtful reader. Why not? It’s because we often have two related desires that we need answered:

What does the original (Hebrew or Greek) text actually say? and
What did the original writer mean? (i.e., What should we understand from it?)

Our answer has always been that it’s best to use two translations—one more literal to give a window into the actual Hebrew or Greek words, and one more dynamic that’s easier for us modern readers to understand—as much to do with our totally different cultures as to do with our different languages.

So the OET gives both side-by-side, and with the advantage that both the Readers’ Version and the Literal Version have been specifically designed to be used together in this way. We suggest reading down the Readers’ Version on the left, and if something stands out and you think in your mind “Does it really say that?” or “Could it really mean that?”, then flick your eyes across to the Literal Version and see for yourself what’s really there in the original texts.

On the other hand if you’ve been reading the Bible for a few decades already, maybe it would be fun to work through the Literal Version to get fresh insight into what’s actually written there in those original languages. It won’t be easy reading, but it should be insightful as the different wording will require more concentration.

Goals and intended audience

The OET has the following goals:

The primary goal of the Open English Translation is to make the Bible more accessible to this current generation with the best of a free-and-open easy-to-understand Readers’ Version alongside a faithful Literal Version so that readers themselves can checkout what was said and what is interpreted.
Part of the motivation comes from our work on the street and door-to-door where we worked hard to explain the Good Message about Jesus to people without any church background. The Readers’ Version strives to replace jargon and terminology that’s only heard at church with words and phrases that should be understood by modern English speakers.
A further goal is to expose more people to some of the background of where our Bibles come from and how translators make decisions, i.e., to teach a little more about original manuscripts and to challenge a little more about English translation traditions (some going back to the 1500’s) that can possibly be improved.
Finally, we also want a translation that can be read by Christians with many years of Bible reading experience, but who might benefit by reading the accounts in slightly different words that make it fresh and interesting, and hopefully it will provoke deeper thought into what the original speakers or writers were likely meaning to say.

Distinctives

The OET has the following distinguishing points:

