Africa Study Bible Sampler - Flipbook - Page 33
A NOTE TO READERS
OF THE AFRICA STUDY BIBLE
O
asis International and Tyndale House have
partnered in creating the Africa Study Bible.
One of the things we are most excited about is to
see readers understand the Bible in a new and
fresh way with the text of the New Living Translation (NLT). You might wonder why this Bible
does not use the traditional and beautiful King
James Version or another modern translation.
We have crafted this introduction to help people
understand how the NLT can help us know God
and his Holy Word. To answer our questions, it
is good to understand how we have a Bible in
English from the original words written in Greek,
Hebrew, and Aramaic.
The goal of any Bible translation is to convey
the meaning and content of the ancient Hebrew,
Aramaic, and Greek texts as accurately as possible to contemporary readers. The challenge for
our translators was to create a text that would
communicate as clearly and powerfully to today’s readers as the original texts did to readers
and listeners in the ancient biblical world. The
resulting translation is easy to read and understand, while also accurately communicating
the meaning and content of the original biblical
texts. The NLT is a general-purpose text especially good for study, devotional reading, and
reading aloud in worship services.
The Holy Bible, New Living Translation,
was first published in 1996. It quickly became
one of the most popular Bible translations in
the English-speaking world. While the NLT’s
influence was rapidly growing, the Bible
Translation Committee determined that an
additional investment in scholarly review and
text refinement could make it even better. So
shortly after its initial publication, the committee began an eight-year process with the
purpose of increasing the level of the NLT’s
precision without sacrificing its easy-to-understand quality. This second-generation text
was completed in 2004, with minor changes
subsequently introduced in 2007, 2013, and
2015. The Africa Study Bible uses the Anglicized version, with British spelling.
We understand that many readers are familiar with the King James Version and may have
questions about how the NLT differs from this
older version. Some of the differences can be
explained easily by differences in translation
philosophy and methodology, which are explored below in the first section of the “Introduction to the New Living Translation.” Other
differences are related to the NLT’s more contemporary English style. The NLT uses the
English spoken today, whereas the King James
Version was translated into the English of the
1600s. However, readers familiar with the KJV
may notice still other variations related to differences between the texts behind the translations. For more on this, see the discussion in the
“Introduction to the New Living Translation”
under the section header “Textual Differences
between the NLT and the King James Version.”
A special feature of the Africa Study Bible is
that you can look up some well-loved terms
from the KJV, such as “propitiation” in the concordance to find their meaning and how the
NLT translates these important ideas.
Each of the translators of the NLT believes
in the power and ultimate authority of God’s
Word. We believe that the New Living Translation—which combines the latest biblical scholarship with a clear, dynamic writing style—will
communicate God’s word powerfully to all
who read it. We publish it with the prayer that
God will use it to speak his timeless truth to the
church and the world in a fresh, new way.
—The Publishers
32