God's Word to the Nations New Testament

God's Word to the Nations New Testament marks an intermediate stage in the institutional history that led to GOD'S WORD. Limited in scope to the New Testament, it drew on the Greek together with an English predecessor, its base text initially related to the Beck project; the predecessor or base translation was William F. Beck's An American Translation, a mid-twentieth-century rendering prepared within American Lutheran circles. In translation philosophy the work was oriented toward natural equivalence, seeking readable English idiom rather than formal correspondence, and it is best categorized as a revision project that was later superseded. The sponsoring society subsequently abandoned this text and retranslated the Bible afresh, so the New Testament issued under this title should not be mistaken for the 1995 GW text, which represents an independent effort rather than a further revision of the earlier work.