An easy-to-understand Readers’ Version alongside a very Literal Version
A generous open license so that the Open English Translation can be freely used in any Bible app or website, or printed in your church Bible-study notes without even needing to request permission.
The Readers’ Version speaks like people around you. Because the history and legacy of English Bibles now goes back for hundreds of years, many things have been carried over that readers don’t even realise. For example, we might all smile at Yoda saying, “Strong is the force.” That’s because naturally we would say, “The force is strong.” So think about “Great is your faithfulness.” (At least Miles Coverdale improved it in 1535 if you look carefully in our parallel Bible pages.) But our aim isn’t at all to criticise those who came before (because we very-much build on their shoulders)—we just want our readers to be able to share the Good Message of Jesus the Messiah with others, without them thinking that Christians speak like dinosaurs (or Yoda)!
The Readers’ Version has section headings and cross-references and most of the other features that help modern Bible readers.
The Readers’ Version uses modern units for all measurements (easy to understand and visualise), whereas the Literal Version retains the ancient units (useful for historical and symbolic studies).
The Readers’ Version keeps well-known figures of speech, but if the original figure of speech is not readily understandable, it explains the point that the author appears to be trying to express. On the other hand, the Literal Version retains the original figurative language (even if it’s not a figure of speech that we are familiar with).
Up and down in the original languages (and thus in the Literal Version) refer to uphill and downhill. However, in the Readers’ Version, up and down are used to refer to north and south respectively as per our modern norm.
The Readers’ Version is less formal than most modern English Bible translations, for example, we would use contracted words like we’ll and didn’t, especially when it’s in direct speech. (Always remember that the Bible was written in the languages of the common people.)
The Readers’ Version uses section headings which are very helpful to skim through when trying to locate a certain passage. However, you’ll quickly notice that they are formatted in such a way as not to break the flow of the letter or narrative. This is to visually help the reader to appreciate the full context of the part they’re reading, and not to ignore the connections with what came before and what follows.
We’ve also tried to focus our section headings on principles that are being taught, rather than just focusing on the events happening at the time.
We’ll also be providing a list of these section headings that you can quickly skim through (and we hope to include extra, alternative headings).
Being a 21st century translation done in an era when there is much more effort in general to respect speakers of other languages (including the languages of ethnic minorities in our own countries) and to pronounce their names and placenames correctly, the OET attempts to do the same for Biblical names and placenames. (All this is a little complex when we have both Hebrew and Greek versions of names and placenames—more below.) Certainly by showing a little more respect for Hebrew names, we hope to make this Bible translation a little more “Jew-friendly”. If you have difficulty following the names in the Literal Version, you can always look across to the Readers’ Version. (Most English readers looking at names in the Bible all the way from Jericho to Jesus would have no idea that there’s no J letter or sound in either Hebrew or Greek, plus there’s absolutely no such name as James in the New Testament manuscripts—it’s a historical accident carried through from an inconsistency by John Wycliffe—see this article for example.
In addition to wanting to get names and placenames more accurate, we’ve also attempted to modernise and simplify the spelling (transliterations) of these names to make it easier for readers to pronounce them as they come across them, e.g., using f instead of ph, so Epafras instead of Epaphras. (Oddly, even traditional English Bible translations surprisingly do use Felix and Festus.)
With regular words, we’ve tried to do the opposite, i.e., to use less Greek rather than more wherever possible. So a word like baptise (which is an adapted transliteration of the Greek verb), actually gets translated, so this example becomes immerse.
Italics are only used for emphasis, not to indicate added words as historically done in older translations due to limitations of the original printing processes. The OET fixes the problem where most modern books use italics for emphasis whereas older Bibles use italics for the words which should actually be deemphasised, i.e., the words which actually aren’t in the original manuscripts!
The English Christ is an adapted transliteration of the Koine Greek word Kristos used for the original Hebrew Messiah. (It’s not Jesus’ surname!) It seems to make sense to only use one word consistently rather than using two words for the same thing (just because they came from two different languages), so the OET has elected to only use messiah. However, these words actually have a meaning, just as President is not just a title, but someone who presides over governmental meetings. So going a step further, we have chosen to use the contemporary meaning of the word in the Literal Version. The original meaning is one who is anointed (by having a hornful of oil poured over them), but we use the extended meaning which is one who is selected/chosen (by God).
Most readers living in modern democracies have never been familiar with the concept of an ancient king or lord who has the power of life and death over them. Thus the title Lord Jesus is easily said, yet relatively few actually live with Jesus as the lord of their thoughts and actions and daily activities. (Just think how many would embarrassingly rush to turn off the video they’re streaming if Jesus appeared in the room.) As a reaction to the word Lord seemingly becoming so cliché for many Christians, we use the translation master as a way to get readers to at least think a little more about what the concept might mean. (The word boss felt a little informal.)
The Literal Version tries to add as little as possible that’s not actually there in the original manuscripts. Of course, we add spaces between words so we can read it faster, and we add capitals at the start of sentences as per standard, modern English, but we don’t capitalise words like Kingdom of Heaven or even He when it refers to Jesus, because the concept of capital and small letters didn’t even exist when original manuscripts like this portion were written. (Our policy has more to do with accuracy and education than it does with “lack of respect” or any such thing. Often this goes against religious tradition of the last few centuries, but just because something is traditional, does not necessarily mean that it is correct or even helpful.)
Most dialects of modern English don’t distinguish between you (singular) referring to just one person, and you (plural) referring to a group of people. However, the original languages clearly distinguish these, so in order to indicate this to our readers the Literal Version uses you_all for the plural form (although we are aware that some modern dialects now prefer yous).
Because the Literal Version so closely follows the original languages, it’s important to remember that words often don’t match one-to-one between languages. This is one reason why the OET-LV reads strangely: because we try to avoid using different English words if we can; knowing that the OET-LV will not be natural English. Again, this is because we want the OET-LV to be a window into what’s actually written in the original languages. For fluent English (like in the Readers’ Version) the same Greek word might require several different translations when used in different contexts. For example, the Greek word translated raise in the OET-LV would likely require the following changes:
1. to raise from sitting, we’d want: stand up
2. to raise from bed, we’d want: get up
3. to raise from the grave, we’d want: come back to life
4. to raise an object, we’d want: lift up
5. to raise a person, we’d often want: exalt or praise
Alert readers might be aware that there’s a play on words here in the gospels. When Jesus talked about himself being raised up, it was deliberately ambiguous because his hearers didn’t understand until right near the end that he was going to be executed so coming back to life wasn’t on their minds. So we, looking back in history, know that he was talking about coming back to life, but at the time, they were just very confused and didn’t understand what he meant. But amazingly, as well as referring to his resurrection, raising also refers to his crucifixion as the victims on the stakes were also raised. (See John 3:14.) Sadly, it’s not usually possible to make a translation easy to read and understand in our current times, without losing some of the underlying meaning or ambiguities or word-plays that were presented to the original hearers. That’s exactly why it’s good to have two different translations side-by-side!
These particular pages use British spelling, but American spelling will also be available in the future.
Our preference in most editions is to place The Gospel according to John before Matthew. This has a couple of advantages:
1. The Old Testament starts with “In the beginning, Elohim created…” and the New Testament starts with “In the beginning was the message…”.
2. Acts ends up right after the first book by its author Luke.
3. It just reminds readers that the order of the “books” in the Bible is not set by sacred degree—only by tradition.
(Some do complain that the traditional order of the first four gospel accounts represent the lion, the calf, the man, and the eagle of Rev 4:6-7 which allegedly match with the banners (not described in the Bible) of the four divisions of the tribes of Israel mentioned in Numbers 2.)
Beware of some traps interpreting the Literal Version. Because it’s not designed to be used alone (but rather alongside the Readers’ Version), it’s much more literal than most other “literal versions”. You’ll quickly notice lighter colours that mark the deemphasis of words that had to be added to make the English sentences even make sense. But there’s at least two other things that aren’t necessarily changed in the English Literal Version:
1. Other languages use the negative differently, especially when it’s doubled or tripled in the sentence. If you don’t understand this, you could easily think that the original means the opposite of what the words actually appear to say. For example the double negative: “You are_ not _caring_about no one.” (adapted from Matthew 22:16). In natural, fluent English, we would have to reverse the second negative to get the expected meaning, ending up with anyone as you’ll find in the Readers’ Version. But in Greek, the second negative adds emphasis rather than reversing the first negative. So our Literal Version shows you the words that are actually there (in the Greek in this case).
2. Other languages may omit (or elide) words which are clearly implied to the original reader, but which the modern English reader finds strange, e.g., a son may be divided against his father, and a daughter her mother. The elided words are “may be divided against”.
Always check the Readers’ Version carefully for how it is translated into modern, idiomatic English before jumping to any conclusions of your own about what the original language or the Literal Version says or doesn’t say.

