Sawyer New Testament

The Sawyer New Testament is an independent American translation of the New Testament, undertaken with the aim of contemporary intelligibility and critical accuracy. It covers the New Testament alone, rendered from Greek and based on the Greek New Testament rather than on an existing English version, and is classed as a fresh translation guided by a readable, critical philosophy. It belongs to the nineteenth-century current of individual English-language translations that sought to move beyond the language of the King James Version and to take account of developments in the textual criticism of the Greek text. Such privately undertaken versions were typically the work of a single scholar, circulated outside official ecclesiastical sponsorship, and anticipated the later revision movement that produced committee-based English Bibles. The Sawyer New Testament was itself later revised near the end of the century.