About this site

BibleTranslationGuide is a non-commercial guide to the English Bible translations most used in Protestant churches in the United States. It profiles twenty-six of them in depth, covers the 66-book Protestant canon, and has no affiliation with any publisher — the buy links are plain outbound links with no affiliate tracking.

It exists because “which translation should I read?” is a genuinely hard question with no single answer, and most of what’s written about it is either a sales pitch or a fight.

The aim is to describe rather than prescribe: to lay out how each translation was made, where its text comes from, and what it’s good for, and let you choose. The site is written from within the Protestant tradition — that’s the scope, not a claim that other traditions are wrong.

A few pages do take a position — the rankings most of all. Where that happens, the reasoning is shown alongside the conclusion so you can weigh it yourself. On the contested questions (the Textus Receptus versus the Critical Text, gender language, KJV-onlyism) the goal is to represent each side fairly and point to where the actual disagreement is.

The comparison table is built from each publisher’s own documentation — permission policies, prefaces, edition histories — and checked against it periodically. Reading-grade numbers are approximate and vary by how they’re measured; the fields marked † are not fully confirmed.

The translation differences and verse comparisons quote each translation under its publisher’s allowance for non-commercial use, with the required copyright notice shown; the words and punctuation are reproduced exactly. The history follows standard reference works, and its images are all public domain.

The Church Finder is built on public U.S. church location data plus corrections and additions that visitors submit. Only a small fraction of listings have a confirmed pulpit translation so far — that part grows one church at a time.

Deliberately left out: The Passion Translation (produced largely by one person, with added interpretive material most scholars don’t recommend); Catholic and Orthodox editions (Douay-Rheims, NABRE, RSV-2CE); and older texts superseded by translations already profiled here — the 1952 RSV (by the ESV and NRSVue) and the 1971 Living Bible (by the NLT). The reasoning for the set is in the FAQ.

Church listings have their own forms — every Church Finder result has an “update information” link, and there’s a form to add one that’s missing. For anything else — a wrong date, a misquoted verse, an out-of-step permission figure, a broken link — use the form below. It goes to a review queue, not straight onto the page.