Few Bibles began as modestly as The Living Bible. It started at a family table in Illinois, where a father tried to make the Bible understandable to his children. It became one of the best-selling books in America, made a publishing house, and was then deliberately set aside by its own author in favour of something more rigorous: the New Living Translation.

The two are often confused. The Living Bible is a paraphrase made by one man, mostly from an English translation. The New Living Translation is a translation from Hebrew and Greek made by a large team of scholars, which used the Living Bible as its starting point. This article tells the story of both, and uses the NLT to show what a meaning-based translation does in practice. Both are under copyright, so their wording is described rather than quoted, apart from a few words.

Kenneth Taylor and his children

Kenneth N. Taylor (1917–2005) worked in Christian publishing in Chicago, at Moody Press. He and his wife Margaret had ten children, and family devotions after dinner were a nightly practice. Taylor found that the children could not follow the King James Version: its vocabulary and sentence structure lost them. So he began, as he later told it, rewording the passages they read into plain, conversational English that even the youngest could understand.

He worked from the American Standard Version of 1901, a very literal translation that he regarded as accurate, and restated each sentence in simple modern English. He started with the New Testament letters, the part of the Bible he thought hardest for children. No publisher would take the result, so in 1962 he published it himself as Living Letters, and founded Tyndale House Publishers to do so, naming the company after the English translator William Tyndale (see William Tyndale and the English New Testament).

Living Letters found a large audience, helped by the support of the evangelist Billy Graham. Further volumes followed through the 1960s, and the complete Living Bible appeared in 1971. It sold in enormous numbers, more than 40 million copies by most counts, and for a time in the early 1970s it was the best-selling book in the United States. Taylor directed much of the income to a charitable foundation that funded Christian work and Bible translation around the world.

A paraphrase, openly

Taylor never claimed that the Living Bible was a translation. Its preface called it a paraphrase: an attempt to say what the writers meant, simply, and in words the reader would use, not to reproduce their words. Taylor was candid about the risks. A paraphrase, he wrote, carries dangers as well as values, because when the writer’s exact words are not rendered from the original, the translator’s own understanding can slip into the text.

That is exactly what critics found. The Living Bible expands, explains and sometimes interprets. Its opening of John’s Gospel, for instance, does not mention “the Word” at all; it says, in effect, that before anything existed “there was Christ.” This makes the meaning plain to a child, but it settles for the reader an identification that John leaves for the end of his prologue, and it removes a term that John chose with care (see The Word was God). Scholars objected that the Living Bible often reflected Taylor’s own evangelical theology and that, because it was made from an English translation, it could not correct that translation’s mistakes. Some also disliked its colloquial tone in solemn passages. Supporters replied that it had brought millions of people to read the Bible who had never managed to before, and that it had never pretended to be anything else.

More on the difference between paraphrase and translation, and on other paraphrases such as J. B. Phillips and The Message, is in Paraphrases and the Amplified Bible.

From revision to new translation

By the late 1980s Taylor and Tyndale House recognised that the Living Bible’s limits were real. In 1989 they began a project to revise it, and invited about ninety Bible scholars from a range of evangelical denominations and institutions to take part.

The plan began as a revision of the Living Bible, checked against the Hebrew and Greek. In practice the scholars changed so much that the result became a new translation. The work was organised in teams. Each book was assigned to a group of scholars who compared the Living Bible’s text with the original and with the leading scholarly translations, proposed changes, and sent their work to a general reviewer responsible for a section of the Bible, such as the Pentateuch or the Gospels. A Bible Translation Committee then reviewed every change. English stylists worked alongside the scholars, and the text was tested for clarity when read aloud.

The New Living Translation was published in July 1996, twenty-five years after the Living Bible. It was translated from the standard scholarly texts: for the Old Testament, the Masoretic Text as printed in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, consulting the Dead Sea Scrolls and ancient versions where needed, and for the New Testament, the United Bible Societies and Nestle-Aland Greek editions (see The Greek texts behind New Testaments).

The second edition and later updates

The Bible Translation Committee kept working after 1996, and the second edition of 2004 was a substantial revision. Reviewers found that it moved the NLT noticeably closer to the original wording in many places, while keeping its readability. Smaller updates followed in 2007, 2013 and 2015, mostly corrections and refinements of wording and footnotes. A Catholic edition, with the deuterocanonical books, was prepared with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, and from 2015 its changes were incorporated into the main text, so that Protestant and Catholic editions share the same wording.

Today the NLT is one of the best-selling English translations, regularly among the top few in sales rankings, and it is widely used for personal reading, by younger readers and in churches that want a Bible in contemporary English.

