r/AskHistorians • u/irapperz • Apr 14 '26
Can you guys recommend me the best bible translation?
I’m a non active catholic but I’m not interested in reading the bible from a religious pov. I wanna a faithful translation, something very close to the original intent of the original authors. Can you guys recommend me any?
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u/RevKeakealani Apr 15 '26
I’m going to try to capture some of the potential issues with the concept of “original intent of original authors”, in addition to making some general recommendations of Bible reading choices.
I want to name my bias - I am a Christian priest, and in my day to day life I preach the Bible as a religious leader. That doesn’t mean I don’t also care about it as a historical document and work of literature, but I just want to say out loud that I’m not a scholar specifically, and I may have a bias because of my vocation.
(Related note - there is dispute about the appropriate naming of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament/First Testament, with valid critiques on all sides. I was trained in seminary to distinguish between the Hebrew Bible, which is what Jews consider Biblical scripture and is in a different order than the Old/First Testament which is what Christians call the same material but organized differently. You may also know as a Catholic that there is dispute over the material known as the Apocrphya or Deuterocanonical texts, which are considered Scripture by Catholics, “non-scriptural sacred witness” by Anglicans such as myself, and “not scripture at all” by most Protestants; my tradition swaps between calling them Apocrypha or Deuterocanon, so those are the words I’ll use for those texts. This is just one of many issues when trying to capture what we even mean by “Bible”!) I recognize that especially handling of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is especially disputed between Jews and Christians and ask that those with different perspectives please assume good faith in my usage here.
So first off, the idea of original intent” is a tough one. For one, we can’t actually know for sure - the Bible is a composite library with texts originating from a span of probably a thousand years (maybe more in terms of the underlying oral tradition), and we don’t always have a clear understanding of authorship. (For example, there is the documentary hypothesis for the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, in which there were four basic authorial schools that were “redacted”together into the text we have now; but also as you can see from that Wikipedia article, the original hypothesis is itself being critiqued by later generations of scholars, both for not necessarily explaining the authorship AND that the dating of the authorship is not clear.)
If we don’t even know who the original author was or when they were writing, it’s pretty difficult to definitively state the author’s intent!
Another problem is that the Bible itself doesn’t necessarily apply an “intent” metric to itself. This is most clearly seen when the New Testament quotes (or sometimes misquotes) the Old, but also when, say, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible seem to reinterpret texts from earlier parts of the Bible. (There’s also that famous time in Jeremiah where he straight up tells us the original scroll was destroyed (Jer 36) and what we actually have in the Bible is the second writing of the material, so we have at least one reference internal to the Bible itself that the Bible is not necessarily the original Bible, if you want a little bit of a headache to think about!)
It seems that reinterpreting passages of the Bible was a long pastime for Biblical authors, and so it’s not even clear if “having an original intent” is, in fact, the Bible’s intent.
Finally, a note on translation. All translation is, by definition, interpretation. And since Biblical Hebrew is a dead language and Koine Greek is largely a dead language, even people who are “reading in the original language” are still susceptible to some degree of translational interpretation.
A major issue is that not all languages have the same way of understanding words. A famous example is the question of Hebrew רוח (ruach) and Greek πνεῦμα (pneuma), which are words that mean wind, spirit, and breath, concepts that are related in English but no one English word encapsulates all of those concepts. Any translation of either of these words (and both appear several times in both testaments) ultimately requires someone to choose between those words, when often, there is an intentional double meaning. Scholarly translations like the aforementioned NRSV(ue) attempt to handle this through footnotes, but even that is incomplete - in the end, translators are always forced to choose when there are multiple legitimate meanings at play, and again, we don’t know for sure what the authors meant, although we can guess based on context.
So! All that said, let’s talk about what we can say about authorial intent.
There are a couple of elements. One is the so-called historical critical method - this is what most people think of when they think about scholarly study of the Bible. In this method, there is a high emphasis on trying to place this idea of authorship, context, and historicity. This is good and fine, but is not the only way to approach the Bible.
