Well, hey, what's up, everybody? Pastor Matt here. Thanks for checking into the YouTube channel.
We're going to talk about Bible translations today. This is a question that I get all the time. I get questions in the comments of my YouTube videos.
I get private message questions. I get Twitter direct message questions. All the time people are asking me about my favorite or preferred Bible translation.
And so, you know, I've done other videos on Bible translations before. I've called out a couple of them and talked about a little... their virtues and vices at times. But I haven't done a video quite like this where I'm just going to come straight out and tell you my three favorite Bible translation choices.
So that's exactly what I'm going to do in this particular video. And you know, I can totally understand the question because we are so blessed in the English Bible translation market that we are literally flooded with options. And that's what makes it... So hard sometimes to decide on which Bible translation you're going to use, either for your personal study or for your group Bible study or for your preaching ministry.
Which one would be the best? We have so many options. We are richly, richly blessed. The market is flooded with choices. We have study Bibles, we have text Bibles, we have specialty Bibles, we have Bibles for this demographic and that demographic and this function and that function.
We have so many options that we are Literally spoiled almost to death with how many English translations there are. There's just so many choices. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to make it simple. I'm going to suggest that you can probably for the rest of your life get along with just three Bible translations.
In fact, you could get along with one Bible translation, but I'm going to give you three. I'm going to give you a triangle of three options that all complement each other perfectly. And I think you would be happy with these three for the rest of your... life.
Now before I tell you what they are, and I am going to tell you what they are in just a moment, let me answer a question that you may perhaps be asking, which is, okay, so Everhard, why are you qualified to tell me what Bible translations that I should be using? Well, I don't know that I am. I'm just a guy out there on the internet with a YouTube channel that talks about Bible and theology all the time.
However, I do have a couple of things in my background that may make my insight helpful to you. First of all, this. I am an ordained minister in the PCA.
Now, let me tell you something about the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America. You cannot get ordained in the PCA unless you have skilled training and experience in the original languages of Hebrew and... Greek. And so there are a lot of denominations out there where you can get ordained with a piece of paper and it's pretty easy.
Maybe you just pass a little practical training course. Maybe you just kind of apply for the job and you get the job and hey, all of a sudden you're the pastor. Not so in the PCA.
In the PCA, we have very strict ordination standards. And one of the standards is that you have to have studied the original Hebrew and the Greek. And so since I'm an ordained PCA minister, I have studied Hebrew and Greek. Now, I will be honest with you and tell you that my Greek is way better than my Hebrew.
I studied Greek practically at every level you could study it at. I studied it for my bachelor's degree. I have a bachelor's degree in Bible theology.
I studied it for my master's degree. I use the Greek all the time. In fact, I used it this morning. I study the Greek text either in the New Testament or in the Septuagint of the Old Testament. Almost every single day without fail, I consult the Greek when I'm preparing my sermons.
And I can't say that I'm the best in the world. I'm definitely not. I do use helps. I do use some study aids. There's a couple of apps that I use to help me out whenever I come to a word that I don't know or a parsing that I'm not sure of.
But I'm good enough to sit down and read what I did this morning, which is the story of Samson from the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, and look through it for every sermon I prepare. Now, my Hebrew was not that great, and I'm going to be honest with you. I took a couple of Hebrew courses.
I did some online stuff way back in the day before online classes were in vogue. This is way early. They didn't help me much, so what I ended up doing is consulting a Hebrew expert, a person who's taught Hebrew at the seminary level around the world.
And we did a year of private study together, him and I, and so that satisfied my Hebrew requirements, even though to this day, I'll be honest with you and tell you my Hebrew is not that great, not nearly what my Greek is. So I do have that by way of background. Moreover, I have read and studied the Bible practically every single day of my converted Christian life.
I'm just into the Bible. I love the Bible. That's what I do. Studied all the time.
Now, I don't say that to brag. And if any of that sounded like a humble brag to you, then just exit out of this video. That's not my point.
I'm not in it to win it like that. I'm not trying to brag or... I'm just simply telling you why I might be qualified to talk a little bit about this topic.
