Nehemiah 8:1-8

Is there a “best” translation of the Bible?

No, but there are better, worse, and a few to avoid, and the reasons are more useful than the answer.

Read the passage in the ESV All questions

The question as it came to us

It is asked more often than almost anything else about the Bible, usually by someone standing in front of a shelf of them, and it usually carries an assumption: that there is one right answer, and everyone reading something else has settled for less.

The short answer is no. But no on its own is useless, because the word best is hiding three different questions, and they have different answers.

Best for what? Study, reading aloud in church, memorising, handing to someone opening a Bible for the first time: these are not the same job, and no single volume is first at all of them.

Most accurate in what sense? Closest to the words of the original, or clearest about the meaning of the original? Those pull in different directions more often than people expect, and assuming they are the same thing is the commonest mistake in this whole discussion.

Faithful at all? This is the only question with a hard edge, and it is not on the same scale as the other two. A handful of volumes sold as Bibles have been altered to say something the text does not say. That is a different category from a translation being loose, and collapsing the two does real damage in both directions: it makes honest work look sinister, and it makes genuine tampering look like a matter of taste.

Short answer

There is no best translation, and the reason is structural rather than diplomatic: translation is not a mechanical operation with a right answer waiting at the end of it. Every translation of every sentence is a decision, and the decisions run along a scale.

At one end, formal equivalence, render the words and the grammar of the original as closely as English allows, and let the reader do the work of understanding (NASB, ESV, KJV). At the other, functional equivalence, render the meaning of the sentence in the way an English speaker would naturally say it, and accept that the word-shapes are lost (NLT). In between sit the mediating versions (CSB, NIV). Beyond the far end is paraphrase, which is not really translation at all but one reader’s restatement of what he thinks the passage means (The Message).

Here is the correction that matters most, because it is where the popular version of this argument goes wrong: literal is not the same thing as accurate. They are two different axes. Render a Hebrew idiom word for word and you can produce a sentence that is perfectly literal and communicates the wrong thing, the LORD’s nose burned is exactly what the Hebrew says and is not what it means. So a formal translation is not automatically more faithful; it is more transparent to the original’s shape, which is a real advantage for study and a real cost in readability. Both ends of the scale are trying to be accurate. They disagree about what a reader needs in order to receive the meaning.

A second axis runs underneath the first and is usually invisible: which manuscripts the translators worked from. The KJV and NKJV follow the Textus Receptus, the printed Greek text assembled by Erasmus in 1516 from a handful of late medieval copies. Nearly everything since works from the critical text, which weighs thousands of manuscripts, including papyri centuries older than anything Erasmus could see. This is why a few verses appear in one Bible and sit in a footnote in another, and it is worth saying immediately that no article of the faith rides on any of them.

Which leaves the only hard line on the page, and it is not a point on either axis. Paul states the test himself: we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word (2 Corinthians 4:2). A translation is out of bounds when it has been bent to make the text teach what its makers already believed: not when it is loose, or modern, or easy. That distinction is worth holding precisely, because the three volumes people usually name in one breath fail in three different ways, and one of them is not tampering at all.

Practice, with one hard edge Which faithful English translation you read is a matter of practice, not doctrine, and no one should be made to feel second-class for his. The hard edge is that a few volumes sold as Bibles have been altered to teach something else. Telling those apart from the merely loose is the whole skill, and this page is mostly about how.

What is settled, and what is not

None of this rests on which English Bible is open in front of you. The left column is why translation is not a second-best arrangement in the first place.

