On Choosing a Desert-Island Bible

Three translations I said I’d keep if limited to three, and why — notes from my own video on this.

KJV or NKJV first, and not because I’m “KJV-only.” It’s “the most beautiful translation that’s ever been done in the English language,” woven into English itself, and “a very literal rendering of the Greek.” The NKJV keeps that literalness but modernizes the language and flags in its notes where the manuscript traditions disagree.

Second, the Legacy Standard Bible, for its discipline of rendering the same Greek or Hebrew word with the same English word wherever possible — there have been times it’s “captured something in the Greek that no other English translation… really captured.”

Third, the NET Bible — not chiefly for the translation itself, which “takes a lot of liberty,” but for its extensive translators’ notes, which show the reasoning (and sometimes several live options) behind hard textual calls.

Even three good translations can’t carry everything, though: English has no real equivalent to a Greek third-person imperative. “Let him deny himself” (Mark 8:34) reads as permission in English; in the Greek it’s a command.