NLT Bible Translation Committee - Dr. Lynn Cohick

Show Notes

The New Living Translation was first published nearly 30 years ago and last updated in 2015. Today, a new generation of scholars is building on the work of the original team to review and refresh the translation. Dr. Lynn Cohick, a New Testament scholar, joins Dan Ehrman on The Church Around the World to share her experience in the review and revision process to ensure the New Living Translation remains accurate, understandable, and audibly enjoyable. She offers practical insights on keeping a familiar text fresh, recognizing how God works through his Word, helping the church navigate secondary issues, and unpacking the character and nature of God who has revealed himself in Scripture.

Lynn Cohick, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Director of Houston Theological Seminary. She has previously served at Northern Seminary, Denver Seminary, and Wheaton College. Dr. Cohick has authored eight books and Bible commentaries, co-hosts The Alabaster Jar Podcast, contributed to Every Woman’s Bible, and serves on the NLT Bible Translation Committee as Senior Translator for the Synoptic Gospels and Acts.

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Episode Links:
Lynn Cohick
New Living Translation
Every Woman’s Bible
The Alabaster Jar Podcast

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Creators and Guests

Host

Dan Ehrman

Director of Church Relations & Strategy - Tyndale House Publishers

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.

The Church Around the World — in conversation
with influential church leaders,

sharing how God is at work and equipping you
with practical insights for your ministry today.

From every tribe, language, and nation,
God is calling people to himself.

So join us as we look out to the fields
already ripe for harvest. Here is your host
for the Church Around the World, Dan Ehrman.

Welcome to the Church Around the World.
I'm Dan Ehrman. Honored to be joined today
by Dr. Lynn Cohick, who is the distinguished

professor of New Testament and the director
of the Houston Theological Seminary. And you
have worked at a whole number of seminaries.

You've been involved in fifty-odd publications
and all the rest. So thank you for taking
a little bit of time to connect with me here.

Oh, happy to do so. I love talking about
the Bible and the Church Around the World,
so I'm delighted to be here. Thank you, Dan.

Part of this initiative is with Tyndale House
Publishers putting together the New Living
Translation. You're one of the senior translators
on the review of the New Living Translation
that's underway.

And I am super excited that you are part of
that project. So maybe share a little — how
did you end up getting involved in working
on the NLT?

Well, it's a mystery miracle to me too, Dan.
I don't consider myself worthy to be on this
team, because there are just amazing scholars
on this team.

A couple of years ago I was invited to talk
with some of the senior people both at Tyndale
and on the senior editorial team.

One of the people, Dan Block, is an Old
Testament professor and a colleague of mine
from my time teaching at Wheaton College.
Terrific guy.

And I remember a lot of it started over a
lunch in the Chicago area, just finding out,
would I be interested?

Kind of what, as you mentioned, I have
published some things. And so my views on
the Bible and how I read the Bible — people
can read that.

And so just talking a bit, I thought, boy,
I'd love to invest my time in this project.

When I first — and here I'll get a little
bit of my history and why I'm so honored
to be part of the editorial team.

When I was in high school in the late
seventies, I came to faith and was given
a Living Bible.

Which is a precursor to the New Living
Translation. And it was so informative for
me — it helped make the Word of God come
alive. I could understand it.

It applied to me, I'll put it that way.
Not that I applied it, but it applied to me.

And so I've felt I owe a debt of gratitude
to the efforts that Tyndale has made along
the way for decades now in bringing the Word
of God to new believers.

But as I've grown in the faith, I've continued
to appreciate the New Living Translation as
a really solid, accurate, precise translation.

So it has academic rigor, right? I didn't
realize that when I was a high school student —
I could just understand it.

It helped me to enter into a world in the
New Testament that's two thousand years old.
But now I also, from my position as a scholar,
can see the intellectual rigor that goes into
producing the translation.

So I thought, wow, what a treat. I'm honored
to be a part of the group. I think a lot of
people struggle with associating the New Living
Translation with the Living Bible, because
the word "living" is in both.

And the NLT is a rigorous scholarly translation.
Ninety, now one hundred scholars have been
part of the process of putting that together.
Whereas the Living Bible was a paraphrase.