Key to symbols and colours in the OET

You will notice the the Literal Version looks different from most Bibles that you’re used to:

Underline/underscore characters: Words joined together by underlines are translated from a single original word, e.g., he_is_walking. Both Hebrew and Greek can express the subject as part of the verb, often saying in one word what takes us three.
Hanging underline/underscore characters: Word groups with hanging underlines mean that to make natural English, we needed to insert the translation of one word into the middle of another, e.g., not he_is_walking becomes much more natural in English if rearranged to he_is_ not _walking. But we can still figure out from the hanging underlines that the two parts either side of not are translated from a single original language word.
Grey words indicate added articles. English uses a or the to indicate whether a noun is indefinite or definite. Other languages don’t necessarily work the same way. Neither Hebrew nor Greek have a word for English “a”. If we have to add an article to make the English sound correct, we indicate this by greying it, e.g., the man. (We use lighter colours to deemphasise added words like these rather than using italics like most Bibles, because apart from Bibles, italics are mostly used these days for emphasis.)
Light pink: A copula is a word that links a subject and its complement (or description), e.g., the word is in the sentence The house is white. Other languages don’t necessarily work the same way and can say things like White the house. Added copulas are marked with this light colour.
Light brown: Certain English verbs require a direct or indirect object. Think of the difference between He said, blah, blah and He told, blah, blah. The second one feels like it requires something like He told him, blah, blah. Added direct and indirect objects are marked with a light colour.
Light green: In other languages it may be possible to say something like The having_fallen…. In English, we must say something like The one having_fallen… or The person having fallen…. If the article and verb are marked as plural in the source language, we may be able to say The ones having_fallen…. If the article is marked as feminine in the source language, we may be able to say The female one having_fallen…. or The woman having_fallen…. Added words like this are marked with this light colour.
Light purple: If we have an original construction like God spoke by son (from Heb 1:2), in English we need to add a word like God spoke by the son or God spoke by his son. In the latter case (where we don’t just choose an article like the), we mark these added words with this light colour.
Light orange: Other added words not in the above categories are marked with this light colour.
All of this colouring is to be completely open by helping the reader to be able to see where the translators have chosen to add words to the Hebrew or Greek in order to make the English sound slightly better, even though this has been kept to an absolute minimum in the Literal Version.
Bold text: In the earliest copies of the original Koine Greek manuscripts, it appears that the scribes marked a small set of words that they considered to refer to God. (These markings are known as nomina sacra or sacred names.) Other Bible translations do not indicate these special markings, however in the Literal Version New Testament we help the reader by making these marked words stand out.

