Your vote will determine which ministry gets the largest cash grant—up to $5,000. And just for voting, you’ll get a chance to win two NLT Study Bibles—one for you, and one to give away! We’re also going to give you the chance to win Bibles for your favorite ministry, and one Grand Prize Winner will travel to Wycliffe’s world headquarters in Orlando, FL, to experience the exciting world of Bible translation first-hand at the WordSpring Discovery Center, or they can choose to donate the value of that trip to Wycliffe instead.

Learn more about our three ministry partners in the Give the Word Bible Contest and Giveaway:

Wycliffe Bible Translators
Today about 340 million people do not have the Bible in their own language. Wycliffe’s vision is to see the Bible accessible to all people in the language they understand best. To make this vision a reality, Wycliffe also focuses on community development, literacy development and church partnerships.

Oasis International
Our ministry is the distribution of books and Bibles that change lives. We provide affordable books and Bibles on a sustainable basis in Africa, where economic poverty is pervasive and the Church is thirsty for truth.
    Oasis concentrates on those areas that have the greatest shortage of Christian literature and Bibles. Currently, we are working in 15 nations of Africa where English is the national language or a major trade language.

The Dream Center
The Dream Center is a non-profit outreach dedicated to helping inner-cities. Our ministry provides hope by meeting both tangible and spiritual needs.
    We provide food, clothing, shelter, life rehabilitation, education and job training, Biblical training and much more through our 273 ministries and outreaches. We reach thousands of hurting and needy children, families and adults across all races and cultures each week.

With the Give the Word Bible Contest and Giveaway:
    • Ministries win: Each time the NLT Facebook Page reaches a fan count milestone, votes will be tallied and the three ministries will receive cash donations from the New Living Translation and Tyndale House Publishers. Invite your friends to join the contest by voting for your favorite ministry and help us reach our milestones so we can release the donations quickly.
    • Daily NLT Study Bible winners: Vote on the NLT Facebook page and you will be entered to win two NLT Study Bibles—one to keep and one to give away. A new winner will be chosen every day.
    • Weekly Give the Word Locally winners: Tell us about a deserving local ministry on the NLT Bible Contest website and they could win five NLT Study Bibles and $250 worth of NLT products. A new ministry will be chosen each week, based on your nomination tellling us why that ministry would benefit from the Bibles.
    • Everyone wins: Everyone who enters on the Bible Contest website wins a free download of Matthew West reading the Christmas story. This is a great way to share the message of Christmas with friends and family.
    • One Grand Prize winner will enjoy a unique trip customized just for them and their family (or three guests of their choice), to Wycliffe Bible Translators world headquarters and the WordSpring Discovery Center where they will experience firsthand the exciting world of Bible translation. The Grand Prize winner could also choose to donate the value of the trip–$2000–to Wycliffe instead. To enter for this Grand Prize, you need to read a passage from the NLT along with the notes from the NLT Study Bible and write a response on the Bible Contest website.

Give the Word
Get started by voting for the ministry that tugs at your heart most, and share this contest with your friends by posting about it on your blog, talking it up on Twitter (hashtag #GiveTheWord), or sharing a link to the NLT Page or this contest on Facebook so that they can learn about how the New Living Translation and these three ministries are helping you Give the Word.

About a year ago, we launched NLTinterlinear.com as the best place to study the Greek text of the New Testament alongside a contemporary English translation. For the past year, we have kept it behind a login wall — the login has been free, but necessary to access the text. We did that with the idea that those early users of the site should be able to contact us easily, and we wanted to be able to email them with questions if we saw an error in the application while they were working with it.

Today we are still officially in “Beta,” but we’ve removed the login wall. Now you don’t have to sign up or login in order to use the NLT interlinear.

Why still beta? Well, the big reason is that the Hebrew-NLT matchup is not yet available, and we anticipate making some changes and improvements to the interface in the process of bringing that data in when it is available.

