Books

The Messianic Greek New Testament Reader (’the Reader’) is a long-term project to provide the Messianic faithful with a parallel readers’ version of the apostolic writings, in an easy-to-read, accurate English, together with the original Greek text in parallel for easy comparison while reading.

Gradually, over time, I will add one book at a time to the Reader, starting with Yohanan’s epistles.

The Reader is typeset to facilitate two main uses:

1. The reader of the Greek text who wishes to compare on a more or less frequent basis, the English translation; and
2. The reader of the English text who wishes to compare on a more or less frequent basis, the Greek source text.

Because this is a reader, and not a study Bible, footnotes have been kept to a reasonable minimum, to balance providing useful or necessary information against interrupting the flow of reading. For the same reason, cross-references are rare and, if provided, will be found in the footnotes.

How was the translation made? and what translation philosophy, methodology or approach was used?

The translation is as literal as possible while preserving reasonable readability in English; therefore, it is not a fully “dynamic” translation designed to sound like it was written in modern English just the other day, except for the odd names, places and customs. An attempt is made to preserve the original word order where possible, even if the English could have been improved by changing the order, or by changing a positive into a negative or vice versa, for example, ’everyone’ into ’no one’, and so on.

In this translation, you will find that ’brother’ is brother, ’man’ is man, and so on. No attempt is made to anachronistically transplant modern notions of political correctness to the language. The reader is assumed to have the intelligence to know when ’man’ is used in the generic sense to refer to everybody.

In common with Daniel Gregg’s The Good News of Messiah, the following translations are made:

God (θεὸς)

The Almighty. I have not used ’Elohim’, as I could have, only because it is not useful to those who do not know what ’Elohim’ means.

Son of God (ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ)

Almighty Son. This could also be translated as ’Son of the Almighty’, but that does not convey, in English, the understanding that the Son is therefore also Almighty.

Jesus (Ἰησοῦς)

Yeshua. Not only was Jesus never called by the name ’Jesus’ (because they did not speak English back then), but the name ’Jesus’ does not mean anything; whereas his actual name, ’Yeshua/Yehoshua’ in Hebrew does mean something: Yahweh saves.

The Christ (ὁ χριστός)

The Anointed. This could have also been translated ’Messiah’, but this does not help those who do not know what ’Messiah’ (or ’Christ’) means.

The Devil (ὁ διάβολος)

The Accuser. This makes plain what the Greek term means.

In terms of methodology employed, first the Greek basis text was selected, and that being the Westcott and Hort 1881 text with Nestle Aland and UBS variants (WHNU).

Because this text does not have the standard diacritical marks (at least the version I am using), I compare this text word for word with the SBLGNT text which does have those marks. Where the SBLGNT matches the WHNU exactly, I copy the SBLGNT with its diacritical marks. Otherwise, I edit the SBLGNT so that it matches WHNU and then use that. Using this method, there can be no copyright issues (as if one could copyright the Word of God).

Furthermore, there are some few places where the traditional text (usually referred to as the Textus Receptus) varies from the more modern so-called ’critical’ text. I make an attempt to review any such variations which may affect the meaning of the text. It then becomes a judgement call as to which text is more likely to be correct.

Since I wish to avoid the charge of abject stupidity, I make copious use of the giants who have gone before me, and therefore make absolutely no apology for using their grammars and lexicons, and their translations and their commentaries in order to guide my own meager translation attempts. I have not diverged from traditional and sensible translations willy-nilly, but always for exact and specific reasons. If there is any one translation which informs this one to the greatest extent, it is Daniel Gregg’s Messianic translation (GNM), because after having arrived at my own provisional draft of a paragraph, I always compare this against the GNM (among others) and conform to it if there is good reason to do so. In this way, I hope to imitate the great works which have come before, without actually copying them.

Because there is often an obvious English way to express the Greek, it should come as no surprise that there are many phrases, and sometimes whole sentences if they are short, that may be word-for-word the same as some other translation. This is not because that translation (whatever it is) was copied, but because the range of possible English equivalents is limited, and the range of good English equivalents is even more limited. One does not make one’s translation worse simply to make it different from something else.

To conclude this brief introduction, I would note two little peculiarities of my PGMV (Pretty Good Messianic Version) translation.

First, when it is not glaringly obvious in English that something is plural (but it is obvious in the Greek), I mark such words with a degree° sign, as just demonstrated.

Second, if there is a long paragraph with the same or similar phrase repeated several times, it can be tedious and error prone to locate the correct, corresponding place in the parallel text. In this case, I have underlined the repeated or similar phrases in question, so that they can be more easily located in the parallel text without going too cross-eyed.

These PDFs are signed for your convenience. Please refer to the Cryptography HOWTO for the details on how and why to make use of these signatures.