Well, I'm excited to be here today with three members of the Legacy Standard Bible Translation Team. My name is Chris Scottie, I'm the VP and Publisher of 316 Publishing, and we're going to start today's segment by giving these men an opportunity to see a brand new Bible, the Inside Column Reference.

So, men, open up your boxes. Wow, it's like Christmas morning, like a little kid. Wow. I'll beat you, guys, I'll beat you. Were you that kid in Christmas? Yes. Yes. Yes. Wow. Can I rip this? You can slide it off, you can rip it. This is the first full reference edition of the Legacy Standard Bible.

That is nice. Yeah. Always well-packaged, too. Oh, my. And for a guy my age, 39 years plus, it's a good-sized font. Also, even the references are in a good size. I have another reference Bible, remained unnamed as to what version it is, but I can't read the Scripture references in it.

And this, not only the text itself, but the references are readable. Yeah. I always tell young guys preparing for ministry, "Get a Bible with larger font so when you make your notes, you can use it when you get older." A lot of guys have these like little tiny Bibles with that eight-point font.

It's like, there'll be a day when you're going to need those. My initial reaction also is that it's a good preaching Bible, you know, it can be on the pulpit with you, and I like that. Preaching or teaching from it publicly, you can see it, yeah, I like it.

Yeah, and I appreciate an emphasis on the text, and I think that's one of the beauties of the inside column reference, which is that the references are toward the bend of the page, toward the inner side, so that the text stands out. It's the main thing as it ought to be, and then if you want to refer, you go to the inner part of the column, but always what's on the flat of the page is the text of Scripture.

Sometimes they put references on the outside margin, and so now the text of Scripture has to bend into the gutter of the page, and so you're kind of straining to see the main thing, even though what is the secondary aspect, which is still important, but secondary to the text, of course, is actually featured.

So this is handy in that regard, and it's also handy that the references are spliced between, I think it says cross-references at the top, and then on the bottom, any translators' footnotes, which is handy to kind of go back and forth between and quickly find the kind of information you want to refer people to, or you're looking for.

So this edition, man, actually represents more of your work. Oh, really? So it's not just the translation, but you gentlemen also worked on culling through the footnotes and such from the original NAS, the 95 and the 77, and so as part of your translation process, can you give us a few insights on how you handled that part of the process?

Notes are very important. I remember when we first started talking about dealing with the footnotes, and in my heart I thought, well, the text itself is the most important, which is true, and the text itself is what we're going to focus on, which is true, and we don't have to concentrate at all on the footnotes.

We'll just let them be because we're under strict deadlines. Well, that thought, that last thought was false. It really is important for several reasons, at least off the top of my head. One is because people really use the notes. They really do, and I think that's wonderful. I think it's wonderful that you have brothers and sisters in Christ who love the Word of God so much, and they want to know it so well that they care about those notes.

It's something, it's a tool for them, just like a translation is a tool. This is an added layer on that. Second, it's not just a tool for them, it's a tool for us. That's what I think I soon realized, which was whenever we came to a quandary where we didn't know exactly how to solve, sometimes the note actually provided the solution to our question.

If we thought, oh, how do you say this and refer to that? How do you mediate between the fact of you want consistency but there's this wordplay here and how do you make it all work together? Well, the footnote could be a really important solution to that. And then on top of all that, as soon as you made those solutions you realize, and that's going to help the reader study in the end.

So you're building on what they wanted the footnotes to be, and you're taking it to a new level where it's not just about, okay, what does this literally say or an explanatory note or explaining measurements or the like, but it's on top of all that giving new ideas where they say, oh, okay, so this word is the same one as this other word in this other passage.

And if the translators are telling me that I should cross-reference there, maybe there's an important connection that they're hinting at that I need to find, and all of that's embedded in the notes on top of other kinds of footnotes that we introduced into the Legacy Standard Bible. For example, whenever the New Testament deliberately is translating the Old, and you have Kyrios, Lord, translating Yahweh, since now we have in the Old Testament the Tetragrammaton translated as the name of God explicitly, we wanted to show the connections between the two, and the footnotes became part of that process.

So there's a lot of helpful resources in these footnotes, and they're a helpful tool for us to communicate what we're trying to get across and sometimes mediate solutions within the translation. Yeah, it was an important thing. - Yeah, I think just going off the same concept there, one of the most common questions I think I received and I noticed even in social media is how we were going to translate Lord in the New Testament.

What are we going to do, Yahweh? And I think that really does help when you have a footnote that says in the Old Testament Yahweh used, for instance, Matthew 22, "The Lord said to my Lord," and we have footnoted the first Lord and indicated that's Yahweh to help the reader understand that the Old Testament context makes that distinction.

And I think it helps people, and sometimes too it eases people like, "Okay, we're not going to just shove a word in there that's not really there, but we're going to help you make the connection back into another passage." - A tradition that we continued is something that new users of the LSB, and not in the NASB tradition, you know, they see in the New Testament the Old Testament quotes in capital letters and it's the first time that they've seen it and they like that.

You know, it's, boom, you know, call attention, there's a quotation from the Old Testament here. And so that, putting it in all caps as we continued that tradition, that legacy, is a good one, and new users of the Bible have commented on that, how much they appreciate it. - Yeah, I think of even in the Greek New Testaments that we use, whether it be in Nestle-Aland or UBS or whatnot, often Old Testament quotations, I think in UBS it's bolded, if my memory serves me right, and NA 27 I think is italicized or something like that.

So we're just mirroring in our translation what scholars and people who know Greek see in their Bibles, and that's kind of the whole idea of a window, which is what we see is what you see, and what you see is what we see. And I can't, and I, you know, Jason and Dr.

Varner are just across the hall from me at the Master's University, and we often comment as we look on social media, and people are saying, "Well, what about this, and how do you respond to that?" And it's often on Facebook, there's a Facebook group that's been very active and very encouraging.

