The Voice(VOICE)

The Voice was produced by Thomas Nelson and the Ecclesia Bible Society, a project pastor Chris Seay helped lead, bringing together roughly 120 contributors — biblical scholars alongside novelists, poets, musicians, and screenwriters (including Brian McLaren, Lauren Winner, and Blue Like Jazz director Steve Taylor). An initial New Testament appeared in 2011, revised later that same year, with the complete Bible following in 2012.

Its most visible distinctive is format: dialogue is set out screenplay-style, with the speaker's name on its own line before their words, rather than embedded in prose with quotation marks and "he said" — a choice the team made after finding that reading Scripture aloud this way changed how listeners engaged with it. Words and phrases the translators added for narrative flow, not present in the original Hebrew or Greek, are italicized throughout.

The Voice's most-discussed translation choice is its handling of the Greek title Christos: rather than transliterating it as "Christ" — which lead scholar David Capes and the team felt many readers mistake for part of Jesus's name rather than a title meaning "anointed one" — The Voice renders it as "the Anointed" or "the Anointed One," and in places expands it further to "the Liberating King."

That choice, combined with including working novelists and poets on the translation team rather than scholars alone, drew real controversy on release, including the pointed nickname "the Bible without Jesus Christ" from critics who felt the name itself carries theological weight the paraphrase-style rendering loses, and questions about whether creative writers belonged on a translation team at all.

On gender language, The Voice takes an inclusive approach, translating generic references to people in ways that read naturally in contemporary English rather than defaulting to generic masculine terms — consistent with its broader goal of a fresh, conversational voice rather than a formal, traditional register.