Ward: A Rising Tide Sinks All Boats: The Legacy Standard Bible and Stewarding the Church’s Trust

The following guest post is from Mark Ward (PhD, Bob Jones University), who serves the church as an academic editor at Lexham Press (though his opinions in this piece are solely his own). His most recent book is Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, and he produced a Faithlife infotainment documentary by the same title.

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It’s time for someone to stand athwart American Christianity and yell “STOP!”—to anyone planning yet another “centrist” English Bible translation. By “centrist” I mean versions designed to be used by actual churches rather than for specialized study purposes.

Making a new “centrist” translation is precisely what a man I greatly respect and love, Dr. John MacArthur, is doing with his recently announced Legacy Standard Bible; and yet I must stick to my guns. Nerf guns. I am not shooting to kill or even to wound but to dissuade: faithful are the foam darts of a friend. And I don’t care to fire even these at Dr. MacArthur in particular; my words apply to all evangelical institutions who might now be planning their own centrist English Bibles. MacArthur is simply the most recent, so he has the privilege of occasioning this piece.

MacArthur has long used the 1995 New American Standard Bible in his world-famous teaching ministry. Its reputation fits his well: both are focused on a careful, literal approach to Bible interpretation. And of these things I have no complaint. But as the NASB branches into a 2020 revision (while promising to continue to print the 1995 edition), MacArthur is branching off in a different direction. One Bible translation (the NASB) is becoming three (NASB95, NASB20, and LSB) in a very short space. ETC has already announced this, but I’ve been invited to subject the LSB decision to some of my foam darts.

Different kinds of English Bible translations

I’m actually a big fan of English Bibles, plural. When someone asks me, “Which is the best Bible version?” I answer with sincerity, “All the good ones.”

I use multiple Bible translations all the time in Bible study, because the ones I use have staked out usefully different spots on the continuum between formal and functional. You’ve seen that continuum in the standard diagram:

The “centrist” translations are the ones that go from about the NASB on the left to the NIV on the right. These are the translations that in my unscientific experience actually get used as the main translation in doctrinally sound evangelical churches. (I could be generous and include the NLT, too.)

Any further toward the left than the NASB and you cross into translations that are designed to be Bible study tools for those who know the original languages (the NASB itself is also often used this way). My own employer’s Lexham English Bible, born as a set of interlinear glosses, is an example. I see room for more translations that are hyper-literal like the LEB, because no one sees them as competing with the centrist ones to be used in churches. They are tools for study.

Any further to the right than the NIV and you cross into translations that, for all their genuine usefulness, are generally perceived to do “too much interpreting” to be useful for all the varied needs of the average church. Some people take what I’ve just said to be a criticism; I don’t. Not infrequently, I need the help the NLT’s—and even The Message’s—interpretation provides. These are useful Bible study tools, if you know what they’re aiming at. But careful preachers of the kind ETC serves have voted with their feet: they generally stick to the centrist translations unless they are serving people without high school educations—which is precisely what I did very happily with the New International Reader’s Version (NIrV) for almost six years in a weekly outreach ministry.

Quite a few English Bibles exist that aren’t on that chart, because they just aren’t popular enough to warrant mention or can’t realistically hope to be used in actual churches. The KJVER, KJ21, ISV, WEB, BEB, and others I see sometimes on BibleHub.com land here.

Other translations are misguided, irresponsible, or even wacky. Here I’d include the frankly weird and alarming Passion Translation, the impossibly idiosyncratic and overweening Pure Word New Testament, and the heretical New World Translation. Not all translations count as good ones.

There are also Catholic and mainline and Orthodox translations that I admit I’m not experienced enough with to say much about; but there’s little chance they’ll be used in evangelical Protestant churches. They aren’t trusted there.

Then you have the “concept car” translations, as I call them, the ones done by major scholars who, I have to presume, did their work without any expectation that it would actually be used as any church’s main translation. N.T. Wright’s and D.B. Hart’s personal translations of the NT are two examples; Robert Alter’s and John Goldingay’s translations of the OT are two more. These scholars, because they aren’t bound by the constraints around a centrist translation, were free to try new things—some of which may find their way, concept-car-like, into centrist Bibles over time. I think this kind of work is valuable and good (and I find Alter’s to be the most promising source of concepts).

In other words: there is a ton of room for various kinds of Bible translation outside the “centrist” band on the spectrum. I don’t care to stop the insignificant ones; I’ll never stop the wacky and non-evangelical ones; and I’m happy to have the single-scholar ones.

But the centrist band is full.