And it really changed the world of the
evangelical church back in the sixties and
seventies, where it was universally kind of
King James only and kind of archaic language.
And it helped set the table where there are
dozens of great Bible translations in English
now.

I believe the NLT is a great tool with that —
to really get after being accurate, understandable,
and audibly enjoyable in the process.

Yes, yes. And I would just echo that this
reflects the idea of doing good translations
that meet the needs of the world.

This reflects God's own demeanor. Here's
what I mean by that.

I'm a New Testament focused scholar and I
also love looking at the New Testament world
and the couple of centuries before the New
Testament, before Jesus. We can call it
Second Temple Judaism.

It's kind of after Ezra and Nehemiah, and
before Jesus — those two hundred fifty to
three hundred years. And in that time the
Greek language, thanks to Alexander the Great
and his conquering of much of the Mediterranean,
spread widely, and a lot of Jews began to
use the Greek language.

Especially those that lived in Alexandria,
Egypt at the time. There was a big thriving
Jewish community there. And they weren't
speaking Hebrew or Aramaic — they were
speaking Greek, and they wanted to hear
the Word of God.

So they translated it into Greek. And then
that becomes the Bible that the New Testament
takes around on their travels — right to
Corinth and Ephesus and Philippi and Rome.

And so now Paul or Peter can give the Word
of God. And actually in the synagogues they'll
read the Law and the Prophets in Greek.

And so anybody can hear the Word of God in
their heart language or mother tongue. It's
like a principle baked into the experience
of the people of God.

God wants us to know him — the Bible is his
self-revelation. So translation in and of
itself, I feel, is approved by God. It's
what God wants.

I saw one apologist speak recently about how
very few people — not even a rounding error
of people in the history of Christianity —
were both native Greek speakers and could
read and understand biblical Hebrew and
Aramaic. So all of us are coming to this as
foreigners. And yet we have a God who shifts
from being a foreign god into delighting in
knowing us and making himself known through
his Word. And so there's a long history of
translation.

One of the things I like to share as I talk
about Tyndale and what we do is that the
New Living Translation, when it got its
impetus back in the nineteen nineties, was
built around taking some of the best practices
from Wycliffe Bible Translators for global
translation and reapplying them back to
English — so that it's not a derivative
translation from the King James or even
William Tyndale, going back five hundred
years.

But trying to go back to those original
languages and speak to the heart of Christians
today. And in some ways I think the New
Living Translation is actually more relevant
right now in the evangelical world than it
was thirty years ago when it first came out.

And right now our committee is using the
two-point-zero version, if I could say it
that way — the NLT that was produced in
twenty fifteen. We're reexamining that.

And I have to say, every time we meet,
someone will make a comment about how solid
and good the twenty fifteen text is. This
is not like we're making all these significant
changes — not at all. It's the tweaking,
the fine-tuning, which you always want to do.

It is the Word of God. You want to make sure
that the English we're using now in twenty
twenty-five carries the same meaning. Our
English language changes a lot — the culture
shifts really quickly.

Just last year they recognized like five or
six thousand new words into English vocabulary,
and the evolution of that is happening at a
very aggressive pace. Not that you want it
to reflect stuff that won't have meaning
ten years from now, but also trying to speak
to the heart of how God is revealing himself.

When I first came to work at Tyndale, I
remember hearing a presentation about the
NLT and some of the philosophy. And then
we started looking at a little project with
pastors and started getting into the actual
process of what you do as translators.

And it shifted from a presentation where you
think, "how nice — I can regurgitate this,"
to it's like swimming in the ocean where
there's not really rules, there's kind of
principles, there's some history, and some
of it is like you've got to feel the wave.
Talk about that dynamic as you approach
translating the Bible on a team.

Well, one thing I will say — all of us do
our homework. And there is a lot of homework.

Let's say I'm doing the Gospel of Luke right
now. That's my assignment. And I try to give
myself an hour for each chapter.

Right now I'm not doing a fresh translation
— I'm just reading through, looking at has
there been any new information that has
emerged, new manuscripts, new arguments,
new ways of saying things in English?

That's what I'm looking at. And then at the
same time, I have two others who are walking
that same process with me, but they're doing
it separately on their own.

They then send their suggestions to me and
I collate them. I read through them, collate
them, we share all of that, and then I send
it back to Tyndale and they go through it.

They look at some of the questions — if we
had a question, they respond. If we have an
idea, they give feedback. Then they send
that back to me and I meet with the team,
the three of us looking at how we feel about
their answers, their suggestions.

Is there a question that is kind of a global
question? Is there a question that will
require the whole team? Is there a question
that refers back to the Old Testament — do
we need to bring the Old Testament people
in on this specific issue?

And so it's a lot of work, but it's all good
work. It's like digging into the biblical
text — the syntax, the grammar, but also
the historical context. What's actually going
on here? What is the author — in this case,
Luke — trying to communicate?

Then I get to read what everybody else has
done. Someone's working on Ruth, someone's
working on Deuteronomy. Then I look at that
and what do I see from a New Testament
perspective?

We're all reading each other's work, but
we're also really responsible for the
particular work we bring to the group. And
so then we meet for a while — usually February
or March — and then we have a whole week where
they feed us very well, which is good because
we start first thing in the morning and go
right through.

But again, it's all good work. But by the
end, when dinner time rolls around, all of
us — even the young people — are tired.
Dan, I am not one of them.

So there's an academic side to what you're
doing — that's the task in some ways. But
in the midst of that, are there moments where
you see insights where it's almost like the
Holy Spirit is speaking to you in the process?

Building into you spiritually beyond just
the academic. Absolutely. That's what
differentiates this work from the academic
process I'm more used to from the academy.

I remember my first meeting — when we started,
we sang a number of hymns. The good old
fashioned hymns that are so theologically
rich. And without instruments.

So it was just these voices in all the
harmonies. It was fabulous. And it just set
the tone. And that tone has remained consistent
in all of the meetings.

We never lose sight of the fact that this
will be read in church and that God's people
in their moments of worship will be reading
this.

And so when we make a suggestion for change,
a Tyndale member will read the verse — maybe
a passage — so that we can hear, does this
sound good? Will this work? Because you
can sometimes translate something and it's
very awkward, each language has its own
rhythms.

So we're trying to respect the Greek meaning
for sure — we want that precision. But we're
saying it in English so that English readers
sense a beauty to it. And it flows.

If it doesn't flow, if it kind of catches
you — you feel like you're stumbling, you
can't pronounce it well — then we say, okay,
let's sit on this a little bit longer. We
work hard enough to keep the precision of
the Greek or the Hebrew and the beauty in
the English. So we don't rush through it.

That's something else that has really impressed
me, because it feels like very important
work and so we're not rushing through it.
Exegetically accurate and powerful in English.

Oh, that's good. Well, I want to turn back
to a little bit of your journey where I read
online that you had done some work in Africa.

And then you were at Wheaton College for
about almost twenty years. And then at Denver
Seminary, Northern Seminary, and now at
Houston Theological Seminary.

The last eight years you've been at four
different institutions. What is that dynamic
within just being in the academy and the
whole world kind of shifting in that season?

I don't know you well, so I'm a little out
of bounds asking this, but — when I look at
academics, it seems like people work at one
or two places their whole career. And you're
either being jostled around or bouncing around.
What has that been like for you?

Thank you. As a professor I spent most of
my time at Wheaton College and loved it.

But towards the end there, I got a little
bit into administration. And so it was as
an administrator — as the provost — that I
went out to Denver Seminary.

And then we had some health concerns and
realities with my family, who are located
on the East Coast. And it just felt better
to move closer, within driving distance.

So we moved back to the Chicago area, where
I also had some family at the time. And so
we were there for a little while, as you
point out.

And it really helped me during that time.
At that seminary I was also in administration
but started to pick up more teaching, and I
realized I really love the classroom — the
seminary classroom.

And so an opportunity opened up to just
focus on that. What do you love about the
seminary classroom?

Well, I think it's that it feels like there's
a direct connection with the church. I mean,
I also love Christian higher ed. I love
teaching undergrads there.

