Transcription
The ESV is the best Bible translation for certain people in certain circumstances. I want to tell you who those people are and when those circumstances occur. Four points.
Number one, the ESV is best for my church. I think the ESV is the best choice for my church. Why? Mainly because we already chose it, and the benefits of using another translation would be outweighed by the difficulties caused by switching. I'm an assistant pastor. Every pastor knows that you have only so many change points to spend. You pick your battles. Even if I did want to change, and sometimes I think about it, it would needlessly threaten the stability of the church.
I said there was no particular order to these points, but you still might find it funny that I didn't start with something academic or even spiritual. I am unabashedly and quite purposely practical in this first point. I don't think this choice, which Bible translation should my church use, is nearly as important as a lot of people do. I see people arguing about this with varying degrees of good-naturedness all the time online. It's ceaseless.
But how different is any of the major modern evangelical English Bibles for many others? Not much. Not really. Not in my humble estimation, after having read and used them all for many years and after having compared them repeatedly to the Hebrew and Greek. We're talking about evaluating something like a million tiny decisions, many of which have more than one mildly different right answer.
By the way, I am at Silver Lake in Washington, super close to the Canadian border, here for a wedding of a young lady in our church family. I want only the best backdrops, settings, and locales for the wonderful subscribers to my YouTube channel. I chose a Bible verse at random, as I sometimes like to do, and out of the 1189 chapters of Scripture, random.org sent me to chapter 777. I kid you not, the perfect chapter, the 777th chapter of the Bible, given the order used typically in Protestant Bibles, is Jeremiah 32. The verse that random.org chose at random for us was verse 15. Here it is in the ESV: "For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards shall again be bought in this land."
I checked other translations, and they sometimes choose "Lord of armies" instead of "Lord of hosts." They sometimes say "purchased" instead of "bought." Which choice is right? They're all right. And 99 times out of 99, that's what's going on when translations differ. Okay, yes, there are some more substantive differences than the ones I just listed from Jeremiah 32:15. Or it wouldn't be worthwhile to check other translations in your Bible study. But 99 times out of 99, there are good reasons for those differences, and when you notice them, they lead to Bible study gold. What they don't lead to is some grand conspiracy to change God's word.
Given that every major modern evangelical English Bible translation was done by serious Bible scholars and vetted by other serious Bible scholars, what's the likelihood that any one of these translations really nailed every single decision, and all the other highly qualified biblical scholars who worked on the other translations got all the decisions wrong? It's low, let me tell you. I'd say that happens 0 times out of 99. So I think practical reasons should probably weigh more than I ever see them do when it comes to choosing a Bible translation. And hence, I suggest a second one.
Number two, the ESV is best for people who really want lots of innovative editions. This is less true than it used to be because other publishers are definitely catching up. But the folks at Crossway have set the tone and set the pace for Bible publishing for the last probably 15 years. My hat is off to them, completely off. It is lying on the ground, actually, in a ditch, and I have stomped all over my hat out of sheer respect and gratitude to Crossway.
Just look at all the beautiful and useful ESV editions they put out. There are journaling Bibles of multiple kinds, there are readers' Bibles of multiple kinds, there are preaching Bibles, and truly beautiful and rich study Bibles, and pocket Bibles, and large-print Bibles. When many years ago, I kind of landed on the ESV as my main squeeze, it was really because they had such an evident commitment to quality and innovation in Bible design, and I have not been disappointed. Even their main Bible typeface, Lexicon, is, and here I make apologies to the amazing Klaus-Eric Kroge and his wonderful team at 2k Denmark, still the most useful and beautiful and appropriate typeface for a Bible.
And this may seem odd, but for me, it's huge. Crossway has an ESV API that allows me to call up Bible verses to my clipboard through Alfred, my mega-favorite app launcher for the Mac. This is basically just another kind of innovative edition of the ESV. This means that I can call up ESV verses and paste them into sermons and articles and YouTube scripts and emails with less effort than it takes me to get any other version. I can also see any chapter in the ESV on the ESV website super quickly through a tiny keyboard shortcut and Alfred or Google Chrome. So what version do you think I end up using the most in my writing? It's the one that's easiest to use. Like I said, the ESV is best for those who want lots of innovative editions.
