Why are there so many translations of the Bible?

Walk into a Christian bookshop and the shelf is a wall of Bibles. NIV, ESV, NKJV, NASB, KJV, NLT, CSB. A new believer looks at that shelf and wonders which one is the real one — and whether the fact that there are so many means nobody quite knows what the Bible says.

Behind the worry sits an assumption. People picture the Bible as a message passed down a line: Hebrew into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into old English, old English into modern English, each version copied from the one before it, drifting a little further from the source at every step. If that were how it happened, the concern would be a fair one.

That is not how it happened. Your NIV is not based on the King James. Your ESV is not based on the NIV. Every serious modern translation goes straight back to the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek manuscripts and works from there into English. There is no chain. Each translation is one step from the source, and each committee starts again from the same material. Put twenty of them in a row and you do not have twenty generations of drift; you have twenty independent attempts at the same task.

So why attempt it more than once? Three reasons, and none of them has anything to do with the Bible being uncertain.

The first is that English will not sit still. The King James Version was published in 1611, and English has moved a long way since.

Take for example the scene in Mark 10 where parents were bringing their children to Jesus, and the disciples were turning them away. Here is what Jesus said to the disciples:

Mark 10:14 (KJV)

Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.

Read that with modern ears and Jesus sounds harsh — as though children must go through something painful to reach Him. He is saying the opposite. In 1611 suffer meant to allow, to let something happen. Jesus is telling the disciples to let the children come through. Here is the same verse in another translation:

Mark 10:14 (NKJV)

Let the little children come to Me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the kingdom of God.

The Greek behind both translations is identical. Not one letter of it changed between 1611 and today. What changed was English. That is why the work has to be done again for each generation.

The second reason is that we know the original languages better than we used to. Around the turn of the twentieth century, archaeologists began pulling scraps of papyrus out of rubbish heaps in Egypt — receipts, private letters, army discharge papers, a mother writing to her son. They were written in the same everyday Greek as the New Testament, and there were thousands of them. That mattered because some words in the New Testament appear nowhere else in anything that survives from the ancient world, and a word you can only see once is a word you can only guess at. Now many of those words can be understood by simply seeing how ordinary people in ordinary situations had used them. A translator working today knows things about the vocabulary that a translator in 1611 had no way of knowing.

The third reason is the one most readers have never thought about. Translators have to decide how closely to follow the shape of the original, and there is no single right answer. Hebrew describes God as erek appayim — literally “long of nostrils.” No translator renders it that way, because in English it means nothing. It is a Hebrew way of saying that a man's temper takes a long time to flare, and every English Bible gives the sense instead: slow to anger. The translator had no neutral option. Keep the nostrils and the reader learns nothing. Write “slow to anger” and the reader understands, but the Hebrew picture of a temper that takes a long time to catch is gone from the page. Something is given up either way. A translation committee faces that decision thousands of times before it reaches Revelation, and how it tends to decide is what separates one English Bible from another.

So translations sit along a scale, and every English Bible sits somewhere on it.

Some follow the original wording as closely as English will allow. This is called word-for-word translation. They keep the Hebrew and Greek sentence shapes even where those shapes sound odd in English, on the principle that the reader should decide what a sentence means rather than the committee. That is the NASB, the ESV, the NKJV used in this book, and the KJV. The cost is that they sometimes read stiffly.

Others aim first at being understood — thought-for-thought translation. Where a Hebrew or Greek sentence would land awkwardly in English, they rebuild it so that it says the same thing the way an English speaker would say it. The NLT works this way. It reads easily, and the committee has made more of the decisions for you.

The NIV and the CSB sit between the two, which is why they are so widely used.

The Message is not on the scale at all. It is a paraphrase — one man retelling Scripture in his own words. Read it to hear a familiar passage freshly, but do not build a doctrine on it.

No position on that scale is more faithful than another. A reader often assumes the closer end must be the honest one and the freer end a compromise. But look again at the Hebrew phrase for a patient God. It reads long of nostrils, and no English Bible prints that — not the NLT, and not the KJV or the NASB either. Every one of them decided what the picture meant and printed the meaning: slow to anger. The most literal Bible on the shelf made the same interpretive call as the freest one.

That is also why reading two Bibles is better than reading one, and why I would urge any believer to do it. Take one from the closer end and one from the freer end and read a passage in both. Where they agree, you are seeing the sense of the text plainly. Where they differ, you have found a place where the original wording is doing something an English sentence cannot easily carry, and you have learnt something about the passage you would have walked past with one Bible open.

Having many translations is a protection rather than a problem. A reader with a phone can lay four English Bibles beside each other in seconds, produced by different committees, in different countries, across four centuries, working from the same manuscripts. Nothing can be quietly slipped into one of them without the others showing it up. So compare them and see what stands: God became man, was crucified, was buried, rose on the third day; salvation is by grace through faith and not by anything we bring. Every one of them says it.

None of this would have surprised the people who first received the Scriptures. When Israel came back from exile in Babylon, the crowd who gathered to hear the Law read had grown up speaking Aramaic, and the book in front of them was Hebrew. So the Levites did more than read it aloud.

Nehemiah 8:8 (NKJV)

So they read distinctly from the book, in the Law of God; and they gave the sense, and helped them to understand the reading.

They gave the sense. That is what every translation committee since has been doing — taking words God gave in one language and putting them into the language of people who need to understand them. God has never asked anyone to learn Hebrew before He would speak to them.