Settled, Scripture states it

God put his word into human language on purpose. Not into a sacred private tongue reserved for priests. Into the ordinary Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek that ordinary people argued and traded and grieved in. The whole question of translation is downstream of that decision, and it was his.
Scripture itself contains translation, approved. The Levites read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading (Nehemiah 8:8), rendering Hebrew for a people who now spoke Aramaic. Mark stops mid-narrative to render Aramaic for his readers: Talitha cumi, which means, ’Little girl, I say to you, arise’ (Mark 5:41).
The apostles quoted a translation and called it Scripture. The New Testament writers routinely quote the Greek Septuagint, including where its wording differs from the Hebrew, Hebrews 10:5 quotes Psalm 40:6 as a body have you prepared for me, following the Greek. The Holy Spirit inspired an apostle to build an argument on a translation. Anyone who says only the original languages are truly God’s word has a problem with the New Testament.
A translation of the Bible is the word of God. The KJV’s own translators said it, against the very attitude later taken in their name: we do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English… containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God (The Translators to the Reader, 1611).
What must be known for salvation is plain in any faithful translation. Those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned… may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them (WCF 1.7). No one has ever missed Christ because he had the wrong faithful English Bible.
No doctrine of the faith depends on a disputed reading. This is the plain result of two centuries of textual work, and it is worth knowing before anyone tries to unsettle you with it. The variants are overwhelmingly spelling, word order, and obvious slips. Where they are substantial they are footnoted in every honest Bible, and the doctrines they touch are taught elsewhere, plainly, in undisputed text.

Not given in this age

Which books are Scripture in the first place. A different question with a different answer, and this page assumes it rather than settling it, see why these 66 books. A translation renders the canon it is given; it does not decide it.
The autographs. We do not have the sheets Paul dictated. We have an enormous number of copies, far more, and far earlier, than for any other work of the ancient world, and the discipline of comparing them is why the footnotes exist. Honesty about this is a strength, not a concession; a text with nothing to compare would be far easier to doubt.
Which English translation is best. Because the question is malformed. Best for reading aloud is not best for word study, and the honest answer changes with the job in hand.
The exact wording behind a handful of passages. The end of Mark, the woman caught in adultery, the heavenly witnesses of 1 John 5:7-8. Their status is disputed, it is disclosed in the footnotes of serious Bibles, and nothing you must believe is decided there.
Whether a rendering is a decision or a discovery. Often it cannot be told from the English. Propitiation or expiation at Romans 3:25 is a real theological choice made on your behalf before you open the page, which is the argument for owning a second translation, not for distrusting the first.

The scale, and where the versions sit

One axis: how close the English stays to the words of the original, against how close it stays to the way an English speaker would say it. Bands alternate in shade only so they can be told apart, the shading ranks nothing, and the left-hand end is not the good end. Every version on this bar is the work of believing scholars trying to give you the text.

NASB · LSB ESV · KJV · NKJV · RSV CSB · NIV NLT · GNT The Message: paraphrase

The versions, read across

Version	Approach	Text behind it	What it is good for
NASB (1971; rev. 1995, 2020)	The most formal in common use, it will keep an awkward English sentence rather than smooth away the Greek behind it.	Critical text; Masoretic Hebrew.	Word study and close work, where you want the original’s joints left visible. Harder going read aloud.
ESV (2001; rev. 2016)	Essentially literal, with more attention to English cadence than the NASB. A revision of the RSV of 1971.	Critical text; Masoretic Hebrew.	A study Bible you can also read continuously and hear read in church, which is why this commentary quotes it.
KJV (1611)	Formal, in the English of four centuries ago. Roughly four-fifths of its New Testament wording is Tyndale’s, through earlier revisions.	Textus Receptus; Masoretic Hebrew.	Memorising, public reading, and hearing how the language of English Christianity was formed. Its archaisms genuinely mislead in places, let for hinder, conversation for conduct.
NKJV (1982)	The KJV’s approach and text in modern English.	Textus Receptus, with the critical and majority readings in footnotes.	Readers who want the traditional text without the archaic English. Its footnotes are unusually candid about where the texts differ.
CSB (2017)	Deliberately mediating: literal where literal is clear, functional where it is not.	Critical text; Masoretic Hebrew.	A single Bible for a reader who wants one that does both jobs adequately rather than one job well.
NIV (1978; rev. 1984, 2011)	Mediating, leaning functional. The most widely read modern version, and the most argued over, chiefly the 2011 revision’s handling of gendered language.	Critical text; Masoretic Hebrew.	Continuous reading and teaching a mixed group. Weaker where an argument turns on a repeated word, since it varies its vocabulary for style.
NLT (1996; rev. 2015)	Functional. Renders the sense of the sentence in natural English, and accepts the loss of the original’s word-shapes.	Critical text; Masoretic Hebrew.	First-time readers, children, and reading a whole book in one sitting. Not the place to settle a disputed verse.
The Message (1993-2002)	A paraphrase, Eugene Peterson’s restatement of the sense in colloquial American English. Worked from Hebrew and Greek, not from an English version, which is more than can be said for most paraphrases.	Critical text, filtered through one man’s ear.	Not a translation, and its author never said it was. It can shake a familiar passage loose. It cannot settle anything, should not be preached from, and is a poor first Bible: see the failure modes below.

