Learn How to Read the Bible with a New Testament Translator

Charlie Webster was the sole translator. Of course, he studied other translations, extensive Bible commentaries, lexicons, and cultural and historical backgrounds, and he sought the advice and input of others frequently.

The guiding principles were the following:

1. Always provide wording that communicated the original author’s ideas accurately.
2. Always use wording that is in common conversational used in America today, wording that would be expected in network television news broadcasts.
3. Always use the context of the individual passage and the context of the entire New Testament to maintain a consistent message without changing the original author’s ideas.
4. Blend the four Gospel accounts into one account that contains everything from all four Gospels, using footnotes and glossary articles to deal with minor differences between accounts.
5. Wherever possible, move difficult to pronounce names of people and places either to footnotes or to glossary articles.
6. Provide glossary articles to clarify accounts where the original author assumed that readers would know things that modern Americans would be unlikely to know.
7. Organize the letters in chronological order so that the reader can see the development of Christian teaching and difficulties Christians faced.
8. Where the original authors used masculine terms as common gender terms (applying to both men and women), clarify the common gender usage.
9. In Acts, where travel descriptions are provided that would have no value for the normal American reader, move the travel details to the glossary.
10. For Acts, the letters, and Revelation, use traditional divisions for chapters and verses but blend verses or chapters as needed to provide a clear picture of the original author’s ideas.
11. For the blended Gospel account, organize the material chronologically where possible and topically in other cases into chapters and verses for the convenience of readers referencing specific passages.

Mr. Webster began studying the Greek New Testament in 1962 and continued to study it for the rest of his life, seeing problems in the traditional translations but not seriously trying to create a new translation until 2004. At that time, Mr. Webster was leading some workshops and realized that people needed a blended translation of the Gospels with significant improvements to communicate the original authors’ messages. Upon completing an initial version of that, he realized that this should include a new translation of Acts, and that led to a decision to translate Paul’s letters along with the account of his ministry in Acts, and once that was in work, it seemed ridiculous not to finish the whole New Testament.

Today, there are three manuscript resources maintained by expert scholars: the Majority Text, the Nestle-Aland Text, and the United Bible Society Text. Fortunately, I’m able to bring up all three in software to compare them. In most cases, the Nestle-Aland Text and the UBS Text are identical. Those represent a serious effort to determine the most probable wording of the original texts (none of which are available today). The Majority Text tends to have some differences due to the number of western manuscripts with some additions and some minor modifications. In general, the policy was to follow Nestle-Aland and UBS.

I hope to form a group who work together to follow the above policies and maintain this translation with updates at regular intervals. Language tends to change over time. (When I was a child, if I’d swiped a credit card, I’d have been arrested.) Serious research into the Greek manuscripts may result in some improvements. And background on the history and culture of the time is certain to change as archeologists continue their work.

The permission for use of material in either the 21st Century New Testament or the glossary is spelled out at the front of each document.

Some verses that the Nestle-Aland and UBS texts show as not original have been moved to footnotes or a glossary article, but in some cases such verses appear to be so consistent with the context that they are included. Two verses in 1 Corinthians 14 have been moved to a glossary article since there is so much evidence either that they are not original or that Paul never meant for these verses to have the meaning that they appear to have.

As mentioned above, this project began as an effort to blend the Gospel accounts into a single account with all the information from all four Gospels and with improved translation of the message. At the end of the Gospels, inclusion of the first chapter of Acts seemed mandatory. However, that led to a decision to translate the rest of Acts and that led to a decision to translate Paul’s letters and that led to a decision to finish the job. In translating the letters, the effort began with chronological translation of Paul’s letters, but toward the end of the process, the translation shifted to put all the letters in chronological order, when required putting James’ letter before Paul’s first letter.