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 help the modern reader, yet not to break the flow of the text any more than necessary.
Well, it’s close, in fact you could debate all day about what is a modern, fluent translation and what is a paraphrase. The short answer is that we don’t regard the OET-RV as a paraphrase, but rather as a modern English translation. Our goal with the OET-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 the Readers’ Version if you’d really like a word-for-word rendering of the Hebrew or Greek. (Having both side-by-side does mean that we were able to break away from ancient/traditional Bible wording and think carefully about how we say things 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 OET
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 OET 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.
In our culture, when we go up somewhere, it usually means to go north. (Other cultures typically use ‘up’ and ‘down’ for ‘uphill’ and ‘downhill’, or ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’, etc., depending on the common modes of travel.) The LV overtranslates uphill and downhill in order to help our readers avoid misunderstanding the cultural cues.
And just a bonus tip: Most modern maps of our countries or of the world have north at the top. However, most maps from Biblical times had the east at the top! (This actually makes quite a bit of sense as we’re all rapidly hurtling towards the east as our planet spins us.)
Ha, the short answer is that baptise is a Greek word and the “ET” in OET stands for English Translation (so we try to use English words, not Greek ones).
The long answer is that the word baptise is not a translation of the Greek word βαπτίζω (baptizo), but just a transliteration. In other words, it was an invented English word that Bible readers have gotten used to in their jargon, but which isn’t used outside of religious contexts. However, the Koine Greek word means “to dip, dunk, immerse, or sink” (but certainly doesn’t mean “to sprinkle”). So the Open English Translation is one of the very few to actually translate the word.
Well, it depends on which Bible you’re asking about, but the OET has 929 chapters in the “Old Testament” and 260 in the “New Testament”, so a total of 1,189 chapters.
And if you’re wondering, the OET has over 23,000 verses in the “Old Testament” and very close to 8,000 in the “New Testament”, so a total of over 31,000 verses. (It’s hard to count exact numbers of verses in a modern Bible translation, because some verse numbers are still there but don’t match any text in the older original texts, so don’t actually have any content in the translation.)
Note that the OET tries to downplay the use of chapters and verses as chapters are artificial and sometimes quite unnatural breaks in the flow of the text, and verse breaks are sometimes even worse—often plonked right in the middle of a sentence.
Any English Bible translation which contains Literal in its name is probably close to the OET-LV. However, the OET-LV is probably more literal in a sense because most other Literal translations are designed to be easy to read. whereas the OET-LV is mostly designed as a reference tool for readers of the OET-RV.
The Contemporary English Version (CEV) and then the New Living Translation (NLT) are probably the closest to the OET-RV. But the OET-LV goes out of its way to remove church jargon more than most other contemporary English Bible translations.
No, not at all.
It’s certainly true that many people these days think that any respectable Bible translation must be done by Bible college or seminary or university professors with advanced degrees in Biblical languages and with decades of teaching experience in those institutions. Well, you already have a wide choice of English Bible translations that would fit that description but one of the main distinctives and benefits of the Open English Translation is that it’s not done by those kinds of people— rather the rendering of the text is done by those who have worked on the street and in public schools and in prison and have expertise at explaining the teaching of our saviour to many people who have never heard this good news before.
That’s not to criticize or show any disrespect to those learned people who write Bible dictionaries and Bible commentaries and work on the committees of Bible translation projects. It’s just that we need them to carefully check our work and offer corrections and improvements, but the OET speaks quite a different dialect of English than them.
John Wycliffe (1300s) and William Tyndale (1500s) were primarily responsible for two of the earliest English New Testament translations, along with Martin Luther (1500s) who translated the Bible into what became ‘standard German’. It may also be noted that the most powerful figures in the churches at that time generally (and sometimes violently) resisted having the scriptures translated into the ‘vulgar’ (ordinary) languages of the less-educated people. (You can find other examples of Bible translations mostly associated with a single translator here.)
After that time, many Bible translations were done in major world languages by men such as William Carey (India, 1800s) and many others.
In more recent times, you might be familiar with the J.B.Phillips (mid-1900s) and Kenneth Taylor (Living Bible, 1971) as well as many others.
The Open English Translation follows a long history of individuals taking the initiative to translate the Bible into a particular segment of the languages they worked in.
These web pages are a very preliminary preview into a work still in progress. The OET 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 these FAQs, or didn’t explain very well. Thanks.
See also the Introduction and the Glossary.
HTML last updated: 2025-10-14 by pack_HTML_side-by-side v0.62