Which Bible translation to choose

Translating is not swapping words. Every language has terms whose range differs from the range of any term in the other, and the translator has to choose — always — which part of the range to preserve. Where Hebrew uses one word covering “wind”, “breath” and “spirit”, English forces a choice among the three at every occurrence. The choice may be good or bad, but it cannot be avoided.

That demolishes the most common expectation of someone shopping for a translation: finding one that “does not interpret”. It does not exist. What exists are translations that interpret less and signal more — leaving the ambiguity visible and pushing the decision onto the reader — and translations that interpret more and hand over the sentence already resolved.

The choice, then, is not between interpreting and not interpreting. It is between carrying the weight of the decision yourself, with the effort that costs, or accepting the decision of a team of translators, with the cost that it may not be the one you would have made.

Formal equivalence is the technical name for what is popularly called a literal translation. The priority is reproducing the structure of the original — word order where possible, the same image, the same term rendered by the same term. The gain is that the construction of the source text stays visible, which matters a great deal when studying a passage closely. The cost is a stiffer English, with expressions that sound odd because they are not English: they are Hebrew or Greek dressed as English.

Dynamic equivalence — also called functional — prioritises producing in today’s reader an effect close to the one the text produced in its original reader. Idioms are translated by equivalent idioms, long sentences are broken up, technical terms are made explicit. The gain is fluency, and fluency is not a luxury: a translation nobody can read serves no purpose. The cost is that several decisions the formal one left open arrive already made, and the reader cannot see that they were made.

Two caveats matter more than the distinction itself. First: this is a spectrum, not a dichotomy — no translation is purely formal, on pain of being unreadable, and none is purely dynamic, on pain of ceasing to be a translation. Second: paraphrase is a third category, not an extreme of the second. It retells the text freely and has legitimate devotional use, but it does not serve as a basis for study or for argument about meaning, and editions of that kind usually say so themselves.

A question almost nobody asks in a bookshop decides more than the style of the translation: which original text that edition worked from. For the Old Testament, the most common base is the Hebrew Masoretic text, fixed by Jewish copyists in the Middle Ages; some editions turn to the Septuagint, the Greek translation made centuries before Christ, at points where it diverges, and editions tied to the Latin tradition take the Vulgate into account.

In the New Testament, the main division is between editions following the so-called Received Text — the line of manuscripts used in the classic translations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — and editions following the critical text, assembled from the comparison of older manuscripts discovered later. That is the origin of the phenomenon that confuses so many people: a verse present in one person’s Bible and “missing” from another’s.

Nothing went missing, and nobody removed anything. The two editions made different choices about which set of manuscripts to follow, and editions adopting the critical text normally record in a note the stretch they left out of the body. Knowing this disarms the accusation of tampering that circulates in both directions — and it lets you check for yourself, because the notes are there to be read.

The discussion turns abstract fast, so it is worth looking at two cases any reader can verify without knowing Greek or Hebrew. Both are on this site, and the first can be checked by switching between the two editions on the same page.

The first is the promise made after the fall in Genesis. The edition translated from the Latin Vulgate says that she will crush the serpent’s head; the edition that follows the Hebrew has the offspring doing it, in the neuter. This is not a doctrinal quarrel dressed as grammar: Latin and Hebrew assign the pronoun differently, and each translation followed its base text. Nothing else in the verse changes, and centuries of Christian art depend on which of the two you grew up with.

The second case is the most discussed in the history of biblical translation. In an announcement in Isaiah, the Hebrew uses a term denoting a young woman of marriageable age, and Hebrew has a more specific word for virgin which is not the one used there. The Jewish translators who rendered the book into Greek, centuries before Christ, chose a narrower Greek term — and it is that Greek reading the Gospel of Matthew quotes. Both editions on this site read “virgin” in the body, one from the Vulgate and one from the Hebrew via the Greek tradition; several modern English translations put “young woman” in the text and the alternative in a note. It is the perfect teaching case, because it shows that a translation decision can be made inside the biblical period and reach us already inside the text.

This is the question that stalls the choice most at the point of purchase, and it is less complicated than it looks. The objective difference is in the Old Testament: Catholic editions carry seven further books and additional passages in Esther and Daniel. The New Testament is the same, book for book, in both.

There are smaller differences of presentation too: the spelling of some proper names, the arrangement of books within the genre blocks, and — in editions that come through the Latin tradition — the numbering of the Psalms, which can appear shifted relative to the Hebrew numbering used by most current editions. That is not a hypothetical here: the two editions on this site number the Psalms differently across most of the Psalter, and the chapter pages warn you about it.

What does not follow from tradition is the translation family. There are Catholic editions of a markedly literal cut and Catholic editions in very accessible language; the same holds on the Protestant side. Choosing “a Catholic Bible” or “a Protestant Bible” does not determine whether you will read a stiff or a fluent text — those are two independent decisions, and it is useful to take them separately.

Two people reading the same translation, one in a pocket edition and the other in a study Bible, are having quite different experiences. Book introductions, footnotes, cross-references, maps and chronological tables are not decoration: they frame the text and answer in advance questions the reader has not yet formulated.

That is an enormous advantage for a beginner — a good share of reading difficulties are settled by a three-line note. And it is, at the same time, the point where an edition’s editorial line shows most. Translation has a narrow margin; a note has a wide one. If you want to know the orientation of a study Bible, read the notes on a controversial passage before buying it.

The practical recommendation that usually serves: an edition without apparatus for continuous reading, because notes break the flow, and an annotated edition for study. If you are only going to have one, have the annotated one — nobody is obliged to read the notes, but whoever does not have them cannot consult them.

In English, this site publishes two editions, and the licences page carries the full attribution for each.

The Catholic Public Domain Version was translated from the Latin Vulgate by Ronald L. Conte Jr. and released into the public domain. It carries the 73 books and the additions to Esther and Daniel, follows the Vulgate numbering of the Psalms, and is the edition the site opens by default in English.

The King James Version of 1611 is likewise free of copyright. It carries the 66 books of the Hebrew Old Testament canon plus the New Testament, follows the Hebrew numbering of the Psalms, and works here as the second edition for comparison. Neither text is owned by us, and we claim nothing over either.

One piece of information that needs saying in plain words rather than being buried in a footnote: the Catholic Public Domain Version carries no imprimatur, and neither does our Portuguese Chama da Fé Edition, which combines the freely licensed Bíblia Livre across the 66 protocanonical books with our own translation of the deuterocanonical books. Neither has been submitted to any ecclesiastical authority. These are reading and study editions assembled from freely licensed texts. For official liturgical or catechetical use, seek an edition approved by your diocese — and be wary of any site or app that is not clear about this.

The choice becomes easy once you stop looking for the best translation and start testing which one works for you. Five steps settle it, and the first is the one almost nobody takes.