“Why are there so many bible translations?”

Probably the most common question I get about bible translations—right after people ask me which one’s the best—is why there are so many.

If you visit Bible Gateway, which is one of the more popular bible websites on the internet—one I myself use frequently—you’ll find they have 63 different English translations. Yep, you read that number correctly. Sixty and three. To be fair, a number of those translations overlap:

• The King James Version (KJV) and the Authorized King James Version (AKJV) are the same translation, but with slightly different formatting.
• The New International Version (NIV) and the New International Version - UK (NIVUK) are the same translation, but with some words spelled differently. The same deal exists for the English Standard Version (ESV, ESVUK) and the New Revised Standard (although the previous NRSV was replaced with the updated edition, i.e. the NRSVUE).
• The Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE) are the same translation, but the Catholic edition uses the Catholic book order and includes the books Protestants tend to skip. Again, same deal with the NRSV (whose Catholic Edition is the NRSVCE).

Still, that’s more than 50 different English translations, and Bible Gateway certainly doesn’t include every English translation. I used to collect bible translations, so I have a few obscure ones which Bible Gateway certainly doesn’t include, and good luck finding bible software which sells them either.

But back to the question: Why are there so many English translations? Especially since there are plenty of people-groups who still lack a bible translation in their language! True, translators are working on that problem; Wycliffe Bible Translators and SIL International are doing what they can. In some cases they gotta create a written version of the language from scratch, just like Sequoyah did, then get the people literate so they can actually read the newly-translated bibles. Still, why aren’t translators working on that instead of creating yet another English translation?

Okay. Simply and bluntly, the reason there are so many English bible translations is because the bible sells big-time. And if you’re a book publisher, and you own the rights to a bible translation, you’re gonna make money. That’s it. Pure and simple.

No, it’s not for altruistic reasons. It’s not because the English-speaking world needs a new and better translation of the bible. We have plenty of perfectly good English translations. If you compare those translations on Bible Gateway—if, fr’instance, you look at all the different ways people have translated John 3.16—you’re not gonna see significant differences! You’re not gonna think, “Wow, there’s some division and controversy about how to translate that verse.” No, there’s really not. And the same is true of pretty much all the English-language bibles.

Yep, the primary reason for all the new bible translations is money. The bible still sells better than every other book. By far. The “best-selling book of 2023” was Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, which sold about 1.29 million copies. But when you look up stats for bible sales, the KJV Giant Print Reference Bible has sold more than 10 million since it dropped in October. And the NKJV Giant Print Reference Bible, released at the same time, has sold more than 5 million. It’s because bestseller lists deliberately skip bibles—because if they included them, their lists would be nothing but bibles.

Okay, so that’s not a heartwarming fact.

People don’t really like this answer. They’d like to think the reason for all the bible translations is some form of altruism. Maybe all these bible scholars on the translation committees felt led by the Holy Spirit to tackle the bible? Maybe all the bible societies out there likewise feel led by the Spirit to make sure we’re getting easy-to-understand yet totally accurate renderings of the scriptures?

Yeah, okay, whatever.

I mean, I translate bible pretty often. You’ve seen examples on this here website. Whenever I’m studying a passage in depth, I wanna understand it better, so I take a look at the original text, and give an interpretation of it which explains it in English as best I can. I have no plans to publish a K.W. Leslie translation of the bible. Especially since every time I study a passage again, I translate it again. And update things where appropriate. Even if I were trying to get the whole bible translated, it’s never getting done at this rate. But like I said, it’s not the plan.

And no doubt other people who translate bible do the very same thing. I have a number of bible commentaries, and pretty much all the commentators try to translate the text a bit. (Well, they do in the good commentaries. In the sucky ones, the commentators don’t even try.) Looking at the original text is simply a part of good, thorough bible study. And if you’re not at all sure of your Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek skills, at least a thorough comparison of all the English translations oughta help.

Sure, sometimes a translator is gonna want to flex his skills and translate some bible. I translated entire books back when I was learning Hebrew and Greek. (I’ve retranslated a whole lot of it since.) And sometimes these translators are gonna want to publish their versions—sometimes because they arrogantly think they did a better job than everybody else, although those translations won’t sell, because arrogance is a work of the flesh, and a big waving red flag to anybody who’s shopping for bibles.

More often, a translator is trying something different. Like when Eugene H. Peterson tried to make the bible sound as much like informal present-day English as he could, and came up with The Message. Clarence Jordan and J.B. Phillips tried the same thing with the New Testament, with varying results. But y’notice there aren’t a lot of people who quote those bibles when they’re doing serious bible study.

I’m pretty sure most of the people who tackle bible translation, whether for the committee behind a particular version of the bible, or for the general editors of bible commentaries, or for scholarly journals, or for the people of their church as they’re putting together their Sunday sermons, are largely doing it for the right reason: They want people to take a fresh look at God’s word, understand it better, and follow Jesus better. That’s a good thing. Just because a publishing company is trying to make a buck, it doesn’t mean the new bible version they’re promoting is a bad bible version. It’s usually the product of a lot of good people!

But yeah, they are trying to make a buck. Millions of bucks, really. And keep their businesses afloat despite a shrinking industry, as more and more people read the internet instead of their books. So they produce the one book that people continually keep buying—the bible.

And if they can have their very own bible, one which they can publish and no one else can; one which people and churches grow to love, and prefer that translation over all the others, and demand reference materials and special children’s editions, devotional editions, illustrated editions, new believers’ editions, and so forth—if they can get anywhere near as successful as the New International Version or English Standard Version—they’re going for it.

So that’s why all the English translations. And the rapidly growing number of Spanish translations.

Sorry.