Dynamic equivalence in practice

The NLT’s translators describe its method as dynamic equivalence, or thought-for-thought translation, in the tradition of Eugene Nida (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?). The aim is that the text should have the same impact on modern readers as the original had on its first readers. In practice this means several recurring kinds of change.

Idioms rendered by their meaning. In 1 Samuel 24:3 Saul goes into a cave where David is hiding. The Hebrew uses a euphemism that the King James Version translated literally:

And he came to the sheepcotes by the way, where was a cave; and Saul went in to cover his feet: and David and his men remained in the sides of the cave. (1 Samuel 24:3, KJV)

Few modern readers would guess what “to cover his feet” means. The NLT says that Saul went into the cave “to relieve himself.” So, for that matter, does the World English Bible:

He came to the sheep pens by the way, where there was a cave; and Saul went in to relieve himself. Now David and his men were staying in the innermost parts of the cave. (1 Samuel 24:3, WEB)

The example shows that the line between literal and meaning-based translation is not absolute. Nearly every translation renders some idioms by their sense.

Measures, money and time in modern terms. Where the original gives a length in cubits or a weight in shekels, the NLT generally converts it into modern units, giving the original measure in a footnote. Times of day are given as clock times rather than “the third hour.”

Metaphors explained. Where a Hebrew or Greek image would puzzle a modern reader, the NLT often states its meaning, sometimes keeping the image as well.

Inclusive language for people. Where the original refers to men and women, the NLT uses terms such as “brothers and sisters” and “people,” with notes where the Greek has a masculine form.

Clarified referents. In John’s Gospel the Greek often speaks of “the Jews” where the context shows that the religious authorities are meant. The NLT frequently says “the Jewish leaders,” to avoid suggesting that the whole people is in view. Supporters see this as accurate and responsible; critics see it as an interpretive choice that the reader should be allowed to make.

Distinctive vocabulary. The NLT renders the Hebrew title traditionally given as “LORD of hosts” as “LORD of Heaven’s Armies,” which it regards as clearer than the archaic “hosts” (see The divine name in translation).

The NLT also uses footnotes generously, often to give the literal Hebrew or Greek behind a freer rendering. A reader who wants to know what the original says word for word is frequently told.

Praise and criticism

The NLT’s admirers point to its clarity. Its English reads naturally aloud, it is accessible to readers with little background, and its scholars were drawn from a wide range of institutions. Many find that it makes familiar passages fresh.

Its critics, many of them advocates of more literal translation such as Leland Ryken, raise the general objections to dynamic equivalence. They argue that the NLT interprets on the reader’s behalf, removes ambiguities that the original leaves open, flattens repeated key words so that readers cannot trace them across a book, and sometimes turns a concrete image into an abstraction. They also note that the reader cannot easily tell where the text ends and the translator’s explanation begins. Defenders reply that every translation interprets, that a literal rendering the reader misunderstands is not more accurate, and that the NLT’s footnotes show many of its choices.

Some commentators have also noted the change between the 1996 and 2004 editions as a sign of how much depends on revision. A translation’s first edition is rarely its last word.

From paraphrase to reasoning

The history of the Living Bible and the NLT is unusual: an author recognised that his much-loved work was not enough, and asked scholars to replace it. The move from one man’s paraphrase of an English Bible to a committee translation from Hebrew and Greek illustrates the difference between making the Bible easy to read and making it both easy to read and answerable to the original.

Open Word Bible takes up the same concern from another angle. Its Readable level aims at plain English that explains idioms, much as the NLT does, but it shares one set of meaning decisions with the Balanced and Literal levels, so a reader can always see the closer rendering beside the freer one (see Literal, Balanced, Readable). Each sentence also has a reasoning record explaining its choices, rather than a footnote on only some of them. It is translated from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Westminster Leningrad Codex and released under CC0. Its drafts are AI-assisted and remain unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them, and it uses the NLT and other translations only for comparison, never as the basis for its wording.

Sources

  • Taylor, Kenneth N. “Preface.” The Living Bible. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1971.
  • Taylor, Kenneth N. My Life: A Guided Tour. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 1991.
  • “Introduction to the New Living Translation.” Holy Bible, New Living Translation. 2nd ed. Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 2004.
  • Comfort, Philip W. Essential Guide to Bible Versions. Wheaton: Tyndale House, 2000.
  • Lewis, Jack P. The English Bible from KJV to NIV: A History and Evaluation. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991.
  • Nida, Eugene A., and Charles R. Taber. The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: Brill, 1969.
  • Ryken, Leland. The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation. Wheaton: Crossway, 2002.
  • Fee, Gordon D., and Mark L. Strauss. How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007.
  • Bible quotations are from the King James Version and the World English Bible (both public domain).