New Testament

The Dickinson New Testament is a distinct nineteenth-century American attempt at rendering the New Testament into a more literary English. Covering the New Testament in full, it was translated from Greek and based on the Greek New Testament, and is classified as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an existing text, guided by a literary or classical philosophy. It belongs to a period in which numerous individual translators in Britain and the United States, working in the shadow of the King James Version, sought to convey the Greek in idioms they judged clearer or more elegant for contemporary readers. Its distinguishing characteristics are a stylistically idiosyncratic manner and the fact that it was little adopted; like many private versions of its era, it circulated chiefly as the work of a single hand and left little mark on public worship or later revision committees.