The Best Bible Translation is...

Answering a frequently asked question.

I’m often asked in the comments of Simple Christianity about what Bible is the best one to read? It’s a reasonable question and I’ll try to talk through the various trade-offs and give you some recommendations.

Photo by Joel Muniz on Unsplash

Right off the bat, let me give you the short answer, so you’re not in suspense: Any of the major Protestant or Catholic English translations of the Bible are just fine for you to use. The Catholic versions will include the apocrypha, which is not cannon but might be interesting from a historical perspective. The best Bible is the one that is easiest for you to read and understand and that you will read on a regular basis.

Got it? It’s simple. Pick one and read it regularly. If you find it difficult to understand, then pick another one and keep reading. Repeat until you find one you like.

The Bible App (aka YouVersion) makes it easy to try out new versions, just a couple taps on your phone or tablet. But you can read it on paper or online. Again, whatever works best for you and keeps you reading.

We’ve talked before about how Bibles are translated and transmitted through history. If you haven’t yet read that article, you might want to do that first.

Atheist Question #4: How can you take the Bible literally when it’s been translated so many times?

I’ve also, previously, posted Mike Winger’s video talking about various translations and the ones that he recommends, both for and against.

Which Bible Translation?

Good Bibles and Bad Bibles

So, everybody wants to see the lists of good and bad Bibles. Here are some lists. Each list is in alphabetical order and doesn’t indicate any preference on my part. I’m just throwing translations into broad buckets at this point. Later in this article, I’ve give you my personal picks. Each Bible has its common abbreviated name listed after it.

Note that Wikipedia lists more than 120 different English translations of the Bible, but I’ll just focus on the most popular and ones that I have specifically been asked about here at Simple Christianity. Side note: what a wealth of options we have in English! Most languages have far fewer options. Some languages just have one translation.

The Good:

• American Standard Version - ASV

• Amplified Bible - AMP

• Berean Standard Bible - BSB

• Christian Standard Bible - CSB

• Common English Bible - CEB

• Contemporary English Version - CEV

• The Coverdale Bible - TCB

• Darby Bible - DBY

• Douay-Rheims Bible - DRB

• English Standard Version - ESV

• Geneva Bible - GEN

• Good News Bible - GNB

• Holman Christian Standard Bible - HCSB

• International Standard Version - ISV

• King James Version - KJV

• Legacy Standard Bible - LSB

• Lexham English Bible - LEB

• Literal Standard Version - LSV

• Majority Standard Bible - MSB

• Modern English Version - MEV

• New American Bible - NAB

• New American Bible Revised Edition - NABRE

• New American Standard Bible - NASB

• New Century Version - NCV

• New English Bible - NEB

• New English Translation - NET

• New International Reader’s Version - NIRV

• New International Version - NIV

• New King James Version - NKJV

• New Living Translation - NLT

• New Revised Standard Version - NRSV

• Revised Standard Version - RSV

• The Living Bible - TLB

• World English Bible - WEB

• Wycliffe’s Bible - WYC

• Young’s Literal Translation - YLT

The Bad:

• Joseph Smith Translation - JST

• New World Translation - NWT

• The Message - MSG

• The Passion Translation - TPT

Alright, let’s talk about the reasons for these classifications.

The reasons Bibles appear on the Good list are:

• They are faithful translations made by Godly people committed to the truth.

• They are translated by a larger translation team that checks the work of the others and generally the team comes from a broader background than just one single denomination. That means there are more sets of diverse theological eyes on each verse in the translation. The result is a more accurate, neutral translation, not trying to push the theology of any particular denomination.

• While every translation requires some decisions on the part of the translator about which specific ancient manuscripts to weight more heavily than others, these decisions are made in good faith from commonly recognized source manuscripts that can be accessed by lots of scholars. The source manuscript isn’t a set of golden plates somebody found buried in the woods (e.g., Mormonism).

• Where texts differ and the translator has made a choice between them, footnotes indicate the other possible choices that could have been made and tell what the alternative translations are. A good Bible translation isn’t trying to “pull a fast one,” but is transparent about the inevitable choices that have to be made when doing a translation.

The reasons Bibles appear on the Bad list are:

• They were written by Christian-ish cults to drive a specific theological agenda that is not supported by the underlying Hebrew and Greek texts available to scholars. In short, they are mistranslations meant to deceive. The Joseph Smith translation was created by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. The New World Translation was produced by the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Both are deceptive at key points to support their respective, heretical doctrine.

• They aren’t faithful translations even if they were created by people who purport to be traditional Christians. Specifically, the Message Bible is a paraphrase, not a translation, and it sometimes plays fast and loose with the text to the point where it compromises important doctrine. The Message was created by a single person, not a team. The Passion Translation has also been done by a single individual, not a larger translation team, and the “translator” is not a Hebrew or Greek scholar. Further, he seems to have a specific agenda in creating the Passion. Mike Winger has done a whole playlist of videos exposing a long list of issues with the Passion Translation.

