Modern American Bible

An early twentieth-century effort to render the New Testament in the contemporary American English of its day, the Ballentine Modern American Bible belongs to a wave of translations that followed the Revised Version in seeking a plainer, more current idiom than that of the King James tradition. In scope it covers the New Testament, translated from Greek and based on a critical Greek New Testament text, reflecting the increasing authority that scholarly editions of the Greek had gained over the received text during the nineteenth century. Its approach is modernizing and critical, and it is classed as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing English version. Among its distinctive characteristics, it saw little long-term ecclesial adoption, with congregational use remaining largely with established versions, though it remains bibliographically distinct and of interest to students of the period's many independent English renderings.