Bible translations and trust

Here’s why: Bible translations succeed only when they achieve widespread trust, and the more translations we have in that center band the more it appears to the general Bible-reading public that theological and financial special interests are driving the production of English Bibles rather than the genuine needs of the church. This appearance, in turn, decreases collective trust in the good Bibles we have.

Bible translations thrive on trust for the simple reason that very few people can and even fewer do sit down to the hard work of comparing whole Bibles. God has not called very many of us to have the necessary skills and take the necessary time, but he has called all of us to read our Bibles. So we have to take someone else’s word—someone who has and uses those skills—that what we’re reading is faithful to the original texts.

The KJV is trusted by default, since its hegemony went basically unchallenged in English-speaking churches for 300-plus years. And the KJV-Only movement, which thrives on distrust—it’s a conspiracy theory that has persuaded many Christians that modern Bible translations are diabolical counterfeits—actually underscores the importance of winning and stewarding laypeople’s trust. Among certain Christian tribes, trust in the KJV and distrust in, for example, the NIV are so strong that they cause people to deny, even write whole obsessive books denying, what every native English speaker can’t not know: that the NIV is translated into English as we actually use it and the KJV is not. Trust is a powerful force.

Even among those who use modern Bible translations, I commonly hear rank-and-file Christians complaining that today’s Bible publishers are just out to make a buck. I try to build back their trust by saying, It’s not HarperCollins that sits down to translate the NIV; it’s Doug Moo, a beloved exegesis professor and author of the best commentary we have on Romans. Crossway, who produces the ESV, is a non-profit—and one of its leaders is Vern Poythress, a godly man whom I know personally. That’s a pretty serious charge to make against Christian brothers and sisters who have dedicated their lives to studying and teaching Scripture. What evidence do you have that they’re just in it for the money?

But it’s hard even for me, a dedicated promoter of the use of multiple Bible translations and editions, to trust that money and other kinds of kingdom building played only appropriate, subsidiary roles in the release of some Bibles. It’s hard for me to convince people, because I can’t convince myself, that all Bible publishers have been acting solely for the good of the church.

And it’s not just that poor whipping Bible, the Precious Moments New Testament, which makes me feel this way. It’s my beloved Dr. MacArthur’s proposed LSB. Now, I’m 100% confident he’s not in it for the money: nothing impressed me more at the one Shepherd’s Conference I attended than the generosity at Grace Community Church. But will the proposed LSB truly be a net gain for the church?

Maybe my years of trying to reach our KJV-Only brothers has sensitized me too much, but I simply cannot hear words like MacArthur’s pitch for the LSB without a little alarm:

It’s going to be the expositor’s dream Bible, to have the absolutely accurate, consistent text to study, to preach, and it’s bound to be the most accurate, the most consistent, translation in English.

“Absolutely accurate”? KJV-Onlyism in all its forms makes basically this same claim for the KJV, either explicitly (far-right Ruckmanism) or implicitly (every other variety). We simply must be careful not to repeat their errors, the most foundational of which may be that there can be only one really trustworthy Bible in any given language.

“Most consistent”? I presume this means lexical concordance, rendering individual Hebrew and Greek words with the same glosses as much as possible. This is useful as a translation tool but not useful as an ideology. It simply isn’t true that literal = moral, or Jesus and the apostles would be guilty for quoting the LXX in places where it fails to be as literal as the NASB, such as Acts 8:32. And the KJV would have been wrong to translate shalom two different ways in three occurrences, none of them using “peace,” in 2 Sam 11:7.

There is no possibility—none—that the new LSB will be “more accurate” than what’s already on offer in the centrist band, because “accuracy” in a collection of decisions as huge as that required by a Bible translation cannot be objectively measured. It’s a marketing slogan. And it’s often acidic to the trust Christians properly place in the English versions their pastors recommend to them. As I watched a man in whom I place a lot of trust try to build our tribe’s trust in the upcoming LSB (which is certainly not in itself wrong), I couldn’t help but feel that he was throwing other excellent translations under the Accurate Bus.

This is my last chance to shoot a fusillade of foam at the LSB, because if it does reach the hands of actual lay Christians as their pastors choose it, I plan to go silent. I don’t want to do anything to harm their trust in it—and I myself will be more than happy to use it! I’m sure it will be a fine Bible, even if I’m a little skeptical that transliterating Yahweh is “more accurate” than translating it (Jesus himself and/or the Spirit [let’s not get into what language Jesus spoke!] translated both Yahweh and Adonai with κύριος, just like the LXX did, when he quoted the all-important Psalm 110:1 in Matt 22:44).