I'm very committed to the liberal arts and
all those things. And I do give time as a
volunteer to higher education — I serve on
a Christian university board. So I still care
very much about that. But in terms of my
teaching,

teaching at a seminary feels like there's a
more direct connection to the actual life
of the church. And maybe having taught for
a number of decades now and written some
commentaries, I feel like maybe I have a
little bit to offer the church more directly
than when I started my academic career at
Wheaton.

So at Houston Christian University, they
have Houston Theological Seminary. And one
of my friends started the Doctor of Ministry
program. And then within a year, moved to
take an opportunity overseas that he had
always hoped would happen.

And life is always complicated, but the Lord
just opened these doors for me to pick up
the reins from my friend and continue his
Doctor of Ministry program. And it's been
going great.

I really enjoy it — I learn so much, because
teaching is a two-way street. I was just
right before hopping on this podcast, I was
talking with a student who's laying out their
dissertation. I love it.

Yesterday I was talking with a student about
what they're hoping to do. It's that part
of the academic year where they're getting
ready to write their proposals, and I teach
that class. So they're telling me their ideas.

It's like, "Oh God, you are just moving in
these students — and through them will be
equipping the church." And it's just exciting
to be a small part of that.

That's awesome. I love it. Well, Dr. Cohick,
I'm going to touch the third rail briefly
here — and nothing you haven't talked about
before.

But for so much of the church, the role of
women in ministry is a shibboleth one way
or another. For me, I kind of fall back to
when I was sixteen years old.

One of my dad's clients built church buildings.
I grew up kind of in the fundamentalist world.
And it was kind of a Pentecostal-leaning
church.

And I was leery walking in theologically
with all my sixteen-year-old wisdom. And I
remember seeing people worshiping God, lifting
up the name of Jesus, preaching God's Word —
and God palpably there and present with his
people.

And I remember saying, if God is going to
be present here, my theological predisposition
can sit down in the presence of God with
his people.

And so I take these issues lightly in the
sense that they're not primary things. And
yet so much of the church, we can tend to
make a secondary thing offense — a shibboleth
— where if God is entering into fellowship
in these spaces, how do we navigate this
well and go forward with a better vision
for the church?

Thank you. I guess I'll say a couple of
things with that. I think you're absolutely
right that there are groups within
evangelicalism that elevate the answer to
the question about women serving in leadership
roles within the church.

They make the answer to that question really
an answer about whether you believe the Bible
is true. So they've connected the question
of "is the Bible true" with "how do you feel
about this particular doctrine?"

And I would like for those two things to be
separate. In church history, we used to fight
about — not us in the United States, but
think about the Thirty Years' War. They're
always fighting in Europe about something.

In the medieval and early enlightenment
period. And often it would be, are you
Catholic or are you Protestant? Martin Luther
baptized babies — so did Calvin. But a lot
of people today say, no, you can't do that.

Back in the day, sometimes people even lost
their life based on where they stood on
those doctrines. So I feel like it is a
Christian predisposition, sadly, that we

sometimes pick doctrines and then make them
the boundary markers for who is truly a
Christian. I mean, I have my opinions on
communion or Eucharist. I think it's fine
for me to hold a position and for another
family member of mine to have a different
position.

And we might go to different churches — that's
fine. I don't draw from that that my family
member is not a Christian, not a believer.
So I would say turning the temperature down
would be a real help.

But to do that, I think we need to separate
the question of, are women able to serve in
the highest forms of leadership within the
church? Because most churches will say women
can serve as a Sunday school director —
at least of children's Sunday school.

So anyway, I think it has to do with authority.
And I've also thought that a lot of times
what we call the women's question is really
a question about how men see themselves.

Aristotle designed a system where female was
the opposite of male, and male was the pinnacle,
was the norm, was the standard. And then the
female was the opposite of that.

And so to understand male, you just looked
at female. And I feel like Aristotle's views
have certainly shaped the West in a lot of
ways. But when I read Genesis, I think, man —
they're not opposites. They're both made in
God's image.