I've been really thankful for those individuals in the Lord who have been interacting there. And I often turn to both of them and say, "Man, the answer to that question, it's just in the footnote, and when they look at the footnote, it'll answer the question." And then I remember to myself, "Well, they don't have access to that wholly yet, at least at that time." And that's another beauty of these footnotes, is for people asking really good questions, questions that they ought to be asking, well, there's a reason why we put the footnote there, because that's a good question, and we anticipated it, and there is a good answer, and it's right there in the resource for them.

And I think this just helps connect back to one of the lines that we came up with for the LSB, that it's your translation for a lifetime of study. And with 95,000 cross-references and 14,000 footnotes, there's a lot of studying that can be done in this edition. So we're grateful that it's finally out now, and that people are really enjoying this specific edition of the LSB.

- And we should not neglect the physical beauty of this. - Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I was thinking that. - Very well done, not only content, but something that's totally out of our hands, is the physical construction of the Bible, and it's a beautiful, visible piece of work. - Yeah, the goatskin is just, it's fabulous.

- Oh, yeah. I always like a good cover. - And one of the things, too, when you, the reason the inside column is one of my favorite formats is that oftentimes your Bible won't lay flat unless, like, maybe you get a rebound or something like that. But with this, like, it lays flat, and so you don't even have even the references kind of obscured because of that.

So it's almost like water, just the flow of it is a beautiful, beautiful Bible. Not many versions of reference Bibles are inside column, from what I've observed. A lot of them still have it on the outside, and that's fine. It's not a sin, of course, but this is really useful, and I think, and I hope more Bibles imitate the style.

- Well, I just wanted to mention that there's been a timeline here of right now, it's January of 2023. When the first complete edition of the LSB came out, it was October of 2021. And so that doesn't seem like a lot of time has lapsed yet. This is still a translation that people are discovering for the first time.

But if you can share some examples or stories of people that have began to read the LSB, whether it's in their personal study time or people that have incorporated it into their theories. - Occasionally, we hear the general criticism, a literal translation does not read well. It's too literal.

But I hear people saying, "You know, I've begun to use the Legacy Standard Bible, and it's readable. And I enjoy reading it to the congregation." An essentially literal, or as we call it, formal equivalence theory of translation does not produce a woodenly literal, hard to read, hard for people in the pew to understand version.

So I'm hearing far more positive responses in that regard than I even expected. It is readable, they say. - Yeah, I remember it was really touching. We all teach at the university. And some of us, I don't, but I know some of us require the Legacy Standard Bible for class.

But I remember even students under peer pressure, they say, "Oh, you just got to get one. You just got to get one," to their fellow student. And an individual wrote me a note one day, stuck it in my box, and it was just so remarkable. The person said, "Oh, for my whole life, I know I needed to read my Bible.

I always struggled. I felt like I could never understand, just never could, just really, really struggled." And so this individual said when she arrived on campus, and people were talking about the Legacy Standard Bible, she just thought it was hype. And I understand that sentiment for sure. But then she said, "I bought one, and I started reading." And she said, "Whatever you did, I don't know what you did, but whatever you did, thank you, because for the first time, I really feel like I have a grasp on the text.

I understand what's going on." And I think there is this notion that when you are "woodenly literal" or "literal," and you have this equivalence between the text, there is a kind of clarity that that produces. Because you're sensitive to, "This phrase is this kind of part of speech. This phrase is the main phrase.

We've got to make sure everything connects correctly and correlates correctly." And people know how to talk. They know how a participle works, even if they don't know the part of speech off the top of their head. They understand these things. And when you sometimes flatten that out, it's just a bunch of ideas that don't seem to cohere together.

But when you have the structure that the author wanted you to have, with the grammar that the author wanted you to have, things start to piece together the right way in people's minds. And there's a clarity to that. And I think that's what this dear sister was conveying, and she was just so moved by it that she took the time to write a card, which I thought was just really touching and really encouraging.

So I see the effect not only in pastors who come up to me and talk with me about it, and not only in adults in the pew who also are talking about their own devotional life, but even in our students. And it's really precious. - Yeah, I would agree.

Just a couple weeks ago, my wife and I led a trip to Turkey and Greece through the university. And so we would go to all of these biblical locations and, you know, for instance, Mars Hill in Athens, or at Corinth, or those kinds of places. And each stop, we offered the opportunity for people to have had memorized and quote Scripture on site.

And so it was really fun to be in the Ephesian Theater and have a student quote the whole first chapter of Ephesians in the LSB. And so when I looked on, because we, you know, for a couple months ahead, we've prepared and had people sign up, not just students, but people who went on the trip.

And I would say a good portion of them did the LSB, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. And it was really fun to see them on site, on location, quoting the LSB, and then talking with them afterwards as they've kind of memorized and things were really starting to piece together.

They would see the structure and things like that. And it was just really fun to see that, and also encouraging that it's not just a good resource to read, but even the memorization, those things that the text points out were key things that they thought about even after. - Fantastic.

One other point that this discussion reminds me of is that you all are also preachers. You're also preparing your own sermons to exposit publicly. And so in your own personal study time as you're preparing those messages, can you tie the idea of the LSB being a window and how that actually helps you in your sermon preparation?

- Well, Chris, it was not a sermon preparation, but I'm looking forward to preaching on this someday, but it was preparation for class. I've taught the book of Judges for many years and people are familiar with the sad theme text at the end, "And there was no king in Israel, everyone did that which was right in his own eyes." And many translations do it that way.

But as I'm reading about Samson, I'm excited to point out to my students that when Samson was looking for a Philistine girl and he found one and his parents were not excited about this, he said, "Get her for me because she is right in my eyes." The exact same expression that is used of the general problem of the book of Judges, people were doing right in their own eyes.

And it jumped out at me because most translate, most versions will say something like, "She looks good to me." And that's the idea, but if you miss it, that he's saying, "She's right in my eyes," you might miss the connection that he's sort of like exhibit A of the book of Judges.

She's doing, I don't care what Yahweh says, she's right in my eyes and I'm the standard and he becomes sort of like a prime example in the book of Judges. And then of course when you see that, that it was a Philistine girl that was right in his own eyes, he's captured by the Philistines and guess what the Philistines do?

They put out his eyes. So there, this whole connection in the latter part of the book between doing what is right in my eyes, and who cares what Yahweh says, but also he loses his eyes. It's sort of like a sad irony that is brought out and strangely most versions don't translate it consistently.

Thank you for that example. This isn't necessarily again in sermon preparation, although I can talk about that as well, but even this past Sunday the preacher was preaching on Psalm 12, and this kind of ties in a discussion we had on footnotes with the window concept of the Legacy Standard Bible.

And Psalm 12 begins with the phrase, "Save Yahweh." It's a very short prayer to the point because of the desperation of the psalmist. And then later on in the same psalm, Yahweh says, "Now I will set him on high, and I will give him, and I will put him in," the safety is often how it's translated.

But there's a good footnote in the LSB that says, literally, "Salvation," cross-reference Psalm 12, 1, and the idea is, "Hey, this word is the word salvation. Go back to Psalm 12, 1. Read it. Save Yahweh." Oh, the psalmist prayed, "Save me." He didn't even pray, "Save me." He didn't even have the pronominal suffix there, he just said, "Save." So desperate, and Yahweh says, "And I'll give him that salvation.

I'll give it to him." And so there is this very precise and deliberate answer to prayer in the nick of time. Now Yahweh will do this at God's perfect timing. He will answer, and according to His own promises, in the way that is best, in the way that we need.

And there's an example of window back into the text, good footnote there to help make the connection established, and it's all right in your Bible. As we went through verse by verse through the Bible, these are all the connections and the issues that we were working through, and we left that behind.

I think often we've all said, "Oh, I'm so glad we made that decision." We sometimes forget what we did, and we discovered and we thought, "Wow, that's nice. I'm so glad we caught that. How did we catch that?" And it's a blessing working on commentary or in class. Sometimes you have to talk about a serious, very somber doctrine like hell, and it's in the Scriptures, and it's even lexically there by the Word.

And a good example of that is in Isaiah 66, it talks about the worm will never be, fire will never be quenched, worm will never be satisfied, and they will endure everlasting reproach. Well, that word often translated "reproach" or "derision" or however you'd like to translate it, is a very unique Hebrew word, and it's only found elsewhere in Daniel 12 too, which also talks about there will be a resurrection for those unto eternal life and another resurrection for those under everlasting reproach, same word.

And we wanted to make sure that those were translated the same way, and the students seeing, "Oh, it's consistently translated, oh, it's the same word," they start to realize as weighty as this doctrine is and as real as it is, it's not just something made up by scholars later or people who want to guilt people into salvation.

This was consciously developed and expounded upon by the writers of Scripture from Old Testament to New Testament. And just consistency like that, that's very, very helpful. I think for me, I think of Philippians 2.11, after this amazing theological kind of unpacking of the personal work of Christ, you have verse 11, "And every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord," and we've capitalized some things to help the reader go back to the Old Testament.

And I think as we do that, there's some like aha moments that happen. If you go back to that quote, it's Isaiah 45, and Isaiah 45, it's interesting, the whole context is about the exclusivity of Yahweh, that Yahweh is the only one. Verse 5, "I am Yahweh, there is no other besides me, there is no God." You have verse 6, "There is no one besides me, I am Yahweh, there is no other." You have in verse 18, "I am Yahweh, there is none." And it just keeps going on and on in chapter 45 until you get to this idea of, "Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth," in verse 22, "For I am God and there is no other.

I'm sworn by myself, the word has gone forth from my mouth in righteousness and will not turn back. That to me, every knee will bow and every tongue will swear allegiance that will say of me, 'Only in Yahweh are righteousness and strength.'" And when you come back to Philippians chapter 2, verse 11, "Every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord," L-O-R-D, with a footnote that says, "In the Old Testament, Yahweh." And it just shows the exclusivity of Christ, His deity, like He's already talked about it, and He does the exclamation point by referencing Isaiah 45, "There is no one but God." And yet, making that sweet connection of Jesus Christ is God.

And I think that's a really sweet reminder that even when you see an Old Testament quote, it's not there just for you to go back to the one little verse that it quotes, but the whole context is in the mind of the writer, and it helps us to go back and kind of make those connections.

- All of Scripture is such an amazing tapestry. And so just hearing these examples from you men just reminds me of that. And the uniqueness of the format helps give that clue to the reader that there are those connections. When you read the New Testament, there's connections frequently drawing back to the Old Testament.

And it's not always just in the footnotes or cross-references, but it's also in the layout, the way the Old Testament quotations are formatted. So very helpful. Thank you, men. Well, gentlemen, the next question that I'd like to pose to all of you is, "Minor refinements to the text of the LSB." Can you expound upon that a bit?

- Yeah, I'll tell a funny story first. When we were translating, I used to have nightmares whenever I got a little bit of a nap that there were these horrendous errors in our translation. And Dr. MacArthur was holding the violin saying, "What were you thinking? How does this happen?" And so we truly, and then I'd wake up and check and everything was fine.

But we truly labored as hard as we could to prevent errors, to prevent mistakes, to prevent typographical issues from creeping into the text. But of course, we are people, and what happens if those things happen? Well, you make corrections. And I think just like everything we've tried to do is principally based, there were some principles about changing or making revisions, even minor revisions to the text.

One was we were committed to making those that could be substantiated. In other words, you don't just change a text because of preference, and we've never done that. And we won't do that, and we didn't do that even in the minor revisions. The vast, vast majority of them, and there's only, yeah, I think just a few dozen compared to a lot of translations that do hundreds of revisions.

But the vast majority of those few dozen are typographical, add a comma, formatting issues where this should have been italicized but wasn't italicized, and that's because computer code was mistyped and such, and so we needed to go back and do that. The vast majority are typographical. There's a subset of minor refinements I can think of maybe out of the few dozen, maybe three to four, that are all actually related.

They deal with the issue of defilement and uncleanness in the book of Leviticus. And you say, "Why did that happen?" Well, the files that were syncing with the server, they're big files. I wish Joe was here because I think he burned through several computers just trying to do this translation because they take forever to load, and then they take forever to save.

So I wouldn't turn on autosave, and you just hit Control-S, and then you leave your computer to take a nap and have a nightmare. And then you come back, and by that time, hopefully, the file is saved. But what can happen in that process is corruption, or a kind of corruption where certain kinds of changes weren't saved.

And those words were marked to be changed in our notes a certain way, and the file got corrupted. And so someone lovingly pointed out, "Wait, this doesn't make any sense. What happened here?" And Joe and I are looking at it and thinking, "What did happen? This was supposed to be changed." And when we went into the computer logs, we realized there was an error in the file save.

And so what should have been there wasn't there, and so we needed to make that correction. And we've been noticing some things like that all along the way, but the changes we make are minor in the sense that the majority are these typographical errors. And most people wouldn't even notice the change because they're so subtle.

But that leads to a second principle, which is transparency. One of the things we really pressed for was to say to the reader, "Hey, these are the changes made so that everyone can be on the same page." Now, I know for a publisher, that can be a total nightmare.

And really, all it takes is a pencil, and you just kind of make the edit. And it's kind of nice. You get this idiosyncratic edition, which has these issues. And you can say, "I was one of those." And it's a real first edition. How do you know it's a real first edition?

Because it has these unique features, let's just put it that way. And so it was our goal to have things principally based, to make sure things were as consistent as possible. Any change always had a rationale. Most of them were typographical. A lot of them also were technologically related.

And then we wanted to be transparent with it. And we've kept it to a minimum. Sometimes, some people say, "Hey, I noticed this issue. How do you-- can you just insert x here?" And the answer is, probably not. We're not going to do that. But what we can do-- and this is where our earlier conversation about footnotes comes into play-- that's an amazing tool, where we can accommodate observations readers and others have made into the coordination of the text by virtue of a footnote.

And so there's a lot of tools at our disposal to resolve issues that come up, but still guarantee the stability of the text, so that people say, "My text isn't changing. It's not changing. It's going to endure the test of time. And it's totally fine." Yeah. Thank you for that.

As we move into this next portion of our segment today, we're actually going to cover some questions that came to us through users and such through our LSB website. And so your explanation, I think, dovetails into the question that came through about the word "baby" in the original Greek and how, in some places, it's translated differently.

And so it appears to some that that is a break of the rule of consistency. So if you could, gentlemen, just expand upon what you went through translating those places where the word "baby" is used. Yeah. Well, I can. I'm happy to jump in there with brephos, I think, is the Greek term.

And there's several things involved. I think, first, consistency does not mean-- let's put it this way-- consistency does not mean that you translate the same word always, no matter what. We recognize that every word in Greek or Hebrew or English, it has nuances. It has different usages. And so it would be inappropriate to translate a certain word the same way when it doesn't match what we might call the semantic tree or the different usages of a term.

For example, in English, if we use the word "dust," we say, yeah, what's dust? Oh, that's the dirt on the table. OK. So when you dust your home, what do you do? Well, that's when you remove the dust. Oh, OK. So when it's a verb, it's always removing dust.

So what's a crop duster? Is it an aerial vacuum? No. It's something that actually spreads fertilizer or whatever, nutrients on plants and such. And while in English, the word "dust" can carry all three of those nuances, no problems. But if you were translating it into a different language, you might have to use different words because language transfers differently between the target language and the receptor language.

We understand those tensions. And so when we wanted consistency, at bare minimum, if we could find one word that got it all, hey, praise the Lord for that. But bare minimum, we needed consistency between and within nuances. And with the term "brefos," there's a lot of different dynamics with that.

There's when it has the article and when it doesn't. There's when it's used in idiom and when it's used not. And we had to account for all of that so that when, say, you're talking about the baby that is brought to Simeon and Anna in Luke versus the infant, which is translating a Hebrew word in the New Testament quotation of the Old, versus an idiom where it's talking about from childhood, you knew the Scriptures.

We had to differentiate each of those ideas. And that's because we're consistency relative to nuance, not just rote consistency of every single word, every single time, no difference whatsoever. And there's a lot of examples of this. One of them is, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling." Well, that's one translation of the word "kaergatzo," but there is another nuance where it's being "worked out within yourself" as opposed to working something out.

And we had to translate it differently, otherwise the translation wouldn't make any sense and would give the wrong impression. And these are examples of every word has nuances. They have kind of major categories, and we try to be consistent relative to the major categories. Sometimes, and oftentimes, a dictionary like BDAG or whatnot, they'll delineate those categories for us so that we can keep things straight, but sometimes we had to kind of delineate it.

A good example in Hebrew would be "relent" versus "regret." You know, the Lord "relented" doing this, or the Lord "regretted" doing something. Why do we do these different things? Because "relenting" is when you are restraining that which is in process. "Regretting" is what happens after the thing is done.

You can't say, "Oh, the Lord regretted doing this, and so it stopped." Well, no, then that doesn't make any sense because you only regret things that have already happened. And we have limitations like that in English. They didn't have it in Hebrew. Good for them, but we do. And so we just had to figure out solutions.

And so even then, "relent," "regret," we try to make them sound pretty similar so that it kind of rolls off the tongue and such, and we kept it consistent. And by the way, just for people who are wondering, does that imply that God can have regrets or God can change His mind?

