The New Living Translation, known as the NLT, is a clear, contemporary English Bible designed to be readily understood on a first reading. First published in 1996 by Tyndale House Publishers, it has become one of the most widely read modern translations, particularly for personal reading, family devotions, and anywhere Scripture is read aloud.

Origins

The NLT began as a revision of The Living Bible, a 1971 paraphrase by Kenneth Taylor. Taylor had written The Living Bible while commuting on the train to Chicago: dissatisfied with how poorly his own children followed the King James Version at family devotions, he had quietly retold each passage in plain modern English. His paraphrase reached enormous sales — over 40 million copies — but, because it was the work of a single author rewording an existing English Bible rather than translating from the Hebrew and Greek, it was always treated by scholars and pastors as a useful supplement rather than as a proper Bible.

In 1989 Tyndale House began work on a true translation that would be as readable as Taylor’s paraphrase but built on careful scholarship. Around ninety biblical scholars from a range of traditions — Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Pentecostal, and others — translated directly from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, working in book teams and reviewing one another’s work. Where The Living Bible had been one man’s reworking, the NLT was a fresh translation by an international committee.

The first edition appeared in 1996. A thorough revision was published in 2004, with further updates in 2007 and 2015. The current text is sometimes called the NLT second edition; Tyndale House continues to refine it.

Translation philosophy

The NLT translators describe their approach as dynamic equivalence or thought-for-thought translation. They worked verse by verse and asked, of each unit, what the original author was conveying and how an English-speaking reader today would naturally say the same thing. Idioms that would baffle a modern reader were turned into their English equivalents; long Hebrew or Greek sentences were broken into shorter ones; ancient weights, measures, and currencies were rendered in familiar units in the main text with literal values in footnotes.

The result is a Bible that reads with the rhythm of contemporary prose. Stories move briskly; poetry sounds like poetry; letters sound like letters. The cost, accepted deliberately, is that the NLT often gives the sense of a verse rather than its words, which makes it less suitable for technical study but unusually accessible to ordinary readers.

The textual base is mainstream critical scholarship. For the Old Testament, the committee works from the Masoretic Hebrew with reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint; for the New Testament, the standard Nestle-Aland / United Bible Societies Greek text. Where translation choices required judgement, the committee discussed and voted; no single translator could impose a wording.

A sample passage

The NLT’s contemporary-prose aim is best seen alongside a more formal translation. Here is Romans 8:38–39 in both:

NLT: And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below — indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

ESV: For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The ESV preserves Paul’s single long Greek sentence with its piled-up pairs of opposites; the NLT breaks the sentence in two and translates the abstractions (“things present nor things to come”) into modern equivalents (“our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow”). A reader encountering the passage for the first time is more likely to feel the force of it in the NLT; a reader doing word-study or sermon preparation is more likely to want the ESV.

Adoption and influence

The NLT has become one of the best-selling modern English Bibles, second only to the NIV in many years. It is the standard text of the popular Life Application Study Bible (in many of its editions) and of countless devotional Bibles, journaling Bibles, and Bibles for children and youth. It is also widely used as the spoken-word text of audio Bibles, including the well-known Bible Experience dramatised audio production.

In churches, the NLT is most often heard from the pulpit in non-denominational megachurches, in congregations focused on seekers and new believers, and in family-service settings where clarity for children is part of the goal. It has also become a common pew Bible in churches that want a single translation accessible to all ages.

Who reads the NLT

The NLT has several distinct readerships:

  • New believers and seekers. The NLT is one of the most frequently recommended first Bibles. Its modern English removes the linguistic barrier between the reader and the text; what remains is the actual difficulty of the message itself.
  • Families with children. Parents reading aloud at family devotions almost always find the NLT easier to use than more formal translations. The same is true in Sunday school and children’s ministry settings.
  • Devotional readers. Many Christians who study from a more literal translation use the NLT for daily devotional reading, where the priority is to feel the sweep of a passage rather than to parse it word by word.
  • Pulpit reading in seeker-oriented churches. Congregations whose Sunday-morning gathering is consciously designed to be accessible to first-time visitors often choose the NLT for Scripture reading. It carries less unfamiliar vocabulary than even the NIV.

How the NLT compares

Within the spectrum of modern English Bibles:

  • The New International Version (1978) is the NLT’s nearest neighbour in popularity, but the NIV sits a step closer to the original languages. The NLT is more openly thought-for-thought; the NIV mediates between formal and dynamic equivalence.
  • The English Standard Version (2001) is at the formal end of the spectrum. Many readers keep both: the NLT for devotional reading and aloud-reading, the ESV for study.
  • The New American Standard Bible (1971) is the maximally-literal contrast to the NLT. A passage that feels dense and demanding in the NASB will feel light and conversational in the NLT — exactly the trade-off each translation makes.
  • The King James Version (1611) and the NLT represent the two ends of the English Bible spectrum across four centuries. A reader who has known only the KJV will be struck, on first opening the NLT, by how immediately accessible Scripture can sound; a reader formed by the NLT will be struck, on first opening the KJV, by how rich and weighty the older English is.

Frequently asked questions

Is the NLT a paraphrase like The Living Bible?

No. The NLT is a true translation from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek by a committee of around ninety scholars. The Living Bible was Kenneth Taylor’s personal rewording of an existing English Bible. The two share a name and a publisher and a commitment to clarity, but the NLT’s scholarly basis is entirely different. The NLT is often grouped with other dynamic-equivalence translations like the NIV, not with paraphrases like The Living Bible or The Message.

Is the NLT accurate?

The NLT is accurate to the meaning of the original Hebrew and Greek by the standards of dynamic equivalence — that is, it conveys what the original is saying in natural English, sometimes at the cost of the original’s exact words. Whether one regards this as “accurate” depends on what one means by the term. For conveying the sense of a passage to a modern reader, the NLT is very accurate; for word-level study, more formal translations are more useful.

Is the NLT good for serious Bible study?

For most kinds of serious study, the NLT is best used as a comparison Bible rather than the primary text. Its smooth English sometimes irons out distinctions in the original that matter for careful exposition. Pairing the NLT with a more literal Bible (ESV, NASB) gives the reader both worlds: the clear sense from the NLT and the precise wording from the formal translation.

Why does the NLT use modern units in the text?

To remove what the translators saw as an unnecessary barrier. When the Old Testament gives a distance “in cubits” or a weight “in shekels,” a modern reader has to mentally translate the unit before the meaning lands. The NLT does that conversion in the main text and gives the literal value in a footnote. Other dynamic-equivalence translations do similar things; more formal translations typically keep the ancient units in the main text.

Is the NLT copyrighted?

Yes. The NLT is owned by Tyndale House Publishers. Permission to quote the NLT in books, sermons, and other works is granted under standard publisher-permission terms set out in the front matter of each printed edition.