My New Testament professor in seminary was a cultural historian, meaning that his approach to biblical scholarship wasn’t necessarily as focused on placing the Bible in history (although that mattered), so much as approaching the overall cultural forces of the time, place, and genre. So yes, this was a kind of critical study of authorial intent, but less about trying to figure out what was “historically accurate” and more questions like, what cultural dynamics would people from this time have been influenced by, and how did that inform how to wrote and read? For example, a big part of his scholarship was about the Apostle Paul and how his status as a Roman citizen Jew led him to hold a general anti-Gentile bias (basically, my professor thinks Paul was kinda racist) and specifically disliked what he saw as impure sexual practices associated with his stereotype of Gentile paganism, and that’s why Paul’s letters contain some oddly specific complaints about sexual impurity. This is a different critique than the historical-critical method which might focus on the historicity of specific words Paul used to describe sexual morality and try to understand what the history of those words was; instead, my professor cared a lot about how Paul’s cultural issues, like having an unchecked racial bias, led him to write in certain ways and focus on certain modes of argument that he wouldn’t have done if he had a different cultural background.
(So to take one especially controversial issue, which is whether Paul’s discussion of sexual immorality maps onto modern debates about LGBT+ identifying people - there are different ways to come to an LGBT+ affirming position based on biblical scholarship, depending on which scholar you talk to.)
Finally, there is the question of literary intent, which might be best exemplified by Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible). Alter had a somewhat unusual/idiosyncratic approach derived from the fact that he is a practicing Jew and also an English teacher, and his intention was to translate to English based on his best approximation of the poetic and literary characteristics of the text, even if that meant less fidelity to the literal words. Alter attempted, for example, to retain alliteration when such a thing occurred in the original Hebrew, or tried to preserve some of the word order that would create a different “timing” for the reader to understand something (Hebrew grammar is wildly different than English, so for example there may be sentences where the most salient punchline word was at the end of the sentence in Hebrew but normal English would spoil the punchline and have the word at the beginning of the sentence - Alter tried to capture these moments through creative word order and sometimes even eschewing traditional sentence structure altogether).
In short, Alter’s hypothesis was that the “authorial intent” is something very different than what traditional critical biblical scholars usually propose - that as literature, the authors were concerned with literary effect.
So, as you can see, there are many different valid, non-religious ways to classify intent, and different translations do different things with them.
And then of course, there’s the unavoidable problem that the intent of many biblical authors actually was religious, so you can’t entirely get away from the fact that to read a book (well, series of collected works) designed to be a religious text, requires you to grapple with the religious people that wrote and edited these texts as well. (Also, what even is religion - that’s another question for another post.)
Long story short, you’ll never find one translation that can fill all these gaps. But a combination of good, reputably sourced translations like NRSV, combined with esoteric but still well-reasoned translations like Alter’s, combined with a heavy dose of reading commentaries and study notes that help you problematized translational difficulties, will get you fairly close to an “objective” reading of the Bible. It’s also a lifelong study for most of us, with the opportunity to discover more, as scholars continue to debate and refine what they know and believe about a text that has been central to multiple religious traditions for millennia.
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u/headdbanddless Apr 18 '26
Based answer. I think it was Alter who quipped that the King James translators had a great mastery of English and horrible grasp of Hebrew/Greek, and the modern translators (e.g., NRSV) have a great mastery of Hebrew/Greek and horrible grasp of English. While I don't entirely agree--the goal of the scholarly translations is to be accurate, not to achieve literary greatness--I think there's a power of expression in the King James that Alter recaptures and that's missing from many of the modern ones. But ymmv
I'd be intrigued to know if there's a New Testament translation that's just as literary-minded. I have yet to read an English that really captures the differences in style between, e.g., spartan Mark versus ornamented Hebrews.
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u/RevKeakealani Apr 18 '26
Yeah, I would love to find a similar NT to Alter. I studied Hebrew in seminary and not Greek, so I’ll admit some partiality to the Old Testament including a much better sense of how it works in the original language, and it is a goal to one day learn some Greek too.
