I think the basic question that we're going to be asked on this effort is, we already have maybe as many as 25 English translations that are in circulation. Why do we need another English translation of the Bible? Why have we taken on this project? And how urgent is it to have another one?

I think fundamentally one of the things we wanted to do with this translation wasn't to produce something new in a brand new sense, but to preserve something old. A lot of what we did in the Legacy Standard Bible was to uphold what we already have in the 95 to make sure that that translation remains extant in the next generations.

And it also pulled from the 1977, which has kind of gone away a little bit, not necessarily in popularity, but in availability. So we wanted to bring some of those things together and preserve it. So it's not just about getting something new to the people, but having them tie with what they've always had and having their children tie with what they've had.

On top of that, and I think the rest of you all can kind of speak to this, one of the goals that we wanted to advance was the idea of consistency. Any of you all want to talk about that kind of notion in translation? But backing up a little bit, preserving a translation, and in this case the NAS, New American Standard 95, collectively we felt that that was the best of the current English translations.

We all felt that way. But we could see trends that were going to replace that in the future, and we wanted to rescue it while we had the time. So if you're working with an existing translation, are you working with the English, or did you take it all the way back to the Hebrew and the Greek?

- Yeah. Why don't we have these guys answer for us here? - Well, in the Old Testament, we absolutely went to the Hebrew and just going word by word from the very beginning. We started with the New Testament, of course, and then the Psalms and the Proverbs, that was the first part that we did.

And when we were doing the Hebrew, we just went word by word, verse by verse, all the way through, looking at every single translation that NASB had, the New American Standard Bible had, and where the translation was good and we affirmed it, which was the majority of the cases, of course, then we retained it.

And where there needed to be some refinement or some kind of an adjustment, that's where we adjusted the text, and I think other men can speak to the New Testament. - Yeah. Dr. Varner, how did you kind of go through the Greek? - So I looked at the Greek, and I looked at what's available in the English language, and what are the best words to convey what's in the Greek?

That's not rocket science. That's what we all ought to have been doing all along. But the more the emphasis got on readability, if you don't mind my saying, I've always viewed the history of English translations as moving from elegance with the King James down to the 1881 British Revised Version, then the emphasis on accuracy from the British Revised Version to the NASB in 1977, and since then, the emphasis is on readability.

And I think we're trying to make an effort, okay, it still needs to be readable, but we need to get back in that second movement of accuracy. We don't want to sacrifice accuracy for the sake of readability. And I think that's what's driven me in translating the New Testament.

- And one of the things with that, I think we were trying to be consistent. I think the word has already been mentioned, and an example of that is in John. So as much as possible across books of the New Testament and within the New Testament itself, we wanted to translate the same word, if at all possible, within the context with the same word across the board.

So in John 19, 28 through verse 30, we know the famous verse, "It is finished," and the word "finished," but it appears twice before verse 30, where it says, "Scripture was fulfilled in the Nazbe, it said that, and we took it back to finished," because it's the same root.

And all the things that Jesus had done were finished, and we took it back to finished. So now you have three words that are the same in the Greek, translated as finished, as opposed to three different ways. And that kind of consistency helps the preacher, but of course the reader, to see that there's the same vocabulary behind the scenes that the author's trying to convey.

And I think that's where the accuracy comes into picture, as Dr. Varner just described, this consistency was a big factor. So you generally felt that the NAS was what you thought it was, a sound, reliable translation, and tightening it up in some places to make it more precise, using the same translation of the same word so that people can connect the dots, were things that would make it better.

And then maybe occasionally, you were thinking about the communication side of it. Would that be fair to some? - Yeah. - Sorry. - No, go ahead. - So one of the principles that we kept coming back to was, if it's not broken, don't fix it. And that goes to what Abner was saying, we were trying to preserve what is already a very good translation, where there was room for improvement, changes were made, and often that came about through drawing out consistency in the use of a word.

And I really appreciate that, because I think it helps with the holistic grasp of what's going on throughout the Scriptures, and just showing the English Bible reader how interwoven the Scriptures are. - And I think from the very beginning, that's what we talked about, is that since the Bible is its own best interpreter, right, since Scripture interprets Scripture, you help the student if the connections are more visible by using the same word, even connecting the New Testament passages with themselves.

So and that would be, what, say, percent of the effort that you did would be that kind of connection? - Substantial. - Substantial. - Substantial, yeah. - So that would have been a major effort in getting the NAS to where it needed to be was in using consistent translations of similar or the same words, so you connected all those things together.

- And even across Testaments. So for example, seed, you know, it appears in various English forms, but we used seed across the New and the Old Testament to make sure the New Testament reader can connect it back to the promise of the seed in the Old Testament. - And that was very crucial so that we can understand that this is one book, there's one flow, and that the New Testament is picking up on the Old Testament, and you can see that in the English because the same kind of vocabulary is used, even something as simple as "now it happened," and making sure that the way the New Testament translates that kind of phraseology is the way the Old Testament translates that phraseology, so you have the understanding, "Hey, this is one book," yes, with many authors, one divine author, but one book, and it flows and it fits together.

- And it would seem to me, since we are utterly and totally committed to God being the divine author of every part of Scripture, that this is a way to honor the single author. So that there's clarity that in many cases wouldn't exist if you didn't do that. - Yeah.

No, that's right. - And I would just say one thing. When it was difficult to make a decision like that, consistency, accuracy, clarity, we left it as is, in thinking that the preacher is responsible to explain the text to the audience, as opposed to us as translators being responsible for the interpretation element.

So I think we all hold each other accountable to that line, that we're not going to become interpreters but translators. - Yeah, and I think that is a definitive characteristic of this effort, that it is not an interpretation of the Scripture. It is the Scripture. - Yeah, that's what we're trying to deliver to the student of the Bible, to the believer, to the discipler, to the teacher, to the pastor, what the Bible says, and leave the decision of what it means and what stems from that to them.

- So you wanted to give them in English what would be the closest thing to the original source as you could get. - That's right. And that's actually the genius, I think, of the New American Standard originally, was that they put things in italics to tell you this wasn't part of the original text.

They put things in footnotes, whether that be extensive cross-references or translator notes to help explain what was going on behind the scenes in the text. There's a lot of resources that are packed into just one translation. It's a valuable tool, and that goes back to why we wanted to uphold it and why it was so wonderful to use.

- It might be interesting for people to know that the two, I think, dominant translators on the original NAS77 were my teachers, Dr. Thomas and Dr. Feinberg. And if ever there lived an originalist, those two guys were originalists, and you all, you know Dr. Thomas, you didn't know Dr.

Feinberg. But they had a lockdown mentality on the scripture, finding the scripture in its most accurate original sense. So the goal that you had in mind was to stay true to the original text, to make connections that might not have been visible in the past because the words were changed in English when they could have gone back to the same word and that would have made those ties clear.

And occasionally you updated maybe the language a little bit, but I don't think you did a lot with, say, archaic language, because there wasn't a lot of archaic language in the NAS95. Most of it was taken out between '77 and '95, is that not correct? - Yeah. - So the these and those.

- Yeah. - Yeah. So you weren't working with those. - No. - Well, that's incredible. You did have an appreciation for the NAS and the work that was done. - Yeah, absolutely. - Yeah. - There are many times Joe and I would talk after translating one of our sessions, how much we respect the NAS even more.

We heard you say many times it is the most literal translation there is. And you know, growing up in this church, you hear that often, but now having been part of this project, it was reaffirmed by experience and through translation. Go ahead, Joe. - And this literal commitment to the original languages expresses itself in the word choice, but also in the word order.

And then we were just talking before we started this, it spills over even into the punctuation. And this commitment to the order of the punctuation is apparent both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. So you can see it across the board that they were really committed to getting it exactly as the original languages had it.

- And sometimes, and it's not just that you have all this commitment across, the way they did it had reasons. And sometimes you couldn't figure that out at first, or sometimes I would write in my notes, "I think we can change this. I think we can increase the accuracy here.

I think we can reorder it." And then a verse later, I'd say, "Nope, doesn't work. And we could do it this way. We could do it this way. We could do this way." Or we could just actually have it as is because that's actually the right way to do it, and we have no other choice.

And we're kind of reinventing the wheel. But in reinventing the wheel in that sense, we realized they did a fantastic job. They really did a fantastic job. - Go ahead, Paul. - One of the implications that spills out of that that I wasn't anticipating, but it just kept impressing itself upon me is how much our reading and our interpretation of the Bible is to be in the local church.

So there were so many times when we wanted to go beyond essentially what was there literally because it would make it that much clearer. - You wanted to help the preacher. - You want to help the reader, but we're not the one explaining. We're there as translators. So we're bound by what the text says.

And then as we've already mentioned today in our discussions, time and time again, we'd say we trust that the preacher is going to explain. - So you had to exercise some restraint because you are all preachers. And the inclination is add an explanatory comment, but we're translators in this project.

- So you were stifling one gift to make the most of it. - But it really does emphasize the importance of the local church in the act of reading and understanding the Bible and the role of the preacher, the responsibility that he has. - Well, that went down all the way to the footnote level.

We wanted to minimize footnotes. - Yeah. So that was the next question. - Sure. - So how frequently did you put a footnote in? How often did you kind of face that challenge? - I think one of the things that we right off the bat were looking to do is to reduce footnotes.

And that was always the kind of the go-to. Can we reduce, can we make this, take the footnote and actually stick it up into the text? And there were times that we had to maybe add a footnote or change one. But I think that was at least our goal is to make it less footnote oriented.

But there were footnotes that we did add because of the uniqueness of the translation decisions we made. Some of the footnotes point out a wordplay that we couldn't articulate in the text without difficulty. And so you'll see literally this word cross-reference another passage, and that helps the reader to know, oh, there's a connection there.

There's a correlation there. Another one, which I think was a very wise move since we did do Yahweh in the Old Testament. But what do you do with the word Lord in the New Testament? What we did is we put a footnote there every time it was translating the word Yahweh so that the reader can say, yes, the Greek is translating it Lord.

And it should be that way because that's what our Greek New Testament says. That's what they wrote originally under the inspiration of the Spirit. But it's also going back to the Old Testament and saying Yahweh. And I think that really helps even to anchor and amplify the deity of Christ because so many passages using Kyrios, Lord, refer to Him.

Use Yahweh in the Old Testament. That's a connection that most people would miss. So there's not an overt effort to give alternative translations. That's a disturbing trend in some newer translations where you get the feeling that the translators couldn't make up their mind or there wasn't enough information to make a decision.

And when too many alternate translations are put in the margin, people lose confidence in what they're reading. So you fought those battles so that you didn't have to do that very often. Yeah. You helped us fight those battles because whenever we had a question, we couldn't solve it. We just said, "Well, let me talk to Dr.

MacArthur." Were you leaning on my authority or my scholarship? We were leaning on your years of wisdom. And in all seriousness, that's the truth. I think I appreciated Dr. MacArthur so much that every time we would talk, you would insist what is the right thing to do. Not what is expedient, not what is comfortable, but what is right.

And you kept bringing us back to that. And I think that provided clarity for a lot of our discussions. What makes sense, and not just in that one paragraph, but in the whole book. So an example I'm thinking of is we had a hard time deciding on maturity versus perfection in the book of Hebrews.

And after going around for probably almost an hour, we finally said, "Okay, we have to go to Pastor John and see what he thinks." And you stepped in and helped us navigate that, but ultimately make the decision. Perfection was the right word, which is also in the NASB, but it's still in the LSB.

Yeah, and just in the case of Hebrews, that's a very important word because one of my first courses in seminary was from Dr. Feinberg, and he pounded that term into us as to its meaning in the book of Hebrews. So you called me on the right question. You know, occasionally we would move what was in a footnote in the NASB to the text and switch what was in the text into a footnote.

We didn't do that a lot, but we did it occasionally. I think of one time that I really had to have a little conversation with Dr. MacArthur twice. The name for Peter is not Simon, it's Simeon. You know, it's in 2 Peter 1.1 and also in Acts 15.14. And I thought that we should, like, bring that out.

It's a little more Hebraic, Simeon, than Simon. It reflects the Shemaon a little bit better. And yet the NASB had Simon even in those two places. James refers to him as Simeon in Acts 15.14, but then he refers to himself as Simeon in 2 Peter 1.1. And we were going back and forth on that, and I actually wrote a long email, Dr.

MacArthur. I just want you to know that I was convinced after the first sentence. Oh my, thanks for the rest. But you know, when Peter calls himself Simeon, he's calling himself that. You know, the liberals think that 2 Peter is a forgery that somebody in the second century wrote it.

But no forger would use Simeon in 2 Peter 1.1. It's like a personal touch that Peter is giving. This is my name, guys, you know. And yeah, he was convinced. And I think this shows us that when we try to just say what it says, there's significance to that.

We don't need to improve on anything. And when you go back to it, there's always a significance to it. You would assume, wouldn't you, that God is far more nuanced than we are, and that there's purpose in all of those? Yeah, that's wonderful. So a personal question from the spiritual standpoint and from the standpoint of looking at your life and ministry in the future.

What value does this exercise have for you to go through so fastidiously every single word in the Bible and translate it? Who was the pilgrim's pastor, the guy in Holland, I forgot. But he was famous for saying, "I am convinced that there are yet fresh things to come out of the Word of God." Well, this old guy here, you know, at 72, and I became 73 during the process, still saw some fresh things coming out of the Word of God.

And I can just say, you know, personally, it was a good spiritual experience for me working through every single word of the New Testament. And now, with a little bit at a distance, the Old Testament, it was a great spiritual experience. And I think the process also works to strengthen your doctrinal conviction, because you're finding other places that's being supported that you maybe hadn't thought of or discovered.

- Yeah, the depth of verbal plenary inspiration. I was telling my students this. I told them, "We don't even know how far that goes." Because all of a sudden, you start to realize, well, that word choice mattered, because it was linked with that word over there, which was linked with that word over there, and all of that was there.

And then you have alliteration here. Sometimes we try to bring that out into the translation. When they alliterated, we alliterated. But sometimes you just can't, because it's English, and that's Greek or Hebrew, and you can't make it work. But you just realize how precise and exacting and exhaustive is God's inspiration of His Word.

It's amazing. - You know, just kind of thinking through a message for this coming Sunday, Jesus says to Nicodemus, "How can you be the teacher in Israel and not understand the new birth?" Somebody might say, "Well, that's a New Testament truth." No, how could you be the teacher in Israel and not know the Old Testament doctrine of regeneration?

You know, Ezekiel and, yeah, so that ability, I mean, basically in my whole life, from the time I was a student, connecting the Bible became everything to me. People who have come to our church recently, haven't been here, have said to me, "We've never heard so many Bible verses in a sermon.

Oh, you have so many Bible verses." But all I'm doing is connecting all the dots, and the more the translation enables you to do that, the richer, and not only the richer, but the more authority is built into the message. And I can't imagine a greater benefit for a believer like you guys than to absorb more of the Word of God, just more and more.

I mean, I've always said that I'm the beneficiary of my sermons far more than anybody else because just getting to that point was intense and many more hours than you're preaching, you're preparing, so. Yeah, I think back to those Wednesday morning Zoom calls that, you know, would go on for four or five hours, and they were mentally taxing, but they were just so edifying.

And we weren't looking at each other's faces, we were all looking at one screen with the text on it, and it was just constant dialogue about what is the right translation here. And for me personally, every single time, my eyes were just being opened more and more to all that is going on in Scripture, and you just see how wonderfully rich it is and how much more there is to explore.

Could make your sermons longer. Just a couple of other questions. You did some things to point out tense in the Greek, which sometimes get overlooked. What would happen in those kinds of descriptions? Oftentimes the imperfect tense is overlooked, and some translations would just translate it as a simple past.

But there's an imperfective continuous aspect going on there in the past with the imperfect and a continuous action in the present. And that's easily overlooked in a translation. It's like the imperfect, he lifted up his eyes and he was praying. It shifts to the imperfect. So it's like he lifted up his eyes, that's just a, you know, an action.

But when the writer wants us to focus in closer on it, he was praying. You know, it's like, and we tried to bring that out in the imperfect, or he continued praying. You know, the imperfect can have an inceptive imperfect, he began praying, or a continuation, he continued praying.

We tried to bring that out without, you know, being overly crazy about it. But I think that brings you up closer with the present and the imperfect tense. You see the action, it's going on, it's more dynamic, is what I'm trying to say. And that's because God put it there, you're recognizing that.