So if you're new to this channel, my name is Matthew Everhart. I'm the pastor of Gospel Fellowship PCA. We are a Reformed Bible-believing church just north of Pittsburgh here in western Pennsylvania. We'd love for you to come visit us on the Lord's Day.
We have services at 830 and 11. We have adult Bible study Wednesday night, 630, and lots of other good things. Check us out on the interwebs, Gospel Fellowship PCA. All right. Let me give you my triangle of perfect complementary Bible translations.
These three are going to work together fantastic, and I'm going to give you the strengths of each one of these translations. Any one of these would be entirely sufficient. You could live on a desert island for the rest of your life with any one of these translations, but each one of them brings something to the table that makes it especially suitable, especially when put together. in combination with the other two translations. So the first one that I would say is the King James Version.
Yes, the authorized version, the Big Daddy, the majestic king of all English translations. I highly recommend the King James Version. Yes, I know it's old. Yes, I know some of the language is outdated. It is still, though, an excellent, precise, beautiful, and glorious translation from the original languages into a majestic...
an easily memorized English style. So if you want a translation that has power, if you want a translation that will serve you very well in terms of your memory verse operations, now some of you will say, well, how can you memorize it when the English is a little bit Elizabethan? It's a little bit difficult for certain readers. Try it. Try memorizing the King James Version.
What you're going to find is that that slightly old-fashioned beautified cadence that it has will actually help your memorization. It's not going to hurt it. It's actually going to help it.
Now, I came to the King James Version party a little bit late in life. The church that I grew up in told us not to use it. They said it was too hard, said we wouldn't understand it. We used the NIV at that time, and so I dutifully obeyed my pastors and my teachers at that time. I avoided the King James.
Later on in life, especially as I began to study some of the Puritans and developed my love for Jonathan Edwards, who is my theological, historical fascination that I've been writing about in terms of my scholarly and academic production, I just thought, man, I've got to get into the King James. And so I did, and it helped me to understand Edwards a little bit better. In fact, look... One of the main strengths of the King James Version is that it has been used by so many of the Puritans. Charles Spurgeon, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield.
If you want to understand some of these old great writers, even some of the Princetonian Reformed guys as late as the beginning of the 20th century, they were all using the King James. If you want to read A.W. Pink, if you want to read... A.W. Pink?
Pink. If you want to read A.W. Tozer, that's what I meant to say.
Even Billy Graham is using the King James Version, so it's hard to avoid the King James. It's just excellent. It was the standard version that was used even in the Westminster Confession of Faith, if you are Reformed as I am.
So there's all kinds of reasons why you would want to use the King James. Now, personally, I use it most, not so much for preaching and teaching, as for my personal prayer. and devotional life where I use it almost every morning and every evening as well. There's just something powerful about the King James Version.
You have to have some KJV in your life. If you don't believe me, please try this. Just get out the Psalms, okay? Get out the Psalms and the Old King James and look up numbers 90 through 100. Read those in the King James and you will probably be an authorized version convert. as I am.
Now, one thing that you need to know about the King James Version, which is going to set it apart from the other two translations, which I'm going to talk about, is its textual basis. Because not only do we have to be mindful of what translation we're reading into the English, but also what are they translating in the King James Version that comes out of the Masoretic Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Excellent.
Wonderful. No problems there. And in the New Testament, the Greek it relies upon is the Textus Receptus.
Now, I've done a number of videos recently about Greek texts. The Textus Receptus compared to the critical text, and both of them compared to the majority text. I have personally landed in the area of the majority text for reasons I have explained in the last two majority text videos I've done.
So just check those out. I think the majority text is excellent. But the King James uses the Textus Receptus, which in my view, though excellent, does have a couple of things that I might want to quibble about.
And that's going to bring me then to the second translation that I'm going to recommend to you, and that would be the New King James Version. Now, obviously... Obviously, there's a relationship between these two translations, the King James and the New King James.
By the way, if you want to live the rest of your life King James only, that's fine with me. I've got no problems with the King James. I love it and use it. But I do also recommend that you may consider adding to your King James usage the New King James version, which is going to give you the added benefit of bringing some of that old-fashioned language up to date.
