Good News Translation(GNT)

The Good News Translation began as a New Testament, published by the American Bible Society in 1966 under the title Good News for Modern Man. Translator Robert G. Bratcher, working under ABS translation-department head Eugene Nida, built it explicitly around Nida's own theory of "dynamic equivalence" — the idea, developed in part for missionary translators working in languages with no existing Bible, that a translation should reproduce the effect of the original on its first readers rather than its exact wording. The complete Bible followed in 1976 as the Good News Bible, with a further revision — including a move toward gender-inclusive language in places where the original text addresses both men and women — in 1992.

The translation was deliberately written in what the ABS called "common language": vocabulary and sentence structure plain enough for both native and non-native English speakers, children, and adults with little formal education, while still ranking as an accurate, scholarly translation from the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. It has sold widely since — more than 244 million copies distributed worldwide by ABS's own count — and remains a common choice for literacy ministries, children's Bibles, and international English-language outreach.

On gender language, the GNT's 1992 revision moved further toward inclusive wording than most of its contemporaries, translating the Hebrew adam as "human beings" rather than "man" and using similar gender-neutral phrasing wherever the original addresses people in general rather than a specific man or group of men.

The GNT's plain, simplified style has always drawn both praise and criticism. Its priority on immediate clarity over precise, word-level correspondence to the Hebrew and Greek means some theologically loaded terms are paraphrased rather than translated directly — most famously Isaiah 7:14's "virgin," which the GNT renders "young woman," and several New Testament references to the "blood" of Christ, which it renders as his "death." Both choices reflect real, if contested, judgments about what the underlying Hebrew and Greek words most naturally mean, but they drew — and still draw — real criticism from readers who see them as blurring specific doctrinal language the original text uses.

Robert Bratcher, the GNT's principal translator, was an outspoken critic of biblical inerrancy in his later career. Addressing the Southern Baptist Convention's Christian Life Commission in 1981, he said that "only willful ignorance or intellectual dishonesty can account for the claim that the Bible is inerrant and infallible" and that treating it as such was "to idolatrize it, to transform it into a false god" — comments that made the New York Times, drew heavy backlash from conservative evangelicals, and by most accounts cost the American Bible Society real financial support from that wing of its donor base. That controversy was about Bratcher's own public statements, not a documented flaw in the translation itself, but it's part of why the GNT carries a more contested reputation in conservative circles than its plain, functional prose might otherwise suggest.