The English Standard Version
Explanation by Dr. Vern S. Poythress
The English
Standard Version is an essentially literal translation. It
strives to preserve the actual wording of the original whenever this
accurately conveys the meaning, but also strives to preserve the
literary excellence and readