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What does it actually take to translate the Bible — and is the New Living Translation really just a paraphrase? If you've ever heard that criticism, this conversation is for you.
In this episode of Church Around the World, Dan Ehrman sits down with Dr. Andrew Abernethy — professor of Old Testament and assistant dean at Wheaton College's Divinity School, and a member of the New Living Translation Bible committee — to pull back the curtain on the NLT translation process and what it means to make Scripture genuinely accessible without sacrificing accuracy.
Three takeaways for church leaders:
- The NLT is not a paraphrase. It comes from a team of top evangelical scholars wrestling simultaneously with original-language accuracy and understandable English — a rigorous, two-stage process most readers never see.
- Translation is always interpretation. From the word "redeemer" in Ruth to a contested phrase in Matthew 1, every translation choice involves asking: what would this have meant then, and how do we communicate that clearly today?
- Scripture transforms whole families. Dr. Abernethy's own story — from a basketball family with no Bible background to an NLT committee member — is a reminder that God works powerfully through faithful engagement with His Word.
"Your word is a lamp to guide my feet and a light for my path." — Psalm 119:105 (NLT)
This episode is a rich resource for any pastor or ministry leader who wants to understand — and confidently recommend — the New Living Translation Bible to their congregation.
Learn more about Dr. Abernethy and the NLT:
Dr. Andrew Abernethy - Wheaton College
New Living Translation
NLT Scholars
God's Messiah in the Old Testament
Andrew Abernethy - LinkedIn
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Creators and Guests
What is The Church Around the World?
Host Dan Ehrman from Tyndale House Ministries invites you to join him for The Church Around the World podcast for important and impactful conversations with church and ministry leaders. They'll share stories about God at work, His people, and what's happening in faith and culture that's shaping the local and global church today. From your neighborhood to the ends of the earth, listen to these powerful and timely testimonies of blessings and challenges directly from the people that are helping build up the church around the world.
Welcome to the Church Around the World.
I'm Dan Ehrman, honored to be in the office of Dr. Andrew Abernethy at Wheaton College,
who is also a member of the New Living Translation Committee.
Dr. Abernethy, thank you for letting me crash your space.
Hey, Dan, it's great to be here with you,
and I look forward to our conversation.
Well, off the mic in the room with me is Kate Warren,
and Kate is the new brand manager for the New Living Translation.
She is academically superior to anything I've got going on in the room,
so I am the facilitator here — but really honored to connect with you
and excited to dig into the NLT, some of your story, and how we're seeing God at work.
Yeah, I look forward to having this conversation.
Well, you were not born as Dr. Abernethy — professor of Old Testament,
dean of the Biblical and Theological Studies at the Divinity School,
and director of the Master's in Biblical Exegesis program.
So share with us a little bit about growing up — where are you from, and who are you?
It's interesting — I wasn't born Dr. Andrew Abernethy.
I wasn't even born Andrew Abernethy.
Because when I was born, my twin brother came out first,
and my mom did not know she was having twins.
So they didn't have a name ready for me.
Matt came out, and the doctor said, "You have at least one more in there."
And then that was me. So I was nameless for a little while,
but they figured out Andrew goes well with Matthew. And so there we go.
I was born into a family where my dad was a professional basketball player at the time.
He played for the Lakers — well, he'd been on the Lakers,
but by the time I was born he was on the Golden State Warriors.
So I was born into this basketball-loving family.
That's crazy.
My dad graduated from college — he was on the championship team
at Indiana University in 1976 and got drafted to the Lakers.
So we're thinking the seventies, before Magic was there.
He got a lot of assists to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Wow. So I was born into this basketball family.
Hold on — Lakers, like that is the legacy team of the seventies, eighties, nineties.
What era of the Lakers did your dad play?
My parents became Christians when I was eleven years old, through Bible Study Fellowship.
Are you familiar with that?
My wife is a teaching leader in Bible Study Fellowship, so yes, very much —
she's deep into that. She also works with the Gospel Coalition.
So yeah, definitely in the evangelical veins of all that.
A neighbor invited my mom to study the Gospel of John through Bible Study Fellowship.
My mom had never studied the Bible before, and through the first words
she's realizing Jesus isn't just like this dude — He is God.
And I realized, whoa, my vision of what Christianity was
is way different than what the Bible is showing.
And I actually need to believe in Jesus and be born again.
She became a believer through the study of Scripture.
About a year later I became a believer —
and certainly wouldn't have thought I'd be on a Bible translation committee,
which is so cool because it's like, wow, God changes people's lives
and brings them to salvation.
And really, it changes whole family lives through the study of God's Word.
