Riverside New Testament

The Riverside New Testament belongs to the early twentieth-century movement toward contemporary American Bible prose, a period in which a number of translators sought to render the scriptures in the idiom of ordinary modern speech rather than in the older diction inherited from the King James tradition. Its scope is limited to the New Testament, translated from Greek on the basis of a critical Greek New Testament text, reflecting the scholarly consensus of the era that the earliest recoverable readings should underlie any new English version. Working from a modern-speech philosophy, it is classed as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing English text. One point calls for caution: its bibliographic attribution varies across catalogues, and should be verified before any long-form description is prepared. It stands alongside other independent modern-speech New Testaments of its generation as a witness to that translational current.