No, because in 1 Samuel 15, it explicitly says, "The Lord does not regret," using that same word. And so by having consistency of translation, and even sometimes a footnote that points people back to 1 Samuel 15, people can see the theology that's happening there. - Chris, you know, to follow up, and in case people didn't quite get that on "brephos," the Greek word "brephos" can refer to a little one in the womb, it can refer to a little one in a manger that's born, and it can refer to a very young child.

So we have to be, you know, so from a child in the womb, you have known the Holy Scriptures? No. From an infant, you know, no, no, they don't. But from a young child. So depending on the context, that it's a young child that would know the Holy Scriptures, not an infant in the womb.

So we're still paying attention to context, which oftentimes really helps us to define the word more accurately. - And the last thing you want, if you're trying to articulate the author's intent and what he was saying, is to misrepresent it by taking a word that he used out of context, because in the name of consistency.

So consistency, I know, has been a big emphasis that we have, but that's not in exclusion of context and other linguistic factors. And they all have to play together to get us a conclusion. - Very good. Another question that came through the LSB website is regarding the name Yahweh in the Old Testament that was chosen.

But why were other names of God not translated, such as Elohim and Adonai? - Yeah, when you think about Elohim or Adonai, they're not just names, they're titles. And that's a big distinction of why you transliterate one and not the other. When we talk about King Nebuchadnezzar, we don't say Melech Nebuchadnezzar, because Melech means king.

It's a title. And when we say, "Oh, Elijah's a prophet," we don't say Elijah Navi. We don't say that. It's not necessary. In any case, we don't need to do that because the title represents a role. Even though that title is ascribed to somebody in a very formal way, it's still a title that conveys an office, a role, a status.

And so with Elohim and Adonai, they are titles, which accentuates this, that Yahweh is God's name. It's not His title. It's His personal name. You know, we might, Chris, call you Mr. Vice President, yes, but that's no substitute for your name. And we understand the difference between the two.

And when we want to address you as a person, as someone we care about, we would use your name. And that's the treasure that the Lord has given to us. He says, "My name is Yahweh. I don't just give you titles to worship Me. Amen to that, and we ought to, but I've also given you My name because I love you and because you're to love Me." And when it says, "They will call Him by name," they weren't just saying, "Call Him by title." They were saying, "Call Him by His name." What an amazing God to do that.

Now, other gods can be called Elohim, and it's possible that other gods can be called Adon because it means "master," but other gods are not called Yahweh. And that is why we wanted to make that special and unique. "This is My name," He says. So where do you stop if you start translating every, or transliterating every single one of those?

We stopped at the point that, as you said, Abner, others are titles that could even be applied to pagan gods, Yahweh is unique. And that's what I think people, generally speaking, I've run into very little opposition. Maybe there are some out there. There will always be some out there.

So okay, then maybe this Bible's not for you if you're that opposed to using Yahweh. But generally speaking, I one time referred to it, to Dr. MacArthur, as a shock value. I'm reading it as Yahweh, and it shocks me. Well, maybe it's a good shock because it reminds me, oh.

And also, does every English Bible reader always see capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, and distinguish it from capital L, small o-r-d? Sometimes that flies past them. They may not recognize that, as Bibles do, English Bibles do, four capitals means Yahweh. But not every Bible reader picks up on that.

Let me tell you, you pick up on it when it says Yahweh is my shepherd. Absolutely. Even in Hebrew, we were trained, when we saw the Tetragrammaton, to read Adonai. And so, Joe and I were even commenting, because of that training, and that's been decades of training, when we read, we just say Adonai.

We don't even think to stop and meditate on, no, no, no, that's not Adonai, that is Yahweh. And so, where we're really confronted with that is when we read the English, ironically, because we kind of dulled ourselves to these realities inadvertently when we were reading the Hebrew. And it not only accentuates the usage of Yahweh, it accentuates every time Adon or other terms are used, too, because now you don't confuse it.

I remember in Zechariah, as well as Daniel 1, we're writing some commentary, maybe more on that in a little bit, on it. And I said, "Oh, yeah, the Lord handed them over." And I thought, "Oh, I better check if this is Yahweh or if this is Adonai." And then I laughed at myself, and I thought, "I know it can't be Yahweh, because it doesn't say Yahweh in the text, in the English text, it says Lord." And I realized at that moment, that actually tells you the theology.

Daniel could have said Yahweh, amen, if he said Yahweh, but he said, "The Lord handed Israel over." Why? Because this is Adon, this is Adonai, this is the master, this is the true sovereign. It was not the power of Nebuchadnezzar. It was not the king of Jehoiakim. It was not him.

It was the Lord, the one who possesses all authority. That's who was sovereign in that moment. There are many kings in human nations, but there is one Lord. And that is brought forth when you are able to make sure you can distinguish between names and titles. - Very good, well, another question that came to us is a question that we see come through fairly regularly, probably a few times every month.

And the question goes something like this, "You gentlemen are all from the same school, so is there any Calvinism imported into this translation?" Only if the Greek words and the Hebrew words convey a high view of salvation. I prefer that over Calvinism because I don't think Bible writers knew about Calvinism.

But if the original languages communicated a sovereign view of election, did we communicate it? I guarantee you, I was not thinking, "Well, I hope I translate this as a Calvinist, or I hope my Calvinist friends will like this." I was just committed to translating what the Hebrew and Greek said.

So I'm sure my colleagues were like that too. - Were you like that? - Yes, of course. I think it goes back to being men of principle and having a principle that we want to reflect the text, be a window into the text and not a window into a theological system.

And if the text moves a certain way, then that's where we want to...and I think anybody that is a believer wants to go where the text goes. And so I think having a window into the text, into what the author's intent was and is, really helps dispel any myth of, "Oh, Calvinism, dispensationalism," or any of the other isms that could be there.