They are to work together to tend the garden
and to raise a family. And there's not this
real concern about, men should be good with
numbers and women should be good with baking.
We divide up these roles — and in our family,
my husband is both good with numbers and
with baking, but I can mow the grass.
I'm really good at mowing the grass, I really am.

In fact, at one point my husband — I was
obviously pregnant, five or six months —
but I love mowing the grass, it just smells
nice, you have these nice straight lines.
Anyway, he finally said, don't do that
because the neighbors are judging me.
Like, why is he sending his pregnant wife
out to mow the grass?

Anyway, there's a freedom — I see a freedom
in Genesis for women to mow the grass and
men to bake and cook in the kitchen. So I
think if we live in that freedom, where we
try to do things together and celebrate each
individual's talents and callings, I think
that would go a long way, Dan — to be able
to say, well, let's now turn to the biblical
text. What are we hearing? What are we seeing?

And then of course, as you say, Dan, I have
talked a lot and thought a lot about some
of those texts that seem directly related to
our topic. But once the temperature is down,
you can have a really good conversation.

Yes. I think it's so imperative to move into
relationship with people and have those
conversations, because it's so easy to
pigeonhole someone and make up a position
for what you view the other as — straw man
it — and it just isn't helpful.

And to me, it becomes, can we move into
relationship? And when you do that, you look
for the presence of the Holy Spirit in the
other person. There's an element — I've found,
even in business, where I've always worked
between business and ministry — it's incumbent
on me today to put myself before the Lord
at the cross. And that becomes a common point.

And when I do that, there can be a bridge
of trust that the Lord can move and work.
That's not something you can sales-tactic
your way into or manufacture — it's just
artifice. It's substantive in the deepest way.

Absolutely. And I think the loss when we
aren't able to do as you just described is
not only a personal loss, but the perception
then by those who are not believers is —
rightly so — "Look, Jesus asks us to love.
Why are you guys screaming at each other
for things that are hard for people to
understand?" That aren't part of the deeper
biblical exegetical conversation.

And I think, boy, that is something Christians
should take seriously — are we really
representing the generosity of Jesus, who
looked up at Zacchaeus in the tree and said,
hey, I'm coming to dinner at your place?
Jesus being courageous there to say, I know
that you're interested and I'm going to be
with you. And I'm going to sit down and talk
with you. It's hard in our day of social
media and instant likes or dislikes.

It's going to take some courageous people
to try and break down this wall that we've
put up. But we've still got to try.

I want to shift back to the Bible. Looking
at your CV, you have like three different
commentaries on the book of Ephesians alone —
kind of in a rut here.

Well, and so I want to talk about that —
you've done the academic work, you've gone
deep. You've probably gone through every
single word in Greek a hundred times over.
Is there still a moment where you can set
the academic work aside and shift into how
the Holy Spirit still moves and works in your
heart? How does he draw you deeper into love
with the Lord when you revisit Ephesians 2
for the ten thousandth time?

Yes. Well, I think one of the ways it stays
alive for me is that I teach.

And so each time you teach — with students'
questions or with different audiences, whether
it's a Doctor of Ministry group or an MA
level group, or people doing Bible study for
their church, teachers and attorneys and
entrepreneurs —

they all bring themselves to the text,
however conscious they might or might not
be of that. And so their questions get me
thinking. "I had not thought of it that way."
And that reminds me over and over again that
the Word of God is alive, separate from my
exegesis of it.

I do firmly believe — and all the people on
the NLT translation team — we all believe
that authorial intent, what Paul was getting
at, what Isaiah was getting at, is really
important.

And so we strive exegetically with reasonable
methods — all kinds of exegetical methods,
hermeneutical systems, all that good stuff —
so that we can discern the communication
that Isaiah is giving us, that Paul is giving
us, that Matthew is giving us.

But there's also at a conscious level a
recognition that this is also the Word of
God — that it is powerful, that it is not
contained by our writing it in English.

I go back and think of First Corinthians,
especially the first two chapters. They are
pushing Paul to have more oratorical skill,
a little bit more flourish, to be more
charismatic — if I use that language — in
a general sense.

