The New Testament for Everyone - Third Edition - A Fresh Translation by N. T. Wright

The first thing that happened in the life of the church was translation . On the Day of Pentecost, God’s powerful wind swept through Jesus’ followers, filling them, like the sails of a great ocean-going sailing ship, so that they could take God’s good news to the ends of the earth. And they found themselves speaking other languages, so that everyone in the crowd could understand.

Part of the point of Jesus’ message, after all, is that it’s about God coming to people where they are, not sitting back sternly and waiting for them to come to him. Not for nothing does John call Jesus “the word of God.” There’s no point speaking a word that nobody can understand.

So, right from the start, they translated. Sometimes it happened, as at Pentecost, by the direct action of the holy spirit. Mostly, though, it was through people eagerly turning the message into other languages. Much of the time, Jesus himself spoke Aramaic, an updated dialect of Hebrew, but the gospels are written in Greek. Greek was everybody’s second language at the time, a bit like English in many parts of our world today. So, since the message was designed to be good news for everyone, not just native speakers of one language, it was important to translate it. Once begun, the process continued.

It took fifteen hundred years for the whole Bible to appear in English, but once that had happened—particularly through the work of one of my lifelong heroes, William Tyndale (who died in 1536)—the idea caught on quickly. Several translations appeared during the sixteenth century, culminating in the King James (“Authorized”) Version at the start of the seventeenth. And in the twentieth century, too, there have been several new English versions. Some have been quite strict translations, almost word for word; others have been paraphrases, trying to convey the message in a looser, less formal way.

Two questions, then: is this new version really a translation, or a paraphrase? And why do we need yet another one?

It’s a translation, not a paraphrase. I have tried to stick closely to the original. But, as with all translations, even within closely related modern European languages, there are always going to be places where you simply can’t do it word by word. To do so would be “correct” at one level and deeply incorrect at another. There is no “safe” option: all translation is risky, but it’s a risk we have to take.