I think we want to show what the Bible says and then let the text help build a theology. - I think there's a fundamental theological commitment, which is you don't win theological arguments by translation. That's frankly cheating. That's what the cults do, is they translate something a certain way to prove their point.

But then you haven't won the theological argument because it's not the author who has said this, it's you, the translator, you've made that point. Well, that's pretty convenient, but that's not the truth, because that's a layer you inserted on top of the Scriptures as opposed to letting the Scriptures speak.

So my theological convictions, they don't require, I hope they don't require me to rig the results. That's not necessary. They stand or fall, and they ought to stand or fall based upon the standard of Scripture and what was originally articulated. And that's our commitment. And you can even see it.

People are saying, "First Corinthians, you're a cessationist. You guys are not charismatics, and so you shouldn't translate it as tongues." Well, we translate it as tongues. Why? Because the word is tongues. - Glossa. - Yeah. - It's tongue. - It means your tongue, and in Hebrew, lashon, is tongue.

That's what you have to translate it, and in fact, there's even word plays made. Even in Acts, you saw a shape of a tongue in fire, and then they spoke in tongues. Well, there's a correlation that needs to be made. If you translated one language and the other tongue, you break the consistency principle.

And so we translated what is there. That's always been the principle, and the linguistic decisions are based upon exactly that, linguistic decisions. When this plus this plus this, it's pretty mathematical. It'll get you this, and that's how we did it. And so I understand people's concern, "Oh, are you going to infuse your theology into the text?" No, no, it's a commitment to the principle of what is said should be transferred over, and the theology derives from that.

And if our theology has to rig the results, then it's a wrong theology. - You brought up an important point about how you all had certain principles in the translation process. Now, as part of this, and the men that were chosen, can you explain a little bit about the doctrine of inerrancy and why it was important for each man that was participating in the work being done held to that doctrine?

- I'm thinking of all Scripture is breathed out by God. That is a high view of Scripture. It can be translated all Scripture is inspired by God, but the literal meaning of the word is all Scripture is God-breathed. That certainly supports our view of inerrancy, because if God breathed out those words upon the writers, obviously they were true.

So I think that there is an evidence, not that we forced the meaning on that, Theopneustos literally means that, God-breathed, and we brought that out. Does that support a high view of Scripture? Yes it does, but it still is a literal translation that supports the high view of Scripture.

We didn't force the meaning onto that. We simply tried to bring out the meaning that Scripture is God-breathed, 2 Timothy 3:16. - And even part of inerrancy deals with the level of truthfulness of Scripture, that it is truthful to every word, not just what results in your life is true, or not just its ideas are true, but every word, every proposition, every claim, and every detail that it stipulates is true, and Joshua says at the end of the book, "Not one good word of all the good words that God spoke failed." Can we remember that truth and say that's why words matter?

Yeah, if we didn't believe that the words mattered, only the ideas or the results mattered, then yes, translation would be dramatically different. We could just kind of gloss over and give a summary of what was going on in the Bible. But the reason translation exists is because people believed, and the Scripture asserts, that every word of it are pure words refined seven times beyond gold and silver, and that's what we carried here, and so that is part of our translation philosophy.

It's embedded in that, and without really having a strong conviction on inerrancy, yeah, the rigor of, shall we say, of the word-for-word formal equivalent window translation, it would change. It would change. Yeah, all the words matter and are inspired, and every word, and even down to the singular plural usage when it comes down to Galatians 3 and the fact that Paul talks about and his seed singular, and so when you come to the text and a window into the text, it's even something as precise as plural versus singular.

Another question that came up is about a specific word. We know that one of the things that was used in the LSB is the word doulos. The Greek word is translated as "slave." Somebody asked the question, "Well, the verb of that, doulo, I believe, why was that not translated?" Yeah, a great question.

When it comes to just the dual root, right, you have doulo and doulo. One is causative, right, to enslave, and that was across the board. And then you have the doulo that oftentimes was translated to serve because the first term deals with the idea of enslavement, the causation of slavery.

The second term is the product of a slave, what does he do, the result of that serving. And even within the usage of that, because we want to be consistent and we want to make sure that we're attentive to the linguistic details, there are sometimes within the doulo where it is translated as "enslave" for a couple of reasons.

One is the perfect tense of doulo because it's talking about a state of type of idea. Another is the wordplay of "master/slave" and when "slave" is used to bring that out. And so you have like several different kind of features of that, like a master type of idea with that wordplay.

But then you also have concepts that are enslaving, like "sin" or things like that. And so those were kind of the contextual factors that lean towards shaping how it was translated because they're linguistically driven, not necessarily, "Well, we like this and this and this sounds pretty in this way and oh, this, you know, you know, I prefer this kind of a thing." It's that term in particular is usually translated as "serve/serving." But when there were contextual factors, perfect tense or masters or a wordplay, we wanted to make sure that our choices were linguistically driven because the author is making that.

So again, we want to be a window into the text, so the author is choosing a specific emphasis even using that term. And that's why it wasn't across the board because then you'd miss what the author is intending. Also, the word "duluo," you wouldn't bring it over into English as "to slave." That doesn't make sense.

You know, that's not good English, "to slave." It means "serve," "to serve as a slave." So I don't see where that's, you know, a problem. Well, we had a conversation about this because I was just so zealous. I was like, "Let's just translate, I'm slaving away!" And everyone on the team's like, "Everett, that's not even English.

Come on, you gotta relax. It's not that." And it's true. This is the limitation sometimes of English. But at the same time, there is an accuracy to it too because you don't want to press the verb of the dual root beyond its proper parameters because slaves, yes, they work.