My dad became a believer a year later —
he also got invited to study John by a neighbor through Bible Study Fellowship.
I was growing up and growing in my faith, and I was a basketball player,
trying to be a college player, and ended up kind of veering away from the Lord
in my late teen years. But the Lord graciously broke me back to himself.
Ended up at a liberal arts Christian college for the second half of my college years.
Again, it was through studying God's Word that —
the way I'd think about it — someone who'd been completely depleted of life
as I was pursuing the things of the world, coming back to the Lord.
One of the ways that life started coming back to me:
I was just finding life as I was studying God's Word,
and before I knew it, this turned into a call to teach God's Word in the church.
Fast forward — after a few years as a youth pastor, I felt called to do a PhD in Old Testament.
Isaiah was my specialty, and now here I am.
Wow — fifteen or sixteen years of being a full-time Old Testament professor.
My first three years were down under in Australia, which was a great experience —
kind of in a more post-Christian environment, training ministers.
And now here at Wheaton College, this is my twelfth year.
So here we are. It's been a long, unexpected but beautiful journey to get here.
One of my struggles in my earlier pursuits was that studying the Bible in an academic context
sort of bifurcated from engaging with God and His Word in my experience.
It doesn't sound like that was the case for you — they kind of commingled.
How did you find the academic pursuit of the Bible and the Word of God,
but also God Himself, and not lose those two along the way?
Wow, Dan, great question.
The way I just told my story, it sounds like it was a really neat, easy,
close-to-God relationship — up and to the right.
But those early years of reading the Bible where I was first getting academic training
were some of the sweetest years, because I was reading in a way
that was very much intertwined with engaging with God as a person
and just needing God's Word for my life.
As I got more and more academic study, I could understand the Bible more —
I could explain, oh yeah, this is what Isaiah is trying to say here,
this is what Paul is trying to say here.
I had a more confident read on how to understand Scripture in the original context
and situate that in the whole story of biblical theology.
But I think what gradually began to happen was I became adrift
in terms of that personal interactive engagement with the Lord as I was reading Scripture.
I don't think I ever felt content with that.
There was always a yearning, a dissatisfaction, a longing
to recover some of that intimacy that I had more at the start of the journey.
To be a little bit nerdy — there's a philosopher who talks about
this movement toward your "second naivete."
And I think that — how do you, let's say you love John...
The idea being, you've gone through all the critical questions,
maybe you've wrestled and struggled with the academic and historical questions,
but you come out the other side still trusting the Lord.
It's almost like a second childlike trust, but informed by having wrestled through things.
And I think that's the journey I've been on —
where I've come back to reading the Bible as someone engaging with the living God,
not just analyzing an ancient text.
And those two things, I've come to believe, are not opposed.
They go together.
And for me, a lot of that was recovered through spiritual direction,
just finding ways to be intentional about bringing the devotional
and the academic together in my own reading.
So I don't want to give the impression it was seamless — it was a real journey.
But I'm grateful that there is a way to be a rigorous scholar
and also someone who is genuinely reading to encounter God.
And I think part of what has helped is having community around that.
Whether it's colleagues who share that kind of orientation,
or just personally having disciplines in place.
And I think about my students —
I want them to see that it's possible to go deep academically
and still come out the other side with a vital faith.
That's something I feel a real burden for in my teaching.
And really, it changes whole family lives through the study of God's Word.
So tell me more about the Old Testament — how did you come to specialize in Isaiah specifically?
It really grew out of that early love of just reading Scripture for life.
Isaiah is such a rich book — it's like a library within the library.
And as I began to see how it points to Christ,
I just found myself drawn deeper and deeper into it.
And as I've gone deeper, the connections to the New Testament
and to Jesus just keep becoming more evident.
Isaiah 53 alone — the Suffering Servant passages —
are so profound in how they point to the cross.
So Isaiah became my home base, academically.
But I also teach on other books — Ruth has become a real love of mine,
partly because of its connections to the story of redemption
and how God works through ordinary people.
Right to left — this ancient script.
There was just this romantic feel of learning Hebrew that drew me in.
That puts you in touch with the culture of the Old Testament.
And I did pretty good in the classes too — that helped.
But yeah, there's this mixture of just really having been blessed
through studying the Old Testament and loving Hebrew when I first was learning it.
Married with the idea of, well, some of my most pressing questions about the Bible are in the Old Testament.
So if I'm going to spend time somewhere, let's camp out there.
Maybe it will bless the church somehow.
So you've carried forward on that — now what, twenty-five years knowing Hebrew?
Actually it was in 2001 that I took my first semester of Hebrew.
So yeah, it's been a beautiful journey.