Okay, now I'll turn to the kinds of points I think people expect in videos like this. Number three, the ESV is best for expository preaching. If your church already chose it and you like having lots of innovative editions, I do think that the basically literal but still sensitively literary philosophy of the ESV makes it the most obvious heir of the King James Version. These things are difficult to quantify, but my feeling is that the ESV has picked up the cultural heft of the King James in a way that even the New King James has not. We're talking subtle differences here, and I can't offer proof, only gut feeling and a read of consensus, whether deserved or not.
I once taught a small Sunday school class for young parents in which, because we were in a Christian college town, there were eight, count them, eight PhDs or PhD students. More literal translations were best suited for that group, as well as for the particular study in which we were engaged. We were parsing some fine distinctions in the text, and I needed ambiguities to remain rather than to be decided by an interpretive translation. It's awkward to have to disagree with the Bible translation from which you're teaching, though it's also a good thing to do every so often just to keep your listeners from assuming that a given translation is perfect.
I preached through Ruth at my church not long ago, one sermon per chapter, took a month, of course. And it was handy that the ESV, because it's generally formal or literal, kept translating key words the same way, especially "kindness" and "worthy." But then it also, in my mind, took a less than ideal, but very common path on a point in the text I wanted to show to people. It had Boaz called the unnamed kinsman-redeemer "friend" instead of what the Hebrew seems to mean, namely, "so-and-so" or even "John Doe." So though the ESV served me well, I did end up appealing to other translations in just that one instance.
I am very open to disagreement on this point because I just haven't heard much exposition from the NIV or the CSB, for example. But for most truly expository Bible teaching of literate adults, the kind of teaching that really digs into scripture, I think you'll find that a more literal translation, such as the ESV or New American Standard Bible, is the best tool. I exposited the New International Reader's Version to great profit in an outreach ministry for a number of years. I even preached a bit of an expository instrument from The Message on YouTube. It can be done, but I do tend to think that the vote of pretty well all the expository preachers I know counsel something.
Number four, the ESV is best for demonstrating what tribe you're in. If you're in the ESV's tribe, this point may sound cynical. It may even strike people who followed some of my work as contradictory. Aren't I trying to end Bible translation tribalism? Yes, I am. I wish it were not so, that the use of the ESV said something about where you're at on the evangelical spectrum. But reality is that it does.
I've been deeply influenced by the New Calvinism, by John Piper, John Frame, Kevin DeYoung, Mark Dever, Jonathan Lehmann, Nine Marks, D.A. Carson, Vern Poythress, The Gospel Coalition, Desiring God. These are all very big names for me. I know this alarms some otherwise sympathetic viewers of my channel, and I don't really want to get into it. I just don't want to talk about Calvinism here, not now, anyway. And for the life of me, I cannot find any connection between Calvinism and Bible versions. There are Calvinist KJV-onlyists, such as members of Ian Paisley's Free Presbyterian Church of the small movement called Confessional Bibliology. And there are non-Calvinist KJV-onlyists, of course. They're a dime a dozen. Then there are both Calvinists and Arminians who use contemporary versions. Like I said, Calvinism is irrelevant to my current mission and themes here.
But I can't deny that when you want to communicate, "We are Reformed," the ESV helps send that message. I wish it didn't. The translation itself is not, to my mind, biased toward Reformed views or complementarian ones, for that matter. We've talked about this in another video, and the roots of the ESV go through the RSV, not exactly known for Calvinist leanings. But a lot of the key progenitors of the ESV were part of the New Calvinism, and there you have it.
The ESV is the best Bible translation for certain people in certain circumstances. And to be clear, my church uses the ESV. And to be clear, I really love Crossway. I'm super grateful to them. But I want you to know that the most important reasons I myself use the ESV as my own main squeeze are the practical ones. I like the ESV API and the clean and useful website. I like the overall elegant feel of ESV Bibles. If you're expecting a more scholarly reason to choose the ESV, take note: there isn't one, not really. All good translations are good. Next video: The CSB is the best Bible translation.