Nevertheless, we’ve made some other improvements to the site. The most important of these is that URLs are now clean and shareable — you can now share any page on the site, and the URL is sensible. Along with that, we’ve included Facebook “Share” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons on every page. So now you can easily share a page of the site on one of those services, and the URL will make sense and not be unduly long.

Please give the NLT interlinear a whirl and let us know how we can improve it!

Here’s some information on this bible and how you can win a copy.

Introducing the NLT Study Bible. The product of over forty Bible scholars and seven years’ work, it is a detailed, comprehensive study Bible. The notes focus on bringing out the full meaning of the text as the original audiences would have understood it, allowing today’s reader to understand the Bible more deeply than ever. Features include 25,900 study notes (over 820,000 words), maps, charts, illustrations, a Hebrew/Greek word-study system, and much more.

Feature details: Ten section introductions provide an overview of the literature and history of each section of the Bible, showing how the books are related to each other and to the rest of Scripture. Theme articles and person profiles (406 total) highlight recurring ideas and describe the lives of those who inhabit the pages of scripture. Also includes 100 Greek and 100 Hebrew word studies, 100 quotations from modern and ancient writers, and words of Christ in red. Another unique feature is that further reading is recommended at the end of each book and section introduction.

Visit www.nltstudybible.com for a more in depth preview of this amazing study bible.

Here’s how to enter.

First, do one of the following actions:

1. Subscribe to the NLT Blog RSS Feed
2. Like the NLT Facebook Page
3. Follow the NLT daily verse on Twitter

Once you’re done, leave a comment on this blog post and tell us which way you chose to enter.

Want to earn more entries? You can earn multiple entries by doing more than one action (do all three for three entries!).

Want to earn yet another entry, or maybe you’ve already completed the above steps and you still want a way to enter. Use the “Suggest to Friends” link on the NLT Facebook page and invite your friends to join the page. Let us know how many friends you invited and this will get you an extra entry.

We will pick one random winner from all the entries to win a free copy.

Ready. Set. Go!

Have questions about this contest, or any of the other great products from Tyndale House? Feel free to follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/adamsab.

I was three days away from reading through the entire Bible when I came upon this passage of Scripture. Something about it just clicked. “It is finished.” No matter what you or I face today, this week, or next year–the God who rose victoriously from the grave is the same God who can be trusted with every circumstance we face in our daily lives.

Today we are announcing the launch of http://NLT.to, a new site that provides what I believe to be a superior and richly rewarding experience with the New Living Translation online. Why do I say that? Here are some interesting aspects of the site:

• Reference lookup: Type a Bible reference. The only requirement is that you include a book name and at least one chapter number. Example: http://NLT.to/Mt.5
• Short URLs: Once you type a reference or search term, you will notice that the URL for the result page includes the search term or reference. We did this so that you can easily share URLs to the NLT on Facebook, Twitter, your website, or your blog.
• Facebook “Share” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons on each page make sharing to those services very easy, or you can copy and paste the URL from the address bar in your web browser.
• Beautiful NLT text display. The NLT text display has been designed to look just as beatiful as a print Bible. We’ve even made the text look like it appears on white paper (with a nice drop-shadow in recent browsers like Firefox and Chrome). Example: http://NLT.to/Ps.23
• The NLT text notes are fully incorporated — click an asterisk (*) in the NLT text and you’ll see the text note in a right-aligned pop-up. Click the asterisk again to hide it. Example: http://NLT.to/Gn.1
• Keyword search with word stemming: Type keywords to lookup, and it will find them and related word forms. (Note: We’re still refining the word stemming dictionary that’s being used.) Examples: http://NLT.to/run, http://NLT.to/run+live
• Exact text search: put “quote marks” around your search term and you can get an exact text search. Example: http://NLT.to/”run”, http://NLT.to/”run+for+your+lives”
• Regular expression search: The exact text search actually recognizes regular expression patterns, so power users can go hog wild (there’s my Iowa background coming out) doing power searches on the NLT text. (The full syntax of our regular expression flavor is documented here.) Example: http://NLT.to/”(^|\s)r[ua]n”
• Search includes the NLT textual notes. Many Bible software tools omit the textual notes from the search function, but we view the NLT text notes as an integral part of the text, so we have included them in the search function. The text notes appear in the search results immediately below each result verse. Example: http://NLT.to/”hebrew+reads”
• The homepage of NLT.to features a beautiful wordle of the entire NLT text (cached; JPG). Okay, that’s a pretty minor feature of the site.

