Translation of the New Testament

The Wakefield New Testament is an independent critical translation associated with late-Enlightenment English biblical scholarship, a period in which individual scholars increasingly issued their own renderings from the Greek rather than working within the inherited line of the Authorized Version. Its scope is limited to the New Testament, translated from Greek and based on the Greek New Testament text, and it is categorised as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing English version. In philosophy it is critical and idiomatic, seeking clarity of sense in contemporary English while remaining answerable to the underlying text. Its distinctive character lies in the way the translation reflects Wakefield's own textual and theological judgments, so that the work stands as the product of a single scholar's decisions rather than of a committee or ecclesiastical authority, a pattern common among the private English translations of its era.