My very first bible was a King James Version, which I read cover to cover… but didn’t wholly understand, ’cause I was seven and didn’t have the vocabulary. My second bible was one of my mother’s cast-off bibles—a Good News Bible she didn’t use anymore, now that she had a Scofield Reference Bible—and this one I did understand. Because, as should be true of every bible translation, it was meant to be understood.
This translation has gone through a few different names over the years. Its publishers have always referred to the text as Today’s English Version (TEV), but when its New Testament was first published in 1966, it was Good News for Modern Man: The New Testament in Today’s English. People came to call it the Good News Bible (GNB), which was its unofficial name till 2001, when it was officially named the Good News Translation (GNT) to emphasize the fact it’s a translation, not a paraphrase.
People will still use all these names to refer to it… though GNT is a little confusing for some, ’cause that’s a common abbreviation for the Greek New Testament. But it’s pretty easy to figure out whenever you’re talking about an English-language bible named the GNT, it’s obviously the Good News Translation; and when you’re talking about a Greek-language bible named the GNT, it’s obviously not.
It began with an inquiry: The Southern Baptist Home Missions Board sent a letter to the American Bible Society, wanting to know what’d be the best bible translation for someone whose first language wasn’t English. The ABS took it seriously, reviewed the current bibles on the market, and realized none of them were all that readable by non-native speakers. So… it was time to create one.
That task fell to ABS’s New Testament consultant and Greek specialist, Dr. Robert Bratcher (1920–2010), who translated the New Testament from 1962 to 1965. He borrowed a wordlist from the U.S. Information Agency, which regularly simplified U.S. Foreign Service documents into a vocabulary of less than 3,000 words. As a former missionary to Brazil, he practiced the same translation technique as Portuguese-English translators commonly do: dynamic equivalence, where you translate idea-for-idea into the natural speech of the target language, instead of so literally you risk a misunderstanding. A committee of five colleagues reviewed Bratcher’s work as he went, and offered suggestions and edits.
Mark was published as a test case in 1964, titled The Right Time: Mark’s Story About Jesus, with illustrations from Swiss artist Annie Vallotton. It got enough feedback for the ABS to go ahead with the New Testament, which was completed and published in 1966, in an inexpensive 25¢ paperback edition. It sold out quickly. So did its reprint. The price didn’t actually cover production costs, so the ABS had to raise the price to 50¢. But it kept selling—in the millions.
Big success, but of course not without criticism. Many people hated the idea of a bible in informal English. Hated the fact Bratcher interpreted their favorite idioms and metaphors of the New Testament; they wanted to do that for themselves. (And interpret ’em incorrectly, but in ways they personally preferred. That’s mostly why.) Fr’instance Bratcher considered αἷμα/éma, “blood,” a metaphor for death—which it often is—and translated it that way in six different instances. But plenty of Christians love to preach on the precious blood of Jesus, really want that word “blood” in their bibles, and were outraged when they couldn’t find it in the verses where they wanted it.
Regardless, Good News for Modern Man was popular enough for the ABS to tackle the Old Testament, which they eventually published in 1976.
And here’s where things get messy.
Since Robert Bratcher’s specialty was Greek, he moved into an advisory position while a committee of Hebrew and Syriac scholars worked on the actual translation from 1970 to 1974: Roger Bullard, Herbert G. Grether, John Thompson, Keith R. Crim; Heber Peacock and Barclay Newman from the United Bible Societies; and Brynmore Price from the British and Foreign Bible Society (who made sure the text wasn’t too American-sounding for other English-speakers to understand).
Portions were published once the translators were done with ’em:
- The Psalms for Modern Man in Today’s English Version.
- Tried and True: Job for Modern Man.
- Wisdom for Modern Man: Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
- Jonah, the Man Who Said “No!”
- Ruth.
- Justice Now! Hosea, Amos, Micah.
- Exodus: “Let My People Go.”
Problem was, this committee had to deal with a lot of interference from the ABS, which had bowed to pressure from the Good News Bible’s critics. They didn’t want to alienate potential customers, so they sought pre-approval from conservative Evangelical denominations, like the Evangelical Free Church and the Assemblies of God. A number of these Evangelical leaders sometimes objected, not on linguistic grounds, but on theological grounds: They wanted the text to support their beliefs.
They had pages of issues where they refused to accept the translators’ judgment, and refused to compromise. Young-earth creationists especially, who really didn’t like what they felt the GNB translators were doing to Genesis. Others felt the translators were nullifying certain New Testament ideas by translating the Old Testament in a way which wasn’t obviously compatible with the way the apostles had interpreted those OT passages. Like when Isaiah says “a young woman who is pregnant will have a son and will name him ‘Immanuel.’ ” Is 7.14 GNT which doesn’t make the virgin conception and birth of Jesus super obvious like they wanted. They wanted something more like the 1978 NIV’s “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” Or even the current NIV’s “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son…” which added words to the text to keep conservatives happy.
Anyway, the translators pushed right back: They felt these alterations were “a perversion of the clear meaning of the text,” as Peacock put it, “a perversion of Scripture to force Genesis to say what the New Testament or some segment of the church says”—and a risk to the translation, because if the general public got the idea the GNT was a “Fundamentalist bible,” you might have even greater segments of the church refusing to use it.
But because the ABS sided with the conservatives and demanded their changes, the translators voted to resign en masse in 1975, and asked that their names not be published with the new bible. The ABS made most of the alterations the conservatives demanded, and tucked the translators’ choices in the footnotes. Then published the Old Testament in 1976, and eventually the apocrypha in 1979.
It didn’t make as big an impact as the publication of Good News for Modern Man. Partly that’s because of marketing; partly because Zondervan was pushing its brand-new New International Version hard. The NIV New Testament had been published in 1973, and the entire bible would later come out in 1978, and that quickly became the preferred bible of Evangelical conservatives. I bought my first NIV in 1985, and it became my go-to translation for the next decade.
About a decade after the full GNT was published, Barclay Newman conducted some studies about then-contemporary English, and tried re-translating certain books of the New Testament for the ABS to eventually publish:
- Luke.
- Acts.
- A Few Who Dared to Trust God (various Old Testament stories).
- A Book About Jesus (various stories from the gospels).
These were developed into the Contemporary English Version, whose New Testament was published in 1991, Old Testament in 1995, and apocrypha in 1999. The CEV is not an update of the GNT; it’s actually meant for an even lower reading level than the GNT. But it, like the GNT, is meant to be in understandable present-day English.
The American Bible Society still publishes both the GNT and CEV, and yes they’re both on Bible Gateway. Both mighty useful translations. The GNT is still one of the most popular bible translations in the United Kingdom, and was updated in 1992 to be more gender inclusive.
In fact whenever the United Bible Societies and SIL Global offer examples of how to dynamically translate the bible, they regularly quote the GNT. Yep, even though there are other bibles out there which are translated this way. The GNT is, after all, one of the first bibles to do this, and do it well. So it’s a useful example for other bible translators—particularly those who are translating the bible into a language which doesn’t yet have a bible translation.
