New Testament in Modern English

A mature revision of J. B. Phillips's influential modern-speech New Testament, this edition covers the New Testament alone, translated from Greek and taking the Greek New Testament as its base text. Phillips, an English clergyman, first rendered the epistles into contemporary idiom for readers who found older versions remote, and his work became one of the best-known twentieth-century experiments in translating Scripture into the everyday language of the day. The present volume is classed as a substantial revision, with the Phillips New Testament of 1958 serving as both predecessor and base translation. Its guiding philosophy remains dynamic or idiomatic rather than word-for-word: the aim is to convey sense and tone in natural English. Its distinctive feature is that it retains the idiomatic freedom of the earlier version while correcting and refining that text, and it stands within the broader tradition of modern-speech renderings that shaped later English Bible translation.