You will notice the the Readers’ Version also looks different from most Bibles that you’re used to:

Sometimes the Readers’ Version adds words that definitely aren’t in the original text, but are included to help our readers understand what was probably being meant. We put these words in a lighter colour in order to be completely transparent about our translation decisions. We also do this to encourage our readers to actually actively think about what the original authors were trying to express to their listeners/readers.
Where it is determined that a group of words was either definitely or most likely not in the original manuscripts (autographs), they are omitted in the OET without any notes but a ◘ symbol is inserted to show that the decision was intentional and not just an accidental omission. These manuscript decisions were mostly made by the authors of the two main works that we relied on to translate the OET from—see the acknowledgements below for more details.)
You might also find more information in the FAQs and/or in the Glossary.

Biblical names

As mentioned above, the OET Literal Version goes out of its way to help English speakers to be able to pronounce Biblical names more correctly. Because our English Bible traditions have often come from Hebrew through Koine Greek through Latin with Germanic influence into modern English, what we consider as Biblical names are sometimes quite far from reality. Since most of us prefer it when people pronounce our names correctly, we have made our best attempt at showing the same respect to Biblical characters. Of course different languages have different sets of sounds and also pronounciations have changed over the millenia (think how much our languages have changed in the last few decades) so we will never get perfect pronounciations, but we’ll do better than our traditional Bible translations.

As a general rule, even if you started to think of the letter J in Bible names like the Germans or the Dutch (the two languages closest to English) pronounce Ja (as Ya), you’d already be taking a big step towards getting Biblical names more correct. (This deviation is not any kind of conspiracy—simply an unfortunate accident of history and continuous language change.)

In the New Testament, the situation is already complicated by the fact that Old Testament (Hebrew) names have been written as Greek-speakers would think of them. So English Jesus (which you now realise should be pronounced more like Yesus as there’s no j sound in either Hebrew or Greek) is actually more like Yaysous in Greek. But it’s likely that his “parents” (using Hebrew or the related Aramaic/Syrian language at the time) actually named the child something more like Yəhōshūʼa (from which we get Joshua). So which name should we call him in the text? Because the New Testament manuscripts are written in Koine Greek, we have chosen to give preference to the Greek forms of the names in the New Testament. However, the first time a name is used, we show both forms like Yaʸsous/(Yəhōshūʼa). Where the name is repeated nearby, we’ll only show the Greek form like Yaʸsous. (Again, it’s an accident of history that English speakers will name a child Joshua, but would not name him Jesus when they’re really just the same name in different forms. Speakers of languages with Spanish influence don’t have that same hesitation, so Jesus is a common name in South America for example.)

Note that where Hebrew or Greek transliterations are given, English speakers will have the most success pronouncing these names if you look up the pronounciation of the five “pure” Spanish vowels in your search engine. Individual vowels should be pronounced in this way, e.g., each of the four vowels in Eleazar.

Macrons (overlines over the vowels, like ē or ō) indicate lengthened vowels, so the pronounciation is the same as the Spanish vowels, but just prolonged. (If you’re wondering which syllable to put the stress/emphasis on, it’ll often be one of the ones with a long vowel. We decided not to indicate stress on the names or there would have been even more marks and squiggles on the letters!)

The vowel schwa ə (in names that come from Hebrew with shva) should be regarded as a fleeting (very short and unstressed), neutral vowel which is the minimal vowel required to linguistically join the surrounding consonants e.g., in Yəhūdāh (Judah).

Dipthongs (e.g., ai, au, ei, oi, ou) are a limited set of two vowels, where one vowel glides into the other, so even though the spelling of a dipthong is two letters, together they are the centre of only one syllable. Note that we use aʸ for Greek letter (eta), because it’s actually only one letter, not a dipthong, even though it’s pronounced very much like ai.

We use the symbol ʼ to mark a glottal stop which is the sound that some UK speakers put in the middle of the word butter (baʼa), so Abraʼam (from the Greek) is three distinct syllables—those two a’s side-by-side should not be made into a long ā.