So, it’s pretty simple. Choose a Bible from the Good list and avoid all the ones on the Bad list. In fact, if you have a Bible on the bad list, I’d suggest throwing it in the trash. Better yet, burn it so that nobody else finds it and is deceived by it.

“But Dave, that still leaves more than 35 Bibles in the Good list! Which of these is the best?”

There’s no right answer to that question for everybody, but here are some things to consider.

Modern Language or Old English?

Some of the Bibles on the Good list are really old. The Wycliffe Bible was written in Middle English in 1388. The Geneva Bible is from 1560. The Douay-Rheims from 1582. This makes the Geneva Bible and Douay-Rheims contemporaries of William Shakespeare. The popular King James Version was first printed in 1611 but was revised again in 1769, just before the American Revolution.

Is old bad? No, not at all. Old is just old. All these Bibles were fine translations at the time they were first created. But the world has moved on.

Specifically, the vocabulary and grammar that was used back then is very different than modern English and most people can’t really understand what they are reading. Worse, some English words have actually changed in meaning over the years and so their usage in these Bibles can be confusing or even misleading. To be clear, this is not malicious intent on anybody’s part. Languages just evolve over time and old texts become difficult for modern people to understand. This issue is not limited to English. If you put a copy of the New Testament written in Koine Greek in front of a modern Greek person, they would struggle with it as well. In short, if you couldn’t understand Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet when you read them in high school, these are not the Bibles for you.

Now, one thing that I want to caution against is that some people think these Bibles, and notably the King James Version, because it was so influential and popular for centuries, “sound like church.” People heard the King James Version read from the pulpit and they may have memorized verses out of the King James in Sunday school. There’s nothing wrong with the King James, but don’t choose it because it sounds “churchy” and then struggle to understand it when you read. The King James Version is no more “spiritual” than any other version. In its own day, it would have sounded ordinary, not churchy, because that’s just how everybody spoke and wrote back at that time.

Word-for-Word or Thought-for-Thought?

The next choice you have to make is between a word-for-word translation and a thought-for-thought translation. The simplest way explain this is with an analogy.

Pretend for a moment that we’re translating from English into another language. The document we’re translating contains the English idiom, “He was under the weather.”

A word-for-word translation would render that as “He was under the weather” in the target language, using the other language’s words for “He,” “was,” “under,” and “the weather.”

In contrast, a thought-for-thought translation would render the same sentence as “He wasn’t feeling well” or even “He felt sick.”

In the case of a word-for-word Bible translation into English, the translator is going to give you the English words that are closest in meaning to the Hebrew and Greek words as possible, and modify the grammar to standard English grammar. Any ancient idioms are going to be your responsibility as the reader to understand. That means you’re going to have to understand more about ancient Jewish culture, custom, and idioms. Things like weights, measures, and monetary units are going to be given in things like shekels (0.4 ounces, 11.4 grams), ephahs (20 dry quarts, 22 liters), and cubits (approximately 17 - 20 inches). Popular examples of word-for-word translations are the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the Legacy Standard Bible (LSB, which is basically a revision of the NASB), and the English Standard Version (ESV).

In contrast, a thought-for-thought translation does more of the work up front so that the reader doesn’t have work as hard later. The translator will try to understand what the original text is “trying to say,” and then say that in English. The goal is not to be able to trace each English word back to an equivalent Hebrew or Greek word, but rather to communicate equivalent thoughts. This means that Jewish idioms are rendered as we would say them in English, and the translations will typically convert weights and measures into modern units so you’re not scrambling to find a calculator and a conversion table somewhere.

Note that the word-for-word vs. thought-for-thought characterization is a continuous spectrum, not just a binary choice. Both the NASB and the ESV are word-for-word translations, for instance, but the NASB is more strict about it. The NIV and NLT are both thought-for-thought translations, but the NIV is less so than the NLT. So, the NASB and NLT are more at the edges of the spectrum, whereas the ESV and the NIV are more toward the middle. The Christian Standard Bible (CSB, a revision of the HCSB) claims to live in a middle ground between the other word-for-word and though-for-thought translations.

Some people have a strong preference here, typically for a word-by-word translation because they think it’s more accurate. But is it more accurate to translate, “He was under the weather,” word for word, or as “He felt sick?” Neither is more correct than the other, but one is more understandable to a person that doesn’t understand English idioms.

Another drawback of a word-for-word translation is that they typically are a bit of a “stiffer read,” having more complex sentence construction, where the words don’t flow as well, because the translator is trying to bring almost every word across from the Hebrew or Greek into its English equivalent.

