JBT (Joe's Bible Translation)

A handful of years ago I decided to try to translate the New Testament.

The start of it came from a teaching series I was putting together on Galatians, and realizing how often I was having to stop and explain various terms or translation decisions. Those things are important, but can also derail a teaching if you're having to do too much of it.

When I asked a pastor how he got around that, he told me he never teaches out of one translation, but from verse to verse will teach out of whatever translation best hits the nail on the head. This works for a teaching series but, my thinking was, if I have to do that for a slide deck for a teaching, wouldn't it be better to just have that together for daily reading and study?

So initially it was just Galatians that I set out to translate for the sake of that series. My goal was not to produce something novel, but to pull together what seemed to be the best current/modern scholastic consensus, based on the latest manuscript evidence, and with the added benefit of not being beholden to any historical or denominational baggage that might lead me to a less accurate but also less contentious translation.

It was a fun project, and I learned a TON through it, but I eventually gave it up and, unless I have a specific reason to in the future, I don't plan to pick it back up.

Just going through the process, I was realizing the incredible wealth of resources we already have available to us in English. I had access to hundreds of commentaries, interlinears, transliterations, etc., on top of the dozens of already existing high-quality full English Bible translations. It didn't seem like the time and energy required to continue on through the process was really adding much of anything to such an incredible body of material that we already have, so I decided to put my time elsewhere.

That said, I do still think those translations are a good reference, and I stopped paying for hosting for the translation project site when I stopped the project, so it hasn't had a home online since then. So I am going to add them here so they are searchable/usable in case anybody else is interested.

I am linking here to the books that I translated (some of them only partially), but they will also show up with everything else for the book if you hit the book link in the right-hand column.

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