But I genuinely believe that Dr. MacArthur will do more good for the church by investing his trust stock in an already trusted Bible like the NASB 95 or 2020 than by creating something new and dividing Christian trust still further.

Losing trust

The LSB will be seen, is already seen, and can only be seen, as a translation owned by John MacArthur. This isn’t all bad. But it is, in my opinion, mostly bad—and I would say this no matter who the big-name progenitor of the LSB was. It furthers the public perception that the Word of God is our creation rather than we its.

The CSB and ESV, two of the English-speaking world’s most recent successful Bible translations, are often seen as Southern Baptist and neo-Calvinist translations, respectively. The truth is that the committees which worked on these two excellent translations hailed from multiple different denominations. But perception is reality when trust is the most important asset a Bible translation has.

Publishers can lose that trust when they come to be seen as (or actually are!) promoting a narrow theological agenda, as the backers of the now-defunct NIVI (New International Version Inclusive Language edition) found out when WORLD Magazine famously attacked/revealed (depending on your perspective) their work as a “Stealth Bible.” Once trusted sources proclaimed it not just wrong but untrustworthy, no amount of frantic explanation could save the ill-fated translation. The mistrust generated by the controversy over the NIVI was enough to sink the subsequent TNIV (Today’s New International Version) as well.

Publishers can shake public trust without demolishing it, as Crossway did after they announced a “Permanent Text Edition of the ESV, a Bible that would remain the same “in perpetuity.” The ensuing Internet uproar drastically shortened perpetuity—and gave a lot of fuel to people who saw the ESV’s revision of Gen 3:16 as a complementarian power grab. I say this as a published complementarian who has pointed countless people to the ESV. People such as my elder brother and teacher John MacArthur may think they’re protecting the Bible from tampering by taking it in-house, but I think they overestimate the likelihood that something like the Vulgate’s poenitentiam agite will sneak into English Bibles and mislead readers. And I think they underestimate the trust-building power of unity by (the right kind of) compromise with other Christians.

Zondervan/Biblica, too, faced much more of a backlash to the release of the NIV 2011 than I expected—solely for changing something familiar to people. The lesson to Bible publishers: trust is hard-won and must be stewarded well.

Building trust

The best way I know for Bible publishers to steward trust and avoid the fate of the NIVI/TNIV and the missteps of the ESV, NIV, and now the LSB is to stop. No more new “centrist” translations. Sign a non-proliferation treaty with other publishers and make a big deal out of it so upstarts (like the LSB, I’m afraid) are shamed into complying. I’m perfectly serious. Set up a publicly available plan for making revisions every 35–50 years, with fine print indicating that 1) major advances in the biblical scholarship regarding a certain word (like monogenes in John 3:16 or of some obscure plant or animal in Leviticus) or 2) rapid shifts in the meaning of certain English lexemes (like gay; cf. James 2:3 KJV) will permit minor adjustments but not a full new edition. Set up a plan that will conserve the church’s trust for the future, and aim to serve the entire church and not just a sector of it. We got into the situation we’re now in because every institution did that which was right in its own eyes. Now that we’re here, let’s agree for the good of us all not to make things worse but to instead steward and build the church’s trust. Legitimate financial and theological interests—“the labourer is worthy of his hire,” as the KJV says—will end up being served along the way if we are driven by love for the Body.

The KJV is the premiere historical example of an English Bible that won public trust. It did so in part by refusing to include sectarian marginal notes such as those in the Geneva Bible. Reformedish conservatives like me feel more affinity to the Geneva; we like those notes and trust the Calvinists behind them. But maybe it’s time to acknowledge and learn from the success of the KJV. Old Testament scholar David J. A. Clines has called it a “truly Anglican enterprise,” “a via media.” The KJV succeeded in becoming a Bible for all Christians, regardless of their theological views. We must all live in our denominational “rooms,” as C.S. Lewis famously said, but Bible translations should be made by and for the “Mere Christian” hallway. By not favoring one party, the KJV ended up pleasing and serving all parties for multiple centuries.

We lost something as an English-speaking church when the dominance of the KJV began to erode. KJV phrases were common coin; we memorized verses together by accident just by living within the Christian community. It seems unlikely to me that we will ever regain the value of a universal standard English Bible translation. It’s kind of hard to have one without a monarch governing the English church.

So I suggest we focus on what we have gained in our multi-translation situation, and unite to take steps to protect those things. When the NIV, NASB, and other modern renderings achieved widespread usage, we gained the insight into God’s word that multiple legitimate perspectives, on different parts of that continuum, provide. We may threaten even that value—decreasing trust in what we now have—if more centrist translations keep coming. A rising tide sinks all boats.