The Voice New Testament
Published by Thomas Nelson
The list of minds and talents behind this new rendition of the New Testament is impressive, as is the intent of their approach: to present the Bible in a user-friendly format, unencumbered by extraneous dialog tags and vocabulary specific to religion and theology. The hope was to make the scriptures “sing” to the reader and communicate the thread of “Jesus, the Liberating King” throughout.
I tried three or four times to become involved with this “retelling” of the biblical story. But I was unsuccessful. For me, a lifelong student of the Bible (in many translations), the replacement of familiar, and to me, important, words such as: Messiah, Savior, baptism, repentance, salvation, was just too distracting. Nevertheless, I think a new Christian or a seeker would find this book helpful. Each book is prefaced with some historical background information, and each chapter contains at least one commentary. Nothing I read was “new” to me, so the inclusion of the commentaries was intrusive rather than informative. In addition, the text itself is complicated by lots of italics where text is added for clarity, making any individual page just too busy for middle-aged eyes!
Thomas Nelson Publishers provided my copy of The Voice New Testament for review as part of their Booksneeze program.
I’ve got to check look through it now to see how they changed the wordings.
Thanks for your insightful words.