And we're recording this in 2026 — just for your listener.
I've seen in the popular Christian culture that Tim McKee with the Bible Project
has done a lot of good work to bring Hebrew back into the dialogue of the church —
and that's commendable.
He was up at Wisconsin studying.
There was an amazing Hebrew program there that's since been discontinued,
but then he studied in Israel for a year or two as well.
As you went through Hebrew studies, there is an overlap that's not just within the Christian tradition,
but within Judaism as well.
How do you intersect with that, and how does that affect your work?
Was there a point when that became more pertinent to your academic work?
Great question. I think there are a couple ways to think about that.
One is at the interpersonal level — there's a sense where when you're a Christian
who's studying the Hebrew Bible, you're aware that you're a bit of a foreigner
in somebody else's homeland.
And so as you're interpreting, you're always mindful of whether the reading
and interpretation you're giving is not just jumping ahead too quickly
to make exclusively Christian claims.
Eventually one would want to see all of the Old Testament in light of Christ, in my view —
and I have a book on God's Messiah in the Old Testament, so that tracks.
But we'd also want to do real service to what is being said in the plain meaning of the text.
One thing that's happened, surprisingly, is I've found that a lot of Jewish scholars
have appreciated my work.
I wouldn't say that was my goal when I set out — I didn't even know if that would be possible.
But I think the careful attention to the text itself, in light of a respect for the scriptures —
I think there's been appreciation.
Another thing that happens from time to time is Messianic Jewish folks will invite me to come and talk.
I remember one instance — there was a ministry up on the North Shore of Chicago,
which is a largely Jewish area,
and they asked me to speak on Jewish and Christian understandings of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah.
What was really striking to me, I just gave an opening to clarify what passages we're talking about,
and a woman raised her hand.
She said, "I just want to ask — is what you were just talking about in the Tanakh?"
And she named it as Prophet Yeshayahu.
It was just a striking moment —
having spent time in Israel's scriptures to accurately say what they're saying,
it created an opportunity just to present what God's Word is saying.
And the correspondence to Jesus as the Suffering Servant
is one of the most remarkable connections from the Hebrew Bible to Jesus.
It's created some really unique moments where you're constantly asking,
am I dealing respectfully, accurately, and really well with this text?
So that if a Jewish person who wasn't a believer in Christ saw what I was doing,
they're like, yeah, you're handling this text well —
even if they might not agree with the ultimate connection I might make with Christ.
So it's been a lovely and enriching journey.
After Robert Alter, I really don't know many Jewish scholar names.
Are there other Jewish scholars who have helped build your appreciation for the Old Testament?
Great question. There's a scholar, a guy named John Levison,
and he wrote a book called Sinai and Zion —
kind of an entry into the Hebrew Bible where he looks at the history revolving around
Mount Sinai and Mount Zion as a way to engage with Scripture.
In a way that I think revealed to me this bigger vision — when we talk about
the mountain of the Lord at Mount Zion, it talks about Mount Zion
having streams kind of coming out of it in Ezekiel's vision.
What he captures from Jewish tradition is this view of Zion
as like the belly button or umbilical cord of the entire world.
And he connects that back to Genesis 2 and 3 with the garden,
where you have streams coming out of the garden —
and it just begins impressing upon me this theme within the Old Testament
that the place where God dwells is the source where all of life springs from.
And that's, of course, what we see in Jesus — this source of living waters.
And in the end, in Revelation, we see these streams alongside the New Jerusalem.
So Levison has really opened my eyes to many things.
He's also written on belief in resurrection within the Old Testament.
Sometimes among more reformed Jews these days, you'll hear that the Old Testament
doesn't teach about belief in an afterlife or resurrection.
But there are numerous texts that point to belief in the afterlife within the Hebrew Bible
that he deals with — and for good reason.
The vast majority of people around Jesus' time who were Jews held to that belief.
It was the Sadducees who didn't.
So I think what it does is ground us — me speaking as a Gentile believer —
is remembering you've been grafted into a story, into a family.
You're like an adopted pilgrim person, into this journey.
And that we encounter a Jesus who's very much living out of a Jewish context.
For some Christians, you ask, why did it matter that Jesus was Jewish?
They would really struggle to know why.
Why wasn't he born, say, in Rome as a Roman?
Why did he have to be Jewish?
And if you go back to Abraham very clearly, you see —
well, God made a promise that it would be through Abraham's offspring
that all nations of the earth would be blessed eventually.
That would include a Davidic king.
It mattered that Jesus came as one who was of the bloodline of Abraham and of David.
Hence how the Gospel of Matthew opens:
"This is the Son of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the son of Abraham."
