The Fall 2022 edition (Vol. 9, No. 2) of Bible Review Journal arrived today, containing a print version of my Modest History of Catholic Bible Translations in English essay. BRJ is the journal of the International Society of Bible Collectors, who can be found at www.BibleCollectors.org.
Along with the previously mentioned CEB, I spent some time last weekend checking out a couple other new Bible translations, one of which was the Open English Bible (New Testament), published electronically in 2011 – I viewed a PDF rendition dated April 4th, 2011. Primarily an individual effort by Russell Allen, this work is an “open source” revision of the rather obscure 1904 Twentieth Century New Testament. Considered the first “modern English” translation, the TCNT was produced in Britain by a group of mostly laymen seeking to produce an &#...
A group calling itself the Church Resources Development Corp is preparing to release yet another new English translation of Sacred Scripture, this one being marketed as the the Common English Bible (CEB) (not to be confused with the 1999 Common Edition New Testament, or with the American Bible Society’s Contemporary English Version from 1995, which goes by CEV). This “fresh” translation was an interdenominational effort (predominantly by members of old-line, liberal Protestant denominations, it would seem). It was translated from NA27, using vari...
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has announced the release on this coming Ash Wednesday (March 9th) of what amounts to the completion of a Revised version of the New American Bible, which will be known as the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE). I should be happy to see the publication of what is being touted as a more formal translation of the Old Testament for the NAB, but I can’t help but feel that the USCCB has bungled this. This will be the fourth release of the NAB family of translations. The original translation was ...
In between disasters and duties, I’ve been spending a bit more time looking at the new 2nd edition HCSB this week. Perhaps the most significant change from the first version is the greatly increased tendency to transliterate the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh), instead of following the standard practice among English translations of rendering it as LORD in small caps. Among major English translations, only the ASV (“Jehovah”) and the JB/NJB (“Yahweh”) have used a transliteration more than occasionally. Curiously, the HCSB does not transliterate consistently, as ...
One of the more interesting recent developments in the English language world of Biblical scholarship was the production of the New English Translation (NET), which merged the obviously traditional discipline of Biblical translation with a process rooted in the modern, Internet-enabled, collaboration practices that have produced results like open source software and wikis. The idea was to make the in-process text available, on the web, for public review and comments; the hope being, I suppose, that such a process would produce a text that approached a co...