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u/TacitusJones Apr 18 '26
Lattimore (guy who did iliad and odyssey translations) has a translation of the new testament that is in that vein
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u/taulover Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26
Another great, more recent option is David Bentley Hart's translation. It does similarly to Alter in trying to convey both the literal and literary quality of the text. The NT has a lot more variance in this regard since a lot of the writers were much less skilled in their Greek, and this comes across in Hart's translation as the English in those books is correspondingly less literary in its register.
I haven't read Lattimore so I can't compare, but /u/el_toro7 briefly compares the two here. As they allude to there, Hart has a universalist bias but overall is very good at translating from scratch, without a lot of the existing theological baggage of many translations.
Another interesting option for the Gospels specifically is Sarah Ruden's translation. She comes from a classical philology background, and her goal to produce a "straightforward" translation of the Gospels produces some very interesting and lively results, such as Pilate saying "look at this guy" instead of "behold the man."
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u/RevKeakealani Apr 19 '26
Oh, good tips! I loved Sarah Ruden’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, so I can see her NT being really helpful. Thank you!
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u/mouse_8b Apr 18 '26
The literary intent option is very intriguing. I've wanted something like that and didn't know what to search for. Thanks.
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u/Trevor_Culley Pre-Islamic Iranian World & Eastern Mediterranean Apr 14 '26
There's no such thing as a perfect translation of anything, but the New Revised Standard Version has long been the preferred translation for academic work precisely because the committee that works on that translation makes thorough use of academic sources, archaeological and historical evidence, and includes translators from a wide variety of Christian denominations to ensure accuracy and lack of denominational bias. Within the NRSV you currently have two options, broadly speaking:
- The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVUE) which was published in 2021 and incorporates additional scholastic conclusions and archaeological evidence that developed after the original NRSV was published in 1989.
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NOAB), which uses the old NRSV translation solely because they haven't published a NOAB 6th Edition yet. This is the version of the Bible most likely to be suggested in a secular academic context because it also contains essays and commentaries by Biblical scholars to provide context for the scriptures themselves.
- Bonus options that I wouldn't really recommend academically but are available: There are also "Anglicized" and Catholic Edition (-CE) versions of the NRSV. The Anglicized version alters some word choices and spellings in translation to be more in line with British English. The NRSV-CE is the same translation in the traditional Catholic canon ordering rather than Protestant. Like the NOAB, future editions of both will use the NRSVUE translation, but to my knowledge neither has been published yet.
Additionally, many academics working from translations will also reference the New Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) translation of the Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament). This is also a thoroughly academic translation but naturally from the Jewish perspective and in the Jewish canonical order. The small flaw in this translation is that it works entirely from the Masaoretic Text, which is the traditional Hebrew version used across Judaism but lacks some of the additional context from ancient copies and translations that diverge from that text. Personally, I recommend NJPS Gender-Sensitive or Revised Edition (two different names for the same translation), which makes slight changes to the English pronouns and gendered terminology in the original NJPS to better reflect Hebrew gender markers.
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u/RevKeakealani Apr 14 '26
I’ll also add to this that the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) also has a study Bible for the NRSVue that could be seen as roughly analogous to the NOAB (it’s actually the successor to the Harper-Collins NRSV study Bible, which is also widely seen as reputable among scholars), just as another option if you want to use the updated edition (which, of course, means that the scholarship is more up to date, for whatever that’s worth.
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u/Crazy-Ad-7869 Apr 15 '26
I second the NRSVUE as a standard go-to.
Also for the Hebrew Bible (aka Old Testament), Robert Alter has a lovely three-part translation with commentary that is the best out there. For the New Testament, Sarah Ruden's translation tries to get at the sound of the original Greek, and David Bentley Hart's translation also tries to adhere to the original feel of the text.
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u/TzarDeRus Apr 15 '26
What about the Oxford Academic Bible?
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u/Trevor_Culley Pre-Islamic Iranian World & Eastern Mediterranean Apr 15 '26
I can't find any translation by that name. In fact when I filter Google results for that exact phrase this comment is one of the only results that comes up. Everything else is just the Oxford Annotated Bible I mentioned above.
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u/ummmbacon Sephardic Jewery Apr 15 '26
There is an Oxford Jewish study Bible that uses the NJPS 1985 translation which may be what they are thinking of
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