The New Living Translation (NLT) is an English translation of the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus ...

. The origin of the NLT came from a project aiming to revise '' The Living Bible'' (TLB). This effort eventually led to the creation of the NLT—a new translation separate from the LB. The NLT relies on

critical editions Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in da ...

of the original

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

and

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

texts. The first NLT edition (published in 1996) retains some stylistic influences of the LB, but these are less evident in text revisions that have been published since.

Translation philosophy

The ''New Living Translation'' used translators from a variety of

Christian denomination A Christian denomination is a distinct Religion, religious body within Christianity that comprises all Church (congregation), church congregations of the same kind, identifiable by traits such as a name, particular history, organization, leadersh ...

s. The method combined an attempt to translate the original texts simply and literally with a

dynamic equivalence The terms dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence, coined by Eugene Nida, are associated with two dissimilar translation approaches that are employed to achieve different levels of literalness between the source and target text, as evidenc ...

synergy approach used to convey the thoughts behind the text where a

literal translation Literal translation, direct translation or word-for-word translation, is a translation of a text done by translating each word separately, without looking at how the words are used together in a phrase or sentence. In translation theory, anoth ...

may have been difficult to understand or even misleading to modern readers. A part of the reasoning behind adapting the language for accessibility is the premise that more people will hear the Bible read aloud in a church service than are likely to read it or study it on their own. It has been suggested that this "thought-for-thought" methodology, while making the translation easier to understand, is less accurate than a literal (formal equivalence) method, and thus the ''New Living Translation'' may not be suitable for those wishing to undertake detailed study of the Bible.

Textual basis

The

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...

translation was based on the

Masoretic Text The Masoretic Text (MT or 𝕸; he, נֻסָּח הַמָּסוֹרָה, Nūssāḥ Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Text of the Tradition') is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. ...

(

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, abbreviated as BHS or rarely BH4, is an edition of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible as preserved in the Leningrad Codex, and supplemented by masoretic and text-critical notes. It is the fourth edition in ...

) and was further compared to other sources such as the

Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the ...

Septuagint The Greek Old Testament, or Septuagint (, ; from the la, septuaginta, lit=seventy; often abbreviated ''70''; in Roman numerals, LXX), is the earliest extant Greek translation of books from the Hebrew Bible. It includes several books beyond t ...

, Greek manuscripts,

Samaritan Pentateuch The Samaritan Torah ( Samaritan Hebrew: , ''Tōrāʾ''), also called the Samaritan Pentateuch, is a text of the Torah written in the Samaritan script and used as sacred scripture by the Samaritans. It dates back to one of the ancient versi ...

, Syriac Peshitta, and

Latin Vulgate The Vulgate (; also called (Bible in common tongue), ) is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. The Vulgate is largely the work of Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels us ...

. The New Testament translation was based on the two standard editions of the Greek

New Testament The New Testament grc, Ἡ Καινὴ Διαθήκη, transl. ; la, Novum Testamentum. (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus, as well as events in first-century Chris ...

(the UBS 4th revised edition and the Nestle-Aland

Novum Testamentum Graece (''The New Testament in Greek'') is a critical edition of the New Testament in its original Koine Greek, forming the basis of most modern Bible translations and biblical criticism. It is also known as the Nestle–Aland edition after its m ...

27th edition).

Translation history

Work on this revision began in 1989 with ninety translators; it was published in July 1996, 25 years after the publication of '' The Living Bible''. Advanced reader copies of the

Epistle to the Romans The Epistle to the Romans is the sixth book in the New Testament, and the longest of the thirteen Pauline epistles. Biblical scholars agree that it was composed by Paul the Apostle to explain that salvation is offered through the gospel of Jes ...

were originally printed as the ''New Living Version'', but eventually renamed the New Living Translation to avoid confusion between this new work and ''The Living Bible''. NLV is still used to identify the New Living Translation in ONIX for Books. Soon after that, a new revision was begun and The Second Edition of the NLT (also called the NLTse) was released in 2004. A revision in 2007 comprised mostly minor textual or footnote changes. Other revisions were released in 2013 and 2015 with minor changes throughout. In 2016, Tyndale House Publishers, the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India Commission for Bible, ATC Publishers Bengaluru, and twelve Biblical scholars collaborated to prepare a New Living Translation Catholic Edition. After reviewing the changes introduced in the Catholic edition, Tyndale subsequently approved and adopted the Indian Bishops' edits into the main body of the 2015 edition, where they appear in all subsequent editions, Protestant and Catholic alike.

Translation properties

The New Living Translation is (according to its publisher) intended to be easily accessible to readers of modern English. As part of this effort: * Weights and measures, money, dates and times, etc., are described in modern terms, with footnotes giving the literal translation. For example, John 6:7 reads: "Philip replied, 'Even if we worked for months, we wouldn't have enough money to feed them, with a note that the Greek text reads "Two hundred denarii would not be enough" and an explanation that a

denarius The denarius (, dēnāriī ) was the standard Roman silver coin from its introduction in the Second Punic War to the reign of Gordian III (AD 238–244), when it was gradually replaced by the antoninianus. It continued to be minted in very ...

was equivalent to a laborer's full day's wage. * Some phrases are translated into contemporary English; e.g. "they beat their breasts" (Luke 23:48) is translated as "They went home in deep sorrow", again with footnotes providing more literal interpretations. * Gender-inclusive language is used where the editors believed that it was appropriate, thus () is translated "brothers and sisters".

Circulation

In July 2008, the NLT gained the No. 1 spot in unit sales, unseating the NIV for the first time in over two decades. According to the

Christian Booksellers Association CBA (formerly known as the Christian Booksellers Association), subtitled "The Association for Christian Retail since 1950", is a trade association that was established in 1950. History The association was first organized by 219 Christian bookst ...

(as of March 2014), the NLT is the second most popular Bible translation based on unit sales, and the fourth most popular based on sales numbers. A

Roman Catholic Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD * Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a let ...

edition of the NLT with the

Deuterocanon The deuterocanonical books (from the Greek meaning "belonging to the second canon") are books and passages considered by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East to be ...

was published by ATC Publications in Bangalore, India. The NLT Catholic Edition (NLTCE) was granted an

imprimatur An ''imprimatur'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''impr.'', from Latin, "let it be printed") is a declaration authorizing publication of a book. The term is also applied loosely to any mark of approval or endorsement. The imprimatur rule in the R ...

by Oswald Cardinal Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay and President of the Council of Catholic Bishops of India. It was later released in North America as the ''Catholic Holy Bible Reader's Edition'' on October 17, 2017. Although the imprimatur does not extend to use of the NLTCE in the liturgy, it has been officially approved by the Catholic Church for private study and devotional use. The NLT is available in numerous editions as well as numerous study Bible editions, including: ''The Life Application Study Bible'', ''The Life Recovery Bible'', '' The NLT Study Bible'', and the ''NLT Illustrated Study Bible''. The Cornerstone Biblical Commentary series uses the second-edition NLT text as its base. In June 2017, the ''Africa Study Bible'', edited by Africa International University dean John Jusu, was offered to African English readers.

References

External links

Official webpage

"Meet the Team" (New Living Translation) on www.tyndale.com
{{English Bible translation navbox 1996 books Bible translations into English 1996 in Christianity Tyndale House books