Language and words

As mentioned in our Goals above, two of our goals relate to the kind of language that the Bible is translated into. Here are some of the changes:

It’s common in the original Biblical languages for possessive pronouns to follow the head noun, i.e., phrases like ‘the house of Zechariah’, or even ‘the house of the father of me’. Of course, we have shorter ways of saying those in modern English. But consider ‘the kingdom of God’ or ‘the son of man’. Could there be more up-to-date ways to express terms like this? Certainly we’ve become so accustomed to phrases like those in the church context that we forget that others don’t talk like that. But that doesn’t mean that God wouldn’t want us to have the scriptures in the language that we actually speak.

Learning

As mentioned in our Goals above, one of our main goals is to educate our readers about how we get our Bibles. Here are some of the main points:

Biblical names are often very mangled in English translations. We’ve already covered this extensively above.
The Open English Translation makes it possible to learn how Bible translation is done. This is because reading the Literal Version gives you a good insight into what’s actually written in the original manuscripts. Then you can read the same passage in the Readers’ Version or your favourite other translation, and you’ll get a good idea of the rearranging and interpreting that Bible translators have to do to get good, understandable translations in any modern language.
Some editions of the OET have the “books” in different orders and in different combinations. Remember that different Bible originals were originally written on scrolls and weren’t combined into a book form similar to what we’re accustomed to until many centuries later. But of course, the individual scrolls could easily be placed in a different order. The traditional Hebrew Bible not only has what we typically refer to as the Old Testament “books” in a different order, they also have different names, are grouped into different categories, and are combined/separated into a different number of “books”. Most readers of Bibles from the West have no idea that Ezra and Nehemiah describe some of the latest Old Testament events as far as timelines go.
Chapter and verse divisions were not in the original manuscripts and came many centuries later. We have deliberately tried to make chapter and verse markers as small as we can, as we actively discourage our readers to get into bad habits like reading “a chapter a day” or quoting “a verse”, as chapter and verse breaks are not always in the most sensible places. We teach that chapter and verse numbers are good ways to locate (or in computer terminology to “index”) a passage, but should not be thought of as “containers” of words. For example, instead of saying, “The verse at 1 Corinthians 3:21 says that all things are ours.”, consider saying something more like, “As Paul wrote in his first letter to those at the church in Corinth and which we can read starting at chapter 3, verse 21…” You see, those words in verse 21 stop right in the middle of sentence. Verses don’t say anything, and we shouldn’t be guilty of quoting short texts out of context.

Acknowledgements

A work like this could not be done with building on the work of so many that have gone before, including:

The creator God who communicates with us in various ways, but who specifically inspired the writing of the Scriptures and caused them to be preserved throughout the millenia despite the best efforts of some who tried to destroy them.
Those who took the time to write down their interactions with God and his messengers, beginning with Moses and those before him who wrote down their experiences even though making the writing materials was so much work, all the way through to the disciples and others who wrote of their interactions with Yaʸsous the Messiah, and the Holy Spirit.
Those who faithfully copied and carefully stored those manuscripts over the centuries and thus allowed the works of the original writers to be preserved for us to translate.
Those who collected, preserved, photographed and digitized, and transcribed those manuscripts so that we could have access to them.
Those who studied the variations in those copies and helped us to get the best evaluations of which words were most likely present in the original manuscripts (autographs). For the (mostly) Hebrew Old Testament, we are especially reliant on the team work of Open Scriptures, given to the world under a generous open licence. For the Greek New Testament, we are especially reliant on the Statistical Restoration work of the Center for New Testament Restoration which is also given to the world under a generous open licence.

Status

English sentences have more limitations on their word order than Greek sentences do. So any word-for-word Greek literal translation has to be reordered to be readable in English. Currently, the words in the following Literal Version books (just over 50% of the NT) have been mostly reordered: Mat, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, 1 Peter, 2 Peter, 3 John, and Jude, leaving the following books which have not yet been reordered at all and will therefore be even harder to read in this preliminary Literal Version: Rom, 1&2 Cor, Gal, Eph, Php, Col, 1&2 Thess, 1&2 Tim, Titus, Phlm, Heb, and 1&2 John.

After completing sentence reordering and fixing capitalisation and punctuation, we then plan to do more investigation into word concordance. For example, if an original language word can have multiple meanings, we want to indicate in the OET Literal Version where a translator has already made that interpretation.

Feedback

These web pages are a very preliminary preview into a work still in progress. The OET Literal 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 notice problems or issues, 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.