This is an interview, not the Dan Ehrman show, so you're not allowed to be quiet!
It's fantastic to see how those academic pursuits have practical implications for the church —
and that even speaks into our apologetics, like you were just sharing.
You also teach hermeneutics as part of your work, is that correct?
Hermeneutics — yeah, that was a BSF mix-up on my part.
But I meant to say hermeneutics.
In teaching hermeneutics, you're teaching folks to rightly interpret and apply God's Word
in the context of teaching and preaching and within the academy.
You have not only a mix of Jewish scholarship that is not Christian,
but then you also have a whole mix academically where there may not be a high view of Scripture,
or fidelity to Jesus as Lord, or the Trinity.
So how do you approach those as both useful resources,
but also guide folks toward engaging with the God of the Bible
in accordance with a Christian statement of faith?
That's a great question. I'd say for me as a scholar,
I've never really been driven by trying to make sure everyone likes what I say.
And the beauty of being at a place like Wheaton College is I can just teach
and operate out of convictions that I share wholeheartedly.
But that doesn't mean we don't engage with and benefit from those who may hold different beliefs.
I think my starting point, when I try to guide students in developing an approach
to biblical interpretation, is asking the question of what actually is the nature of the Bible,
and how can we develop an approach to reading the Bible that fully aligns with the nature of what you're reading?
For instance, part of the nature of the Bible is it's literarily masterful —
it uses genres to convey meaning, it uses intertextual allusions.
And that's a lot of what Bible Project does — showing how different verses allude to previous verses.
We need to read the Bible literarily.
We also want to recognize that part of the nature of the Bible is it's historical.
God didn't choose to write in such a way that was totally detached from historical contexts.
So if we want to read the Bible according to its nature,
we need to attend to the historical realities within which these scriptures are written.
Craig Keener has this beautiful quote in a book he wrote.
He said, if God has chosen to speak to us in ancient forms,
then to understand what He has said we need to understand those ancient forms.
Learning from those who maybe don't share your views.
I think one other thing I'd say about benefiting from the insights of others
is not just scholars, but thinking about how we in the West might have a certain way
of seeing things in Scripture.
Whereas if I learn from a sister or brother from the Global South
or from the East in Asia, they may actually help me see things in Scripture that I was missing.
And I think of a story where I have a Guatemalan friend,
and he said to me just in passing once,
"I don't know how anyone could read the book of Ruth without just thinking about immigration."
And I'm like, I teach on Ruth every year and don't really talk much about immigration.
But oh yeah — that is all over the book of Ruth.
And all of a sudden you have these new insights
that come simply from benefiting from folks with other cultural backgrounds.
So before we started recording, I always ask folks if there's anything we want to talk about —
and one of those things was the NLT translation process and the theory.
And you were like, oh, I have an example from the book of Ruth and how it applies to the NLT.
So since you brought up Ruth, let's hit that now —
what did the study of Ruth look like both in process
and in terms of the implications for modifying a Bible translation?
Great question. Let me back up a little and share what my perception of the NLT was
before I joined this committee — and then what I've actually seen it to be now.
Somewhere along the line — I think it was a mixture of the churches I went to
and my seminary training, which is funny because the seminary I attended
had several members of the New Living Translation Committee on it, which I didn't know at the time.
But somewhere along the line I heard the New Living Translation is not an accurate Bible translation —
it's just a paraphrase, you can't take it seriously.
So therefore you need to read whatever other translation they were recommending.
And so I frankly lived with that assumption for about twenty years.
Then I get an email from one of my heroes in the field of Old Testament studies,
a guy named John Oswalt.
He said, "Andy, can we talk on the phone tomorrow?
I want to ask you about something I think you'd be interested in."
And he asked me to take over his role on the New Living Translation Committee,
overseeing the revision of the Prophets.
Here was my hero — a wonderful Christian scholar — who was asking me to do this.
First I was honored, but second, I was shocked to know
that he had actually been part of the New Living Translation Committee.
I'm like, if he was part of this, I must have it wrong about the New Living Translation.
And as I've been a part of things, I think that what most people don't know
is that this is not a paraphrase.
This comes from a group of the top evangelical scholars in Old and New Testament,
wrestling deeply with two things:
first, what did these scriptures mean in their original languages with accuracy?
And second, wrestling equally as hard — with the help of stylists —
how do we put that into English words in a way that is actually understandable
for your average reader?
And there's something that gets missed about this.
People will say, well, I thought translation is just about moving word-for-word
from one language to the next.
No — that's never really how translation works,
because different language systems operate with different ways they convey meaning.