We have plans for many more features and improvements in the coming days, but that’s about it for now. The new site runs off the same codebase that powers http://NLTinterlinear.com, and we will have some exciting announcements about that site in the days to come. Keith told me today that NLTinterlinear.com is the best way he knows of to get into the Greek text of the New Testament quickly and painlessly.

I hope that’s enough to whet your appetite; take a minute to head over to NLT.to and give it a go, and let us know what you think.

The good folks at LifeChurch.tv provide this free service as an application on virtually every mobile platform, and they are lightning fast at getting good, user-friendly apps available on new platforms as they come on the market. You can currently read the Bible on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and even the new Windows 7 phone, launching today.

YouVersion rolled out a new version of their iPhone application this week, and along with it we are pleased to let you know that the NLT is available for download as an offline version from now until 1/31/11. The benefit of downloading the NLT as an offline version on your phone is that it will be available to you even when you don’t have a data connection, and moving from chapter to chapter as you read is much faster.

Give reading the Bible on your mobile device a try. I think you’ll find that it is very rewarding. If you do already use a mobile device to read your Bible, share about your experience in the comments.

What do we have in store for you today?

The Holy Bible: Mosaic NLT

Encounter Christ on every continent and in every century of Christian History. A new genre of Bible—a weekly meditation Bible—Holy Bible: Mosaic is an invitation to experience Christ both in His word and in the responses of his people. Each week, as you reflect on guided Scripture readings aligned with the church seasons, you will receive a wealth of insight from historical and contemporary writings. Full-color artwork will engage the soul; quotes, hymns, prayers, and poems enhance the rich devotional experience. Also includes a Dictionary/Concordance, NLT word study system with Hebrew/Greek dictionary. A beautiful layout of art and devotional content.

You can check out the first four weeks of the devotional content from Holy Bible: Mosaic online at http://www.holybiblemosaic.com/trymosaiconline/ (click and drag to turn the pages).

Here’s how to enter to win this Bible:

Leave a comment on this blog post with one of your favorite verses from the NLT.

Do you have a twitter account? To get an extra entry in the giveaway help us spread the word and tweet the following sentence:

Visit the #NLTBlog to enter to win a copy of the Holy Bible Mosaic NLT www.nltblog.com

We’ll keep track of your comments and your tweets and pick one random winner tomorrow afternoon (Friday 11/5). We’ll be sure to announce the winner on this blog and on Facebook.

Beginning this week, we will welcome a few new contributors to the blog. We are pleased to welcome Renee Johnson to the team. I first met Renee on Twitter, but she’s now a published author and bona fide Devotional Diva. She will be offering devotional thoughts from the NLT every Wednesday here on the blog. Our second new contributor will be familiar to some of you from his work on the NLT Study Bible. Sean Harrison is a senior editor for Bibles and Bible reference at Tyndale, and he will be posting about Bible translation issues and developments with some of the NLT’s online tools, such as NLTInterlinear.com. Additionally, Adam Sabados will be hosting a weekly Bible giveaway on Thursdays. Adam is a Marketing Services Coordinator at Tyndale, which means he gets to play around on Twitter and Facebook all day. You can read more about him at the Tyndale Blog. I also plan to post a weekly round-up of interesting news and notes from the world of Bible publishing and biblioblogging in a new Friday feature, TWIB (This Week in Bibles). Of course, Mark Taylor will also continue to offer his insights into Bible translation and especially the NLT, as evidenced by yesterday’s post.