There's a couple of things in the King James version. that are just a little bit weird when you come to the word peradventure for a moment. When's the last time you've used peradventure in a sentence? Guarantee you probably haven't. No, you haven't.
Maybe you don't even know what it means. It means maybe or perhaps. But the King James Version's got all kinds of stuff like that in there.
It'll say, I want not, W-O-T. Do you know what I want not means? It means I don't know. So anyways, what the new King James Version does is it takes those old kind of weird expressions that honestly nobody uses anymore and it brings them into a more modern English and so it's taking the same King James Version but updating the language in substantial and I think important ways that are going to make it much more readable to the average person. Now, a lot of people talk about the plow boy.
There was a reference to helping the plow boy to understand the word of God back in Tyndale's day. We want ordinary people to be able to read and to understand God's word. Sometimes I think about the guys who work with my son at the car shop, doing car repair, hands-on body work, brake work, cleaning them up, detailing them, that kind of thing. I often wonder if I gave one of those guys a King James Version, how well they'd be able to do in understanding it. But I wouldn't have any problem with giving them a new King James Version.
And that's not to say anything bad about car guys. I'm just saying, you know, people that haven't grown up with the Bible regularly, haven't heard it preached and taught regularly, maybe it might be helpful to read more of a modern translation. And so the new King James Version is going to be awesome.
It's going to be a great supplement to the King James Version. In fact, if your preacher preaches from the KJV, you can break the KJV. bring a New King James Version to church with you, and you're going to follow along very, very easily, absolutely no problem, because of that updated language. Not only that, but the New King James is a very, very precise translation of the Hebrew and Greek, just like its father, the King James Version was. Both of these are word-for-word precision translations from the Old Testament Hebrew and the New Testament Greek.
into the English language. Both of them have a word-for-word precise style of translation that makes them excellent for word studies and very detailed examination of the biblical text. In fact, both of them, the King James and the New King James, I can still take my Greek New Testament and follow along.
easily, very easily in either one of those because they're precise word-for-word translations. Now, I will say this. I mentioned I'm a majority text Greek New Testament guy for reasons I've given in a couple of those videos I mentioned.
The New King James is probably the best option on the block if you're one of those minority of people like me who believes in the majority text because the New King James has the best of any of any English Bible has the best footnotes indicating to you whether a reading comes from the Textus Receptus or the critical text or in many cases the majority text as well. New King James is the only one that does that and so you're going to want to supplement your King James with the New King James and that's going to bring me to my third translation that I highly recommend which is the ESV, the English Standard Version. Now This is going to be a little bit different from its two relatives. It is related to the King James and the New King James because the ESV does translate the New Testament from the critical text. So whereas the KJV and the NKJV both use the Textus Receptus, the ESV is going to be the one in the family that does use that critical Greek text, the scholarly, academic.
the one that has the advantage of many papyrus discoveries and older manuscripts that were not known to those who collated the Textus Receptus in the days of the Reformation. And so this is why the ESV is beloved by scholars and academicians, especially seminary professors, theologians, very in-depth writers, people that have kind of that mind for the academy, the ESV. in conservative circles is going to be the one that a lot of reformed seminaries are going to depend upon because they want that precision. They want that critical text. They want to know that they have the most available information and that is the most precise translation that can be made while retaining the beauty.
and the eloquence and the style of its parent translations, the King James Version family. So if you go to a Reformed seminary, one of the best seminaries, you're probably going to end up using the ESV, which is why so many churches have adopted the ESV for their preaching Bible. So if you have the King James and the New King James in the ESV, then you're going to have in that triangular... fashion, you're going to have the best of all possible worlds.
You're going to have three translations that are all precise word-for-word translations. They're all going to be related to each other in terms of their derivation from that broader Tyndale family of English translations. And you're going to have the benefit of the beautiful, though slightly archaic, language of the King James with the updated language of the New King James and the critical text scholarly academic. Greek underline text of the ESV. If you had any one of those texts, you should be happy for the rest of your life.
But in combination, those three translations make a particularly powerful combination that for me is pretty much... all that I need. Now, let me say a couple of things about a couple other translations that you might incorporate as well. These are not my choice, but they could be your choice.