Where a translation actually goes wrong

Three failure modes, in descending order of seriousness. They get named in one breath and they are not the same thing, the first is a different kind of object from the other two.

1. Sectarian alteration: the text changed to protect a doctrine The real category, and the only one that earns avoid entirely. The New World Translation (Jehovah’s Witnesses, 1961) renders John 1:1 the Word was a god, which the Greek will not carry as a general statement, and inserts other into Colossians 1:16-17, all [other] things, so that the Son becomes part of creation rather than its maker. The insertion has no basis in the text. This is not looseness; it is the doctrine being written back into the evidence, and a reader is not equipped to notice because the alterations are small and quiet.
2. Ideological re-rendering: the text bent to a programme The Inclusive Bible (2007) systematically re-languages God, Israel and the apostles to conform Scripture to a contemporary commitment. Whatever one thinks of the commitment, the method is the problem: the text is being corrected rather than translated, and the reader is not told which sentences have been adjusted. Milder versions of the same pressure show up in mainstream revisions, which is a fair thing to argue about, and is a difference of degree that should not be flattened into the same charge.
3. Paraphrase mistaken for translation: a real book used for the wrong job The Message belongs here, and this page will not put it with the other two. Eugene Peterson was a Presbyterian pastor of unremarkable orthodoxy who wrote it for a congregation that had stopped hearing Paul, and he said plainly it was a reading Bible, not a study Bible. The trouble is what happened to it: it got quoted in sermons and printed on wall art as though it were the text. Individual renderings do drift, on earth as it is in heaven becomes as above, so below, a phrase with a history Peterson surely did not intend, and one man’s ear is not a translation committee. So: not heresy, not a Bible to build on, and not the same failure as the New World Translation.

