Initial working release of NT

Posted on Aug 7, 2010

So that people can see progress, we’ve released a working release of the “Open English Bible”.

It comprises the base Twentieth Century New Testament text with formatting applied but with only very minimal textual changes.

Accordingly it covers the New Testament only, with a mostly modern language and sentence structure. However, there are a number of areas in which translation choices dating from the early twentieth century would give a misleading impression to modern readers:

like the New English Bible and the RSV, the TCNT deliberately retained archaic language for Old Testament quotes and direct addresses to God (which may mislead readers into believing that the distinction is present in the original text),
it used masculine gendered universals such as ‘man’ for ‘humanity’ or ‘person’ and ‘sons’ when a mixed group or ungendered referent is intended, which may mislead readers into the believing that only men were intended to be referred to, and
it used bare references to ‘the Jews’ when Jewish authorities or specific groups of Jewish people were intended to be referred to, which may mislead readers as to the theological and practical relationship between early followers of Jesus and their neighbours.

Fixing these three issues is the focus of the current round of editing. This working release can be read online, with a simple html version also available or can be downloaded as a PDF file.