As if that weren’t enough, I’d love to have you contribute to the NLT Blog. I’ll post some more details next week, but if you have something up your sleeve that you think would be a great guest post on the NLT Blog, send me an email [KeithWilliams dot NLT at gmail].

So what do you think about the new format? Is there anything you’d like to see more (or less) of here at the NLT Blog?

The difference between the two translation philosophies can be seen in lots of ways. One is the question of whether it is appropriate (or even permissible) for the translator to add specificity in the translated text. Here’s a simple example in 2 Kings 24:19. I’m quoting first from the NASB, which generally provides a good word-for-word translation of the original text, and then from the NLT (dynamic equivalence):

2 Kings 24:18-19 (NASB95)
¹⁸ Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem; and his mother’s name was Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.
¹⁹ He did evil in the sight of the LORD, according to all that Jehoiakim had done.

2 Kings 24:18-19 (NLT)
¹⁸ Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. His mother was Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah from Libnah.
¹⁹ But Zedekiah did what was evil in the LORD’s sight, just as Jehoiakim had done.

Look at the first word of v. 19. The NASB translates the Hebrew text literally with the pronoun “He.” Incidentally, all formal-equivalence translations (e.g., KJV, NKJV, RSV, NRSV, ESV; also NIV) join the NASB in rendering it “He.”

The NLT (joined by NCV, TEV; also HCSB) replaces the pronoun with the proper name Zedekiah. These dynamic translations feel free to translate beyond the literal wording to ensure that the meaning is accurately conveyed. (Everyone would agree that the antecedent to “he” is Zedekiah, who is named at the beginning of v. 18, even though the masculine name that immediately precedes the pronoun is Zedekiah’s maternal grandfather, Jeremiah.)

Is each approach appropriate? Is each permissible? Is one preferable to the other?

My answer is that each translation is simply following its own basic philosophy. The literal translations render the passage with a word-for-word correspondence. The dynamic translations render it with an expansion of the wording to ensure that the meaning is accurately conveyed.

If you use both styles of translation, you get the best of both worlds.

The Greek text in Mark 12:42 says that she dropped in “two lepta, which is a kodrantes.” So if we simply translate it that way in English, everything is clear, right? Sure, if the reader has an intuitive sense of the value of two lepta! And Mark even gives us a clue by telling us that two lepta (Jewish coins) are equal to a kodrantes (a Roman coin). But most of us would still have to reach for a Bible dictionary to make sense of those terms. So translators have resorted to numerous solutions.

KJV: two mites, which make a farthing
RSV: two copper coins, which make a penny
NASB: two small copper coins, which amount to a cent (with a footnote)
NIV: two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny (with a footnote)
ESV: two small copper coins, which make a penny (with a footnote)
HCSB: two tiny coins worth very little (with a footnote)
NLT: two small coins (with a footnote)

Which translation is correct? I would argue that the KJV, RSV, NASB, NIV, and ESV communicate the wrong message. After all, a penny has very little value in our current economy. But in the first century, a kodrantes was equal to 1/64 of a denarius, and a denarius was considered fair pay for a day’s wage. If today’s wage for a laborer in the USA is $15 per hour, that comes to $120 for an 8-hour day. At this rate, 1/64 of a day’s wage is $1.88. Round it up to $2.00, and we could say that the widow dropped two dollar-coins into the collection box. That feels very different from “two coins worth only a fraction of a penny.”

It’s for that reason that the NLT simply says “two small coins” [footnote: Greek two lepta, which is a kodrantes (i.e., a quadrans)]. After all, the point of Jesus’ teaching was that the widow gave everything she had. And if her two small coins were worth a couple of dollars in our economy, let’s not give the impression that she had only two pennies.