And Paul says, I came, I determined to know
nothing among you but Jesus Christ and him
crucified. Like, that's my message. I am
not going to get off track. And he also says,
I didn't come with these lofty words of wisdom.

Lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its
power — the power that defeated sin and
death. How can we empty that?

Well, Paul says I can, if I insert my own
human wisdom, my own self-aggrandizement —
if you start noticing me as an orator rather
than noticing that I'm giving you the gospel
of the crucified and risen Lord — that weakens
the cross.

I just go back to that and think it's an
amazing phrase and a sobering one, especially
for someone who's a translator. It always
has to be — this is a living word. I'll just
put it that way. It's living. Because it's
the Word of God.

So in my own devotional life, I try to read
through the Bible each year. That keeps me
in different spaces. I will confess that I
don't always read every verse in Leviticus —
I'll just put that right out there. When
I'm in that spot, I might just jump to the
New Testament or a Psalm. But at least in
principle, I'm reading through.

That's another way to kind of keep it alive
to me — it's the whole thing. Not just
zeroing in on Ephesians, but looking at not
even just the whole New Testament, but the
whole of God's Word to God's people.

And it becomes part of biblical theology too,
where your understanding of Ephesians is
informed by the canon. Exactly.

Well, and philosophically — God has revealed
himself through his Word. What does that say
about the character and nature of God? And
what does that say about us as made in his
image, that his Word is his mechanism of
communicating himself?

Yes, yes. At a very basic level, God desires
a relationship. He is the Creator. We are
his creatures. So he designed us for
relationship and then created us so that
communication can be understood and deepened.
Jesus represents God to us. And if you have
seen Jesus, you've seen the Father.

And that's — I know for myself I can forget
how momentous that truth is. I don't know
of another faith that can claim something
like that.

And the implications of God desiring us,
wanting to be in relationship with us —
certainly in the biblical period, with the
pagans, the idolaters. I don't know a neutral
way to talk about it. They had no idea that
their gods, their deities, their goddesses,
were capricious, were demanding, were obtuse.

They had no idea. They looked at the stars —
is there a comet? How do we understand the
comet? They would look at the innards of birds
to find out, are we going to win this battle?
I mean, they had no idea. So stressful.
But God chose to reveal who he is to his people.

I mean, it's just — so in our day and age
when we have a lot of anxiety, this fundamental
truth — that God desires a relationship with
us, that he sees us — not the us we were,
or that we will be, or that he's going to
fix up or any of that, but just right now,
us — and he's there. That's so wonderful.

People can access that through his Word.
And that's where the NLT comes in — why
we feel our work is so weighty. Because we
recognize that's one way that God speaks.
It's obviously not the only way — he's God —
but it is an important way.

And what a message of hope for people in
the world today when things just seem like
they are spinning faster and more crazy.
I'm always blown away that God moved — just
the very act of creating and us being, and
the overflow of who he is in that and in
Christ himself.

It just breathes substance and meaning into
the mundane — that there is no ordinary, but
all of life is a gift and extraordinary and
a joy.

Well, as you look forward toward the New
Living Translation project — you still have
several years of work ahead on this — what
are you looking forward to as you go through
the remainder of the review process?

I'm looking forward to the actual exegetical
work. I really do enjoy that close reading
of the text. And then equally, I enjoy the
close reading in community.

I really love being at such a high level of
scholarship — but scholarship committed to
the church. The richness of the work that
comes out, and also the richness of the
relationships that develop.

So selfishly, just for me, I love the
relationships that are being built. But I
think it's because of these relationships
that we work together — that helps us to
produce a translation that's precise,
exegetically accurate and also beautiful
in English.

I love it. Dr. Lynn Cohick, just an honor
to speak with you — and exciting to see God
continue to move and work in your life and
your scholarship in this partnership with
Tyndale, with the New Living Translation.

Thank you so much for making time here.
Thank you so much, Dan, for the invitation.
It was great to visit with you.

You've been listening to the Church Around
the World. I'm Dan Ehrman. God bless you.

You've been listening to the Church Around
the World with Dan Ehrman, discovering how
God is working in and through the church.
Practical takeaways and insights from this
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