And I mean, it wasn't just the imperfects, it was also participles. Jason, I know that you had some favorite examples of that. Just Romans 12, even just a few years ago, trying to work through that, and it just sometimes it seems like Paul is giving, like, several different things that are disconnected, a way that sometimes it's translated.

So like, for instance, in verse 9 of chapter 12, "Let love be without hypocrisy." And then there's several participles that all connect back to show what this sincere genuine love without hypocrisy looks like. And so we tried to really work at helping the reader see that, and then see how all of the various participles connect back to that idea.

So rather than a list of equal things, they're simply describing loving without hypocrisy. Yeah. Here are all these books that tell you how to do something when actually the Bible does. So you can just read your Bible and find out how to love without hypocrisy. Did you need to do this translation with some kind of a manual?

Not exactly. I think we've been trained by you. But I mean, there is no manual on that. You're just dealing with the original. Well, I was trained by you and you. But our chairman didn't give us a book that said, "You've got to do it this way. You've got to do it this way.

You've got to do it this way." No, no. He trusted us, under God, he trusted us to have our understanding of the original language. And then also we met together. You know, these 450 translations, you know why there's so many? Many of them are done by one guy, okay?

That should not be done. One guy should not do a translation. You know, from the King James, you know, group on, there was a team because I might make a mistake. And a brother can correct me and say, "You know, I think you're going in the wrong direction there." And we helped each other in that regard, whereas if it's just one guy, he's going to do it and that's it.

And he answers to no one. I like the team concept. And the fact that you were operating not only from a scholastic level and a level of conviction, but alive in the spirit, whereas there were guys in the original King James who were definitely not even converted. So, but maybe being a little closer to the original by a few hundred years.

Well, I mean, we didn't have a manual, but we knew some principles and some goals. Agreed upon. Yeah. And it was about what the text said as opposed to why it said what it said or making sure we focused on bringing the words over or consistency and upholding the translation where we could.

And we had to hold each other to those principles. So there was no manual. I wish sometimes there was a manual to make things easier, but we had to state some very core principles and then trust the Lord and trust each other. And we're very like-minded and it was beautiful to see.

Sometimes we would come with a problem and that's where the team dynamic comes because then we work to solve it. That was always the trajectory. It was always work to solve the problem. And the solution was always better than the options originally given. And if I get outvoted four to one, maybe that's telling me something that my idea may not be the correct one.

You know, one of the things along that line that happens in a translation is it's made up of a committee of people from different theologies and different categories. And you've got to sort of play the game of I got my deal. So in chapter five, you get your deal in chapter six.

And you didn't have any of that because you guys are on the same page. So you feel that all of you can affirm this translation. Nobody felt like he gave up something because he got something somewhere else. And I think one of the really cool features of it too is, you know, you have these translations where they kind of parcel out either books or sections to a variety of different guys.

And so you get different flows and they translate something different in one than another book. And the way we did it, I really was encouraged because all six of us are going through all of it. We're not parceling it out. And that was really, I think, just fun to see the camaraderie build and also to have six eyes on it, but yet have a consistency across the board.

>> Yeah, there's a continuity to that. >> And we also had a few external reviewers as well, outside our group of six. >> That was my next question. So you guys care about each other and you love each other and you work together. So you might be a little more amiable than people who aren't so connected.

So you did consult some other people. You ran these things by people in the outside group for some validation. How did that go? How did that process work? >> So after we finished New Testament Psalms and Proverbs, we had a list of people, external reviewers is what we called them.

And we really appreciated them. They gave sacrificially of their time to really look at the text carefully, to give us a lot of helpful notes. And we sent copies of different books that they requested or parts of books that they requested for them to look over in that way.

And they would provide us feedback. And because of the lockdown, the way we often did it was we would write their comments anonymous. So no one knew who was saying what in a Google Doc, in an online spreadsheet. And everyone had the opportunity to kind of interact and think through it.

And at one point, I remember because I'm filling out the spreadsheet, I think it was about a thousand comments a day. >> A thousand comments a day from external readers. Out of that thousand comments, did you find some? >> They were really good. They were really good. They were very helpful.