What the text says

The first translation scene in Scripture is also a sermon Ezra reads the Law to people who had come back from Babylon speaking Aramaic, and the Levites read from the book, from the Law of God, clearly, and they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading (Nehemiah 8:8). The ESV footnotes clearly with or with interpretation, which is the honest state of the Hebrew. Either way the aim is stated in the verse: so that the people understood. Then watch what understanding does: they weep (8:9), and are told to stop, because the joy of the LORD is your strength (8:10). Comprehension was not a lower grade of encounter with the word. It was the encounter.
God’s first act in the church age was to translate At Pentecost the crowd’s astonishment is not at the noise but at the languages: how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?… we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God (Acts 2:8-11). Fifteen regions are listed. He could have required everyone to learn one holy tongue, as another religion would later do. He did the opposite, immediately, as the opening move.
The inspired writers translate in front of you Mark keeps Jesus’ Aramaic and renders it for his Greek readers, twice in the most charged moments in his Gospel: Talitha cumi, which means, ’Little girl, I say to you, arise’ (5:41), and Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? which means, ’My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (15:34). John does the same with Rabbi, Messiah and Siloam (1:38, 41; 9:7). The Gospels are themselves a translation of a Galilean’s Aramaic into the common Greek of the Mediterranean, and they are Scripture.
And they quote a translation as Scripture The Old Testament quotations in the New usually follow the Greek Septuagint, and sometimes follow it precisely where it differs from the Hebrew. Hebrews 10:5-7 hangs an argument about the incarnation on a body have you prepared for me, the Greek of Psalm 40:6, where the Hebrew reads that God has dug or opened ears. An inspired author, arguing for Christ, from a translation. That single fact settles more of this question than any comparison chart.
Word for word can be word-perfect and still wrong This is the point the whole argument turns on. Hebrew says God’s nose burned (Exodus 4:14) and means his anger was kindled. Paul writes of the bowels of compassion (Colossians 3:12, KJV’s bowels of mercies) because the Greeks located feeling in the viscera; compassionate hearts is less literal and more accurate. Genesis says a man knew his wife. A translation that renders each of these word for word has been faithful to the vocabulary and unfaithful to the meaning. So the scale is not accuracy at one end and convenience at the other. It is two ways of trying to be accurate, each with a real cost.
But words do carry weight: Jesus and Paul both argue from single ones Which is why the other end of the scale has its own cost. Jesus rests an argument on one word, gods, and adds Scripture cannot be broken (John 10:34-35); on a tense, I am the God of Abraham, to prove the resurrection (Matthew 22:31-32); and Paul on a singular against a plural, it does not say, ’And to offsprings,’… but… ’And to your offspring,’ who is Christ (Galatians 3:16). None of those arguments survives a translation that freely varies its vocabulary for style. That is the honest case for keeping a formal translation on the desk.
Some renderings are theological decisions made on your behalf At Romans 3:25 the Greek hilastērion is propitiation in the ESV and NASB, a sacrifice that turns away wrath, and expiation in the RSV, which removes the wrath and leaves only the cleansing of sin. That is not a shade of English; it is a doctrine, decided before you read the verse. At Isaiah 7:14, almah is virgin in the KJV and ESV and young woman in the RSV and NRSV; the Greek translators before Christ read it as virgin, and Matthew quotes them that way (Matthew 1:23). Knowing that such choices exist is not a reason to distrust your Bible. It is the reason to own a second one from the other end of the scale, and to read the footnotes, which is where translators tell you the truth about their own work.
The manuscript question, stated plainly The KJV and NKJV render the Textus Receptus, the Greek text Erasmus printed in 1516 from a handful of late medieval manuscripts. Everything since works from a text weighed against thousands of witnesses, including papyri from within a few generations of the apostles. Three places show the difference: the long ending of Mark (16:9-20), the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53-8:11), and the heavenly witnesses of 1 John 5:7-8, which appears in no Greek manuscript before the fourteenth century and entered the printed text late. Serious modern Bibles print the first two with a note and put the third in the margin. Notice what is not at stake: the Trinity does not rest on 1 John 5:7 and never did, it is taught across the whole New Testament, which is why its loss costs the doctrine nothing.
The test Paul gives is about honesty, not style We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God (2 Corinthians 4:2). That is the criterion for judging a translation, and it is a moral one rather than a technical one. Loose is not cunning. Modern is not cunning. Changing what the text says so that it will agree with you: that is cunning, and it is what puts a volume out of bounds.
The goal was never the translation The word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it (Deuteronomy 30:14). Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it (Habakkuk 2:2). Scripture’s own ambition for itself is to be understood and obeyed by ordinary people at speed, not to be admired at a distance in a language they do not have.

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

The Septuagint translators (3rd-2nd century BC) Seventy-odd Jewish scholars in Alexandria turned the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek for Jews who no longer read Hebrew, and produced the Bible the apostles quote, the church’s Old Testament for its first centuries, and the vocabulary the New Testament writes in. Every argument that translation is a compromise has to explain why the Holy Spirit used one.
Jerome (the Vulgate, 382-405) Commissioned to tidy the Latin, he went further and translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Greek, insisting on hebraica veritas against considerable pressure. Augustine wrote to him worried about the disruption, and reported that a congregation in North Africa had erupted when Jonah’s plant came out as ivy instead of the gourd they knew (Jonah 4:6). Sixteen centuries later people are still leaving churches over a changed word, and the argument has not improved much.
William Tyndale (New Testament 1526; martyred 1536) The first to put the New Testament into English from the Greek, and the reason English Christianity sounds the way it does: scapegoat, Passover, atonement are his coinages. Answering a cleric who preferred the Pope’s laws to God’s, he said: if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost. He was strangled and burned for it, praying Lord, open the King of England’s eyes. Three years later the King authorised an English Bible built largely on his work.
Martin Luther (German New Testament 1522; An Open Letter on Translating, 1530) Luther’s method was to go and listen: one must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace, and watch how they speak. And he is the honest illustration that no translation is neutral, at Romans 3:28 he rendered justified by faith as justified by faith alone, conceded that the word is not in the Greek, and defended it in the Open Letter as required by German idiom and by Paul’s own sense. Argue with the decision if you like; the point for this page is that the most consequential translator in Protestant history had to make one, and knew he had.
The KJV translators (The Translators to the Reader, 1611) Their own preface is the best answer to the movement that later claimed them. They never set out to make a new Bible: their aim, they say, was not to make a bad one good, but to make a good one better. And on the versions they were replacing: we do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English… containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God. The men who produced the King James Bible did not believe there could be only one.
The Westminster Confession (1646), 1.8 The confessional position on this exact question, and it is not anxious. The Scriptures were given in Hebrew and Greek and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages; but because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God, who have right unto, and interest in the Scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come. Note the ground of the argument: the people have a right to the text.
Wesley Huff (Wycliffe College, Toronto; Can I Trust the Bible?) A working scholar of the manuscripts themselves, and the place to go for the question underneath this one: how the text reached us, what the variants actually consist of, and why the sheer number of copies is a strength rather than a liability. He has also written on this page’s own question, in One Bible, Many Versions (2020), which lays the English versions out on a timeline. That is the piece to read if this page has left you wanting the history at first hand, and it is linked rather than summarised here so that his argument reaches you in his own words. What is recommended on this page remains ours: we do not enlist him for a preference between versions.
Eugene Peterson (The Message, 1993-2002) Named here in fairness to him. Peterson was a Presbyterian pastor who paraphrased the Bible for a congregation that had stopped hearing it, working from Hebrew and Greek, and he was consistently clear that the result was a reading Bible and not a study Bible, he expected people to keep using a translation alongside it. Much of the criticism aimed at him is really aimed at how his book has been used by people who ignored that. The caution stands; the accusation of heresy does not.