First of all, we might consider the Geneva Bible. If you wanted to be kind of hipster cool, then you could replace the King James Version with the Geneva Bible. The Geneva Bible is actually older than the King James.
If the King James is dated to 1611, Then the Geneva Bible goes back even into the 1500s. It's an older English translation and still very, very excellent, very beautiful. It's very much like the King James. In fact, if I gave you a sample reading of either the Geneva or the King James, you might not be able to tell them apart, to be completely honest, unless you really had that chapter memorized.
But they're very, very similar. And yet the Geneva Bible was the one that was... preferred by many of the Puritans, especially the English Puritans, before the King James Version, the Authorized Version, was translated in 1611. So that's a pretty cool one.
Now, what about the NASB? Well, I could supplement that one for the ESV. I could switch those out in my triangle because the NASB and the ESV, they both have the critical Greek text, and they're both word-for-word translations.
So I could easily swap those out, and I've talked about the NASB on a video called Why No Love for the NASB. It's just not a translation that I have time for. I mean, how many translations can one person realistically use all the time for me?
You may like it. It's just not my thing. The CSB is another one that I could switch out for the ESV.
Not a big CSB fan either. Honestly, I've never really given it a fair chance, so I don't have much negative to say about it. Other than I kind of had the feeling with the CSB, formerly the HCSB, that the Baptists kind of needed an alternate to the ESV, which the Reformed were really kind of digging into.
And I think sometimes the various publishing houses like to have their own translation. So all the books from Holman, you know, that publishing house are going to use the CSB. To me, it's a little bit of a marketing thing. So if you love it, cool for you.
It's not my thing. No big deal. I used to like the NIV 1984. That one, though, steps out of the Tyndale King James Family Linear Heritage because it was a new translation, and yes, done from the critical text.
That one's a little bit more of a functional equivalent. I prefer a more word-for-word precise translation than NIV 84. But I grew up with it, and I loved it for what it was until I eventually moved over to the ESV for my preaching and writing ministry. Now, there's a couple that I'd say that you should stay away from, and I don't mean to rip on any translations here.
There's just a couple that I want to mention that are not my favorite. The NIV-84 was a pretty good translation. When they updated the NIV, though, they went...
to a little bit more of that kind of gender-neutral language, which I have a problem with. And then they even removed the 84 from print altogether and even from some of the websites. I didn't like that.
That bothered me a little bit. It kind of rankled my feathers a little bit. It kind of grated on my nerves that they did that. So I've never been into the new NIV. I definitely would not want to touch the NRSV with a 10-foot pole.
If you don't like gender-inclusive... language where they kind of take away words like brothers or fathers and they make them into like family members or I don't know that all kinds of ways that they steer away from male language that's just not my thing I'm not into the NRSV I think it's a liberal translation to me it's kind of like the RSV that came before it I'm just just not not into that. That's not my thing either. The Passion Translation, don't touch that with the 10-foot pole. It's not even a real translation of the Hebrew and the Greek.
It's just some charismatic guy's idea of what a Bible might look like. The New World Translation of the Jehovah's Witnesses completely ignores the doctrine of the deity of Christ. One that I will say a little bit nicer things about is the message. Now, that may surprise you because it's a paraphrase, right? But if you look into Eugene Peterson's Anderson's bona fides in terms of his linguistic abilities.
He actually is a very good Hebrew and Greek scholar. So yes, it's a paraphrase, but it's not as bad as, you know, some of the other ones. Either way, I don't use it myself. All right, now I've advocated for the King James, the New King James, and the ESV in this video, but I'd love to hear from you. Where did I get it right?
Where did I get it wrong? Maybe you disagree with me on my majority text conclusions. maybe you like one of the other ones that I said were good but not great let me have it in the comments of this video hit me you can't hurt me don't worry let last thing I want to say don't forget my new book souls how Jesus saved sinners coming out right now it's a book about the gospel it's a book about justification can you define that propitiation can you define that atonement you know where that is in the Old Testament though the whole book souls is a way to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with the world.
It's the book that I've always wanted to write. I want people to know Christ as their Savior. Alright, well thanks for checking into this video.
I do love you lots and we'll talk to you later.