And so the aim of a good translation is to make the original understandable
to the target audience in a way that's conveying things the way
someone would have tried to convey if they were speaking today.
So as I've been part of things, I've become a big fan of the NLT.
What's made me even more of a fan are two things.
One is that from very early on, they made it clear
that the aim of the New Living Translation is not to act like there's no need for other translations.
There can be benefit from other translations that have a different philosophy.
And I have loved that spirit.
While also growing in conviction that what we're doing is actually really good for the church —
with this combination of wrestling with accuracy alongside understandability.
But the second thing that has increased my love for the NLT is my kids.
One night I'd been reading the Bible to them,
and they were having difficulty understanding what I was reading.
So I switched to the NLT, and my kids' ability to understand what I'm reading
as I'm reading Scripture just changed.
They can read and understand and engage with the story.
So I love this level of understandability that we're wrestling with.
Let me give you a couple examples from Ruth.
These aren't necessarily new changes we've come up with,
but they illustrate what the New Living Translation is trying to do.
In Ruth chapter one, we're told that Boaz went to the town gate and took a seat there,
and just then the family redeemer he had mentioned came by.
I'm reading here from the NLT, where it says "the family redeemer."
In Hebrew, that's just one word: Redeemer.
And some translations choose to translate it that way.
The typical person in our context today will have no clue what a Redeemer is.
So the NLT brings more understandability to the term by translating it as "the family redeemer."
By adding that word "family," there's a greater grasp, a more accurate understanding
of what this word Redeemer was meaning —
thinking about someone who's operating within a family context,
a relative who is bringing about redemption — in this case, for Naomi and Ruth.
It's accurate, but also more understandable.
Another example — just as I was thinking about this,
we had a very long conversation about the end of Matthew chapter one,
where it talks about how Joseph, in the current version of the NLT,
did not have sexual relations with her.
And we wrestled with this,
and someone said, wow, when I hear "sexual relations," I think of Bill Clinton.
And we were all laughing, but of course we were dead serious.
Others were like, yeah, that's an issue.
And we began thinking about how to best convey this.
We moved away from "sexual relations."
At one point we were leaning toward just "he didn't have sex with her."
But then we thought about how actually the scriptures are very discreet
in how they talk about sex, in a way that kind of honors sex —
and even in that, the language used in Matthew 1.
And so we wrestled with it, and I think where we landed is
"he didn't sleep with her," which captures the idea well in both contexts.
And I was looking at Ruth chapter four, verse thirteen,
and in Hebrew it talks about how Boaz takes Ruth to become his wife.
In Hebrew it says, "and he went into her."
And that's what some translations say — because, hey, let's be accurate and use the verb bo.
Bo means "to go in."
"He didn't go into her" — that means nothing today.
No one would ever talk that way in English.
So how do you convey that in a way that's understandable?
And the NLT went with: "When he slept with her, the Lord enabled her to become pregnant."
So again, a decision to say, well, we're not thinking word-for-word
in this sort of literalistic, lexical way —
but we're thinking of how to convey the sense well in a way
that captures both the meaning and the original context and can be understood today.
So those are just a few little insights into the sort of things
we're wrestling with in the New Living Translation Committee.
Well, Dr. Abernethy, this has been fun to get a little window into that process,
into the heart of the scholars and the folks involved in it,
and the care that's being put to it.
And I just want to say thank you for making time to bring this in.
When I first walked in, I was like, you've got a lot of writing projects going on.
You're teaching, you're an assistant dean here,
and just a lot of irons in the fire.
And we're really thankful to have your work in this process.
It's a joy. When I first signed on to join the NLT,
one of my spiritual mentors — who I met with to discern whether this was something worth committing to —
he said, you know, this may end up being the most meaningful and important outworkings of your calling.
And I think most of us on the committee, as we think and talk about it,
view this as perhaps the most important, most weighty, most meaningful and valuable
outworkings of our calling.
So it's a real privilege to serve Tyndale House in this way —
but more ultimately to serve the Lord, stewarding His Word for future readers.
I'm so encouraged hearing you share, hearing your heart,
and getting a little glimpse of ways that God is moving and working.
Thank you for joining me here.
Yeah, thank you for having me on.
You've been hearing from Dr. Andrew Abernethy
here at Wheaton College, professor of Old Testament and author of a gajillion books and articles.
We'll have links to his profile and some of his work,
as well as to the NLT and the committee,
and encourage you to take a look, dig a little bit deeper,
and look under the hood of that process — the people involved —
and engage with God's Word, seeing Him and how He's speaking into each one of our lives.
He's a God who communicates, and creates, and is at work right now.
So Dr. Abernethy, thank you again. Blessings to you.