We understand that, but it might not have all the nuances of slaving. It's doing the activity of a slave. Well, what is the activity of a slave? The activity is to serve. The activity is to work. And that's why it can be used in all kinds of arenas. But yes, when in certain contexts with certain linguistic factors, whether it be wordplay, whether it be in a certain tense, or even with certain words where abstractly it doesn't make sense because sin is not normally conceived of as a human master, that would be having to regard as personified.

Then in those cases, yes, you have to change the normal translation of the word to show the abstract nature or to show a nuance brought out by the author himself. Well, there's another question that I'm going to ask you gentlemen today that came in through our LSB website, and it's regarding the base text that you used for your translation.

The question reads, "Why does the LSB use the NA 27 UBS 4 as the base text for the New Testament rather than the majority text, Textus Receptus, Tyndale House Greek New Testament, or even the updated NA 28-UBS 5?" Well, oftentimes Abner said, "Dr. V, maybe this is for you on textual criticism.

I'm sure we all could answer it, but I'll give a shot at it." This is not a matter of a liberal or conservative fundamentalist or unbelieving issue. There's general agreement across evangelicals, Bible believers, that there needs to be improvement on the Textus Receptus. God honored and blessed that text for many years, but manuscript discoveries, manuscripts that predated the manuscripts that were used for the Textus Receptus, and evangelicals agree with this, too, and so we, with all due respect to those who advocate the Textus Receptus, we don't condemn them.

They're not wicked people, but we want the earliest text of the New Testament, particularly I'm thinking of the New Testament here, and that is represented, we believe, in the Nestle-Alan 27th edition, and the Tyndale House is not much different, really. The Tyndale House is not much different. I worked with that quite often, so it's a very, very small difference.

So the NA 27, as it's called, or the UBS 4 is, we think, the best, earliest, most reliable edition of the New Testament. There is a movement that resulted in the NA 28 and the UBS 5 that we're concerned about. I don't want to go into details about it.

It's called the coherence-based genealogical method. I like to say this, any method that tells me that 2 Peter 3.10 is a text that is represented by no Greek manuscript at all, I'm not going to put any value on that. And sadly, the NA 28 and the UBS 5 are committed to a different approach to textual criticism that comes up with things that we're concerned about.

So we stuck with the NA 27 and the UBS 4, and again, I emphasize, this is not a matter of liberal or conservative. Across the board, those who have a high view of Scripture stand together on the idea that the earliest and the best manuscripts are represented in the NA 27 and the UBS 4.

That being said, it's not as if we didn't consult all of those texts from SBL, Tyndale House, GNT, NA 28, UBS 5, and in fact, some of our readings and selection based on the evidence went against sometimes the NA 27-based text when you have issues in Jude with Jesus, for example, as opposed to Joshua and other, our Lord, excuse me, is it Kyrios or is it Jesus, who led them out into the wilderness and into the Promised Land?

And there were other issues in Mark that we had to kind of defer to, and it was based, though, upon the evidence. So it's not a slavish, automatic adherence to these texts. You have to start somewhere, but then from there, you have to go through the evidence. And one of the things that Dr.

Varner really did is go through every problem, go through every issue, go through every variant, and map out, here's what it says in these different collections of texts, here's all the different textual evidence, here's what the strongest supporting evidence would suggest, and that's how we worked through it. So it wasn't blocking things out, and even for those of our friends who are Texas Receptus friendly, LSB, like its NASB predecessor, still includes the different texts from John 8 and other passages, Mark 16, which are excluded in other translations just because we say, "Hey, these are issues that you have to deal with," and we're being transparent.

This is what we would see in our Greek New Testament. It would be marked as a textual critical issue, so you should see the same thing. So you know that we're not hiding anything from you. So people can work with that. Well, as I had mentioned at one point earlier in our discussion today, it's been just a little over a year since the full LSB was released, and I wanted to ask the question of you men, where are you seeing the LSB used in print or dissertations, et cetera?

Right now, then, you'll see a graphic, and it's got the most freely translated here over here and the more strictly translated over here, and you'll see all these versions from the New Living Bible to the KJV, and it'll be on a gradient like that. Well, we're starting to appear there.

Just recently, I saw in some of those charts, there's LSB down at the bottom of the Legacy Standard Bible, and they're locating us pretty accurately on the more formal equivalent, literal. So evidently, somebody's taking note of us. They're putting us on their charts, so that's one way. And also, the growing number of people in this Legacy Standard Bible fan group, as they call it, it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and they're fans, and to see their excitement is really encouraging to me.

- Yeah, a lot is by word of mouth, and you see those people who are, you know, sometimes they're the free promoters. They're just, you know, they're talking about how much they love it, and especially like this edition has come up on social media quite a bit in that fan group as like the best edition or best format.

They're like, they just love it, and looking at it, I can see why. I mean, it's a beautiful layout and really helpful, and on a personal note, when I started this project with joining my colleagues, I was in the middle of writing a dissertation, and so at the end, I was able to include some LSB shout-outs, if you will, or footnotes in my own dissertation, and so I don't know if that's a big deal, but I know that I used it.

- It's a big deal to me. - Yeah. - I like it. - So it was good to be able to use what I had been working on for both in the LSB and in my dissertation at the end. - My last three books, one of which is soon to be published, use the LSB, and I've not got any negative response to that.

People appreciate using this newer version in these books that I've published. - And that's a great segue, Dr. Varner. So I have a couple books here that I wanted to show. So this one is Psalms of Grace, which is from the Master's Seminary Press, and this was just put together, just released in the last few weeks, and it's a beautiful psalter that includes the entire book of Psalms from the Legacy Standard Bible.

So that's one example, and then rather than talk about this book that just came out, I'd like you to talk about it a little bit. - Okay, Chris, can you just hold it there? Last May, I was praying Scripture as I always do, and the thought came to me, "Hey, hmm, we finished the Legacy Standard Bible, I'm praying somebody else's handbook of Scripture." You think, Varner, you could produce a handbook for praying Scripture from the Legacy Standard Bible?

