American Baptist Improved Bible / New Testament

The American Baptist Improved Bible and New Testament continued nineteenth-century Baptist efforts to revise the English Scriptures directly from the Greek. Conceived as both a New Testament and a full Bible revision, the project worked from Greek and English, taking as its base earlier Baptist revisions together with the Greek text; its immediate predecessor and base translation was the versions produced by the American Bible Union. Such undertakings arose from a conviction within parts of the Baptist tradition that the received English Bible rendered certain terms in ways that obscured their sense, and the Improved Bible's distinctive features bear especially on terminology surrounding baptism and church offices. In approach it is formal and denominational, and it is classified as a revision rather than a fresh translation, standing within the broader nineteenth-century movement to bring English Scripture into closer conformity with the original languages.