New Testament: An American Translation

Associated with the American scholar Edgar J. Goodspeed, who worked at the University of Chicago and published his rendering of the New Testament in 1923, this was one of the first major scholarly Bibles deliberately cast in natural American English rather than the inherited idiom of the King James tradition. In scope it covers the complete Protestant Bible, translated from the Hebrew and Greek and based on critical original-language texts, and it stands as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an earlier version. Its guiding philosophy is idiomatic modern American English, intended to read as contemporary prose for ordinary readers. Distinctively, the Old Testament and New Testament began as separate translation projects, the Hebrew scriptures being undertaken by a team of scholars, and the two were only later combined into a single Bible, commonly known as An American Translation.