Where it lands

It lands on the most extraordinary act of translation there has ever been. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). God did not require us to climb to him or to learn his language. He rendered himself into ours: took a body, a village accent, a mother tongue, so that he could be understood by people who could never have understood otherwise. Every Bible translator since has been doing a small thing in the shape of that enormous one.

Which is why the anxiety underneath this question can be laid down. If God were the sort of God who guards his meaning behind a language barrier, the incarnation would never have happened, Pentecost would have been an examination rather than a gift, and Mark would not have stopped to tell you what Talitha cumi means. The Spirit who inspired the words also carried them into Greek, and Latin, and Tyndale’s English, and the language a translator somewhere is learning this morning in order to do it again.

So use the best tools you can. Read a formal translation as your main Bible, since that is what carries the argument of a passage through into English. Keep a second from further along the scale, because the places where two good translations differ are precisely the places worth slowing down, and if your comparison Bibles are all from the same end, as ESV with NASB and KJV, you will see less than you think, since they will mostly agree with each other by design. Read the footnotes; they are the translators being honest with you. And treat avoid entirely as a judgment for tampering, not for looseness.

Then remember what all of it is for. The Levites translated so the people would understand, and the people wept, and were told the joy of the LORD was their strength. Jesus told men who searched the Scriptures with enormous care that it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life (John 5:39-40). It is possible to hold the most accurate translation ever made and miss him in it. The best translation of the Bible, in the only sense that finally counts, is the faithful one you will actually read until you find him there.

What the passage does not settle

This page does not name a winner, and could not honestly. It does not settle whether almah at Isaiah 7:14 should be virgin or young woman on the ground of the Hebrew alone, whether the long ending of Mark was written by Mark, or how far a translation may adjust gendered language before it has started correcting the text rather than carrying it. Serious believing scholars are on both sides of each of those.

Nor does it tell you which Bible to buy. Reading level, the ear of the congregation you sit in, whether you are studying or reading a whole book at a sitting, and what your children can follow, those are real factors and this page cannot see them from here.

And one limit worth stating out loud. This page has judged three volumes and defended one of them from the charge usually laid against it. That is a judgment, made on the stated criterion, has the text been bent to teach something else, and it is open to challenge like anything else here. Bring the evidence and we will change the page.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else, a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

Before this page, did you think most literal and most accurate were the same thing? Where would that assumption have led you astray?
The apostles quoted a translation and called it Scripture. Does that change how you feel about reading the Bible in English?
Look up one verse in two translations from opposite ends of the scale, Romans 3:25 and Colossians 3:12 are good places to start. What did each one give you, and what did each one cost?
Tyndale died so a ploughboy could read this. What would he make of how many unread Bibles are in your house?
The Levites read so that the people understood, and the people wept. When did understanding a passage last do anything to you?