Reading Level

The next thing to consider is reading level. Some translations demand more of the reader in terms of vocabulary, sentence length, and grammatical constructions. To give you some examples of where the various Bibles fall in terms of American grade level:

• Geneva - 12th grade level, because the language is old and the vocabulary larger.

• KJV - 12th grade level, because the language is old and the vocabulary larger.

• NKJV - 11th grade level, because the language is slightly more modern than the KJV.

• NASB - 11th grade level, because this is a strong word-for-word translation with expansive vocabulary.

• ESV - 10th grade level, because this is a word-for-word translation.

• CSB - 7th or 8th grade level, because, as described before, the CSB is trying to stake out the middle ground between word-for-word and thought-for-thought translations.

• NIV - 7th or 8th grade level, because this is a thought-for-thought translation, so it demands less of the reader.

• NLT - 6th or 7th grade level, because this is a thought-for-thought translation.

• NIRV - 3rd grade level, because it specifically targets children and readers who struggle by using a more restricted vocabulary with simple sentence construction.

So, is one reading level or the other better? Nope. Again, these are all faithful translations that are trying to communicate what the Hebrew and Greek source texts say, but they are choosing different words and sentence structure to do it.

The Apostle Paul is famous in his various letters for using complex, run-on sentences that make Bible translators’ eyes bleed. As a strict-word-for-word translation, the NASB is going to hang on to a lot of that complexity in the English translation. In contrast, the NIRV is going to break up those run on sentences into multiple, much shorter sentences. The NIRV is also going to use fewer pronouns for greater clarity. So, when you’re deep into one of Paul’s sentences and you can’t remember who “he” refers to anymore, the NIRV is going to say “God” even though Paul used a pronoun.

If you’re a new Christian or you never liked reading when you had to do it in school, choose a translation near the bottom of the list.

Another reason to avoid the Geneva Bible and even the KJV is that they again demand more of the reader. If you’re up for that, fine, go for it. But don't think that torturing yourself with one of the higher grade-level translations makes you more spiritual. It just means that you’ll understand less of what you read and get fatigued more quickly so that you’ll stop reading sooner.

My Personal Recommendations

Okay, so here are my recommendations. Let’s start with the high level and then we can dive deeper.

The number one, primary goal in selecting a Bible translation is to pick a translation that you can both read for extended periods (think chapters per day, not a single verse every six months) and understand. As a Christian, you need to be reading God’s word on a regular basis, ideally daily. And you need to be understanding what you’re reading. Reading without understanding is just a waste of time and a cause for frustration.

And this is where I get to say, “But why choose just one?” The fact is, we have a wealth of riches in English Bible translations and you may want a different translation for a different situation. Apps for your phone or tablet like the Bible app (YouVersion) make this easy and portable. You can select whatever translation you want from the Good list above with just a few finger taps.

So, first, I have my daily reading translation. This is the New Living Translation (NLT). It’s a thought-for-thought translation at a 6th/7th grade reading level. I’ve been an avid reader ever since I was young, but I choose the NLT as my daily reading Bible because it’s buttery smooth. I can read it for long stretches, and I have no problem understanding what it is saying. I don’t get confused or fatigued, even when I’m a bit tired.

I highly recommend the NLT for new Christians, too, as it’s much easier to read than any of the word-for-word translations. Christianity is confusing enough when you’re new to it. The last thing you need is a difficult-to-read translation.

Next, I have my more in-depth translations that I use for deeper Bible study. I use two word-for-word translations for that, the English Standard Version (ESV) and the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Both are solid word-for-word translations. The ESV is a bit smoother reading than the NASB, but both are no problem. They are both more clunky for daily reading than the NLT, however.

Finally, I have my in-church translation that I read along with during the sermon. Our church has a relatively new pastor. The old pastor used the NIV but the new one likes the ESV. That’s fine. I read that version when I’m in church so my translation matches the pastor’s words.

Again, my advice is simple: pick a version that you can read for long stretches and that you can understand. But perhaps choose more versions for other situations. I have three go-to Bibles for various situations, daily reading, deep Bible study, and following along in church: the NLT, NASB, and ESV.

You can easily compare different versions at Bible Gateway or Bible Hub.

A paper copy of the Bible is great to have so that you can take notes or mark it up (circle, underline, highlight, whatever) when you find impactful verses. That said, I’ve gone almost 100 percent digital. At home, I typically read off my iPad using the Bible app/YouVersion. When I’m at church or small group Bible study, I’ll read off my phone, also using the Bible app/YouVersion. I can highlight verses and all those highlights are saved in the cloud.

But all of that is just my personal preference. Feel free to chart your own course. Just remember that you need to be reading and understanding. Do not compromise on that.

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