>> So some of it was affirmation? >> Some of it was affirmation, but actually the thousand were issues we needed to think through. >> Wow. >> And it's very significant. >> And sometimes it would come out, "No, we made the right choice." And they didn't have the whole picture.

And that's not their fault. We didn't give them the whole picture. >> But just running your translation against that is very, very important for that external reader. >> Yeah. There were different types of people. We had some language experts reading, but also some pastors. And so both types of comments were coming at us, so we can think from both elements.

>> Yeah, and even some like long-term NAS readers that, you know, they love this translation and just being able to -- >> Was that the general consensus of the people that read it, that they liked it, that they appreciated what you have done? >> I think so. >> Yeah.

There was deep appreciation. And there would be a lot of comments. And I didn't always share it with the guys because my hands got tired typing. But they would be, "Thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that." >> And they were talking about something specific.

>> That's right. They, you know, in 1 John, "Thank you for translating it that way. Thank you for doing that." You know, "Oh, thank you for doing that in Proverbs." >> So while this is your project at the heart, there's a consensus of guys on the outside. >> Absolutely.

>> But this is a worthy effort. >> Yeah. And it's not just within America. It's going to be spread out outside of America to the broader English-speaking world because this isn't just going to be for Americans, we hope. We hope it goes and reaches the world. And so we wanted to make sure it connects.

>> Which is why it's not called the New New American. >> Right, Paul? >> Amen. >> Well, we got a few Russians and we got a UK guy. I need to thank you all. I mean, I can't even calculate the hours. I know it's taken over your life and the rest of you as well.

I think the Lord will put His stamp on this in the end and we'll know. The question that might be a good wrap-up is, does this translation have the potential to last a while? Everybody seems to be chasing the vernacular. You get a translation, two years later they want to do an update, and two years later they want to do an update as they chase vernacular.

What do you think? Now, having said that the NAS-95 is what this is based on, and that's a quarter of a century ago, you didn't make dramatic vernacular changes even in this from that one. So do you feel this has lasting value, readability? >> I think, yeah, fundamentally it does.

And I think the philosophy behind it is what gives it long-lasting value. Because if you make a translation in order to accommodate or to appease or to chase after the vernacular, well, you've already set up the translation to be replaced when vernacular changes and society changes. But our translation philosophy was to do what they were doing before, like Dr.

Varner mentioned, which was to move it back to accuracy. And that was always the goal. And for people who are inclined that way, then they don't want it to change because the Word of God doesn't change. >> You know, and I'm sort of a living illustration of that. Having preached for over half a century, I never felt any inclination to need something other than the NAS I was using, and I could make the adjustments I needed to make.

But I'm thrilled about this, not because it's driven by a new vernacular, but because it's driven by a desire to be more correct. And so it will have a long, long life, and that's important. I also remind everybody that when we started this, we said we're concerned with the author and not the reader.

That communicates that this is not about what a reader needs to read, but what the writer intended to say. So that's the uniqueness of this. So thank you. And your work is not done? >> Not nearly. >> But we're persevering, and they're doing a great job. >> So when will the people see a translation of the Legacy Standard Bible that they can read?

Will the first appearance of that be online? >> I think it'll be at Shepherd's Conference. >> In March. >> In March at Shepherd's Conference. >> And they'll have that Psalms, New Testament, and Proverbs volume. >> We're going to call that the Legacy Testament, I think. Is that right? >> Legacy Standard Bible, New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs.

>> Okay. The full treatment. >> And that'll be the first thing. It's like a four by six? >> Yep. We have a mock-up. >> Then, yeah, that—I asked for that because for years and years and years, I've used one of these in my shepherding ministry, and there it is, Legacy Standard Bible, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs.

Had you seen that before? >> It's a small one. It's great. It's beautiful. >> But I've carried one of those for years in hospital visits and home calls and on the planes and wherever I go, and I want to have a tool that's easily transportable. It's a whole lot more portable than a MacArthur study plane, which I have so that I know what I believe.

But anyway, that's actually the cover, isn't it? That's going to be a real—the pastors at Shepherds Convention are going to love that. We opened the registration, right? >> We did. >> And 750 signed up the first day? >> First week, yeah. >> First week. >> They heard they were getting a free Bible.

>> You probably heard this. This is beautiful.