- I usually put in a few days of prayers, and I emphasize our adoration of God, our thanksgiving to Him, our affirmation of Him, our confession, and also personal petitions and intercessions, and put in the disciples' prayer and a benediction. So those are categories each day, and I've used about 300 verses and passages from the Legacy Standard Bible, so that we are actually praying to the Lord.

Occasionally, we adapt a verse, and I like the way that our editors, whenever I have slightly adapted a verse, in the reference, they put an asterisk there to let you know that I've adapted it, but I've never changed the intent of the verse at all. So people are using it.

It's only been out, my, just less than a couple of weeks, and recently, the students at the Master's University got a copy, and it's just a delight to see them and hear that they're praying. I think of the benediction that I use occasionally, "Yahweh bless you and keep you.

May Yahweh lift up His face upon you and be gracious unto you. May Yahweh lift up His face to you and give you peace." People oftentimes forget that the word "face" is the same in the first part of the verse and the second part of the verse. But many translations will say "face" in countenance, because it's the same word.

We use "face" both times. And then as we pray that benediction, I'm reminded of the verse right after that that says, "Thus you will place my name on the children of Israel." My name. Then it's important that we translate it as "Yahweh bless you and keep you. Yahweh make His face to shine upon you." So it's been a delight, and I'm very thankful to the publishers of the Legacy Standard Bible.

I remember sending you, you know, the idea, "Chris, what do you think about that?" And you said, "Well, send me some samples." So I sent some samples, and you said, "Hmm, I like this, you know, okay, let's see who else likes it." And so it was field-tested to a bit, and enough people liked it that you committed to it.

So I'm very thankful. It's very personal, and I hope people will read the preface, because this arose out of my life. And when you write a book out of your life, it's different than just writing about something. And so this has been a blessing in my own life to pray Scripture, and it's my most personal book, but I hope that it'll minister to others and enrich our prayer lives.

I think when you ask just about any pastor what they'd like their congregation to do more of, it's read the Bible and pray. And so this is a great resource to help equip the church, so we're excited for it. And we realize that, okay, well, do I just pray Scripture, or do I pray personal requests?

At the end of each of those, I've got what I call a pause button. So at the end of the intercessory Scripture prayers, pause button, introduce your own intercessory prayers. So it gives freedom as well as structure to one's prayer life, I hope. - Thank you very much for sharing about your book.

And Abner, I understand that you've been working diligently on a project regarding Pastor MacArthur's content. - Yes, so after we completed the Legacy Standard Bible, Joe and I had just such a wonderful time working together, and we're part of the same fellowship group, and both emphasizing Old Testament as well, that we said, "Well, let's see if we can't figure out a project to do together." And we kind of said, "Oh, it'd be amazing if we had the honor to complete the MacArthur commentary on the Scriptures." Obviously Pastor John has done the New Testament and gone through every book preaching-wise as well as writing commentary on the entire New Testament, and we thought, "Well, why not try it with the Old Testament?" So we pitched the idea to him.

He was thrilled, and we wanted to do it with the Legacy Standard Bible. And doing the Old Testament commentary, we've finished Zechariah, we've done work in Jonah, we've done work in Haggai, we've done work in Nahum, and we've done work in Daniel now as well. And Zechariah, I think, should be ready for Shepherds Conference 2023, so that's a huge praise and it's exciting to see this project really kick off.

But using the Legacy Standard Bible for all of it has been such a blessing because we've been able to maximize on the consistency. We've been able to see and bring out the distinction of God's name, Yahweh, as opposed to His other titles. And seeing all of the factors of the careful precision that was brought into the translation, it really does pay dividends when you're explaining the text.

Dr. MacArthur always said, "Oh yeah, a really good translation is the expositor's dream." And I thought to myself, "Yeah, I could see that. Yeah, sure, that sounds good." And then now being in it, I really see the reality of it. And so we're really excited to complete an entire set so that people have both New Testament and Old Testament all produced in conjunction with Dr.

MacArthur as a resource for the church expositing through the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation. - Big project. - Yes. - Wow. - Can't wait. - Yes. Many people can't wait because many people have been blessed for a long time using his New Testament commentaries. So I'm sure you're going to get a lot of emails saying, "When's it going to be ready?

I'm preaching on this book." - Yeah. - That's true. That's true. And we're moving as fast as we can. - That's fantastic. Well, today we also wanted to showcase our Scripture Study Notebooks in the Legacy Standard Bible. The New Testament set came out in the last month, and today we're showing the Old Testament set that's in production and releasing very soon.

So these books are uniquely designed, and actually Jason and his wife have been using them. So I've asked Jason to give us an explanation of how useful this is as a tool. - Yeah, we love these. When my wife first saw that these were up for an option, I asked her, "What do you want for Christmas?" And this was on the top of the list, like, "I want this for Christmas." And so she got it for Christmas.

It came in. We were excited. It's a wonderful opportunity for inductive study. One of the things that I love about this, and my wife as well, is that there is so much room to make notations, highlight, draw, all kinds of things on the front side, when you have that, just that room to work through, and then the notes that you can then take on the right-hand side.

And then you can have this and keep it and add to it as you continue to go back and study. I love just this concept, and the fact that it's an LSB, and the way that you formatted it, I just feel like is better than some of the other ones that I've seen, because of the space and the ability to do that.

In fact, I teach a class in Romans every spring, and I was telling them that when it becomes available to do the Romans one, because I have them do specific projects in studying the text, looking for repetition, making notes, that kind of thing, that it would be perfect for that, too, and just a big fan.

I think it's great. And the Scripture Study Notebooks are also available individually, so if somebody is studying a particular book and just wants to try one, they're welcome to do that as well. - Well, thank you all today for taking time out of your busy schedules to address questions, give us more insights into the translation process for the Legacy Standard Bible, and it's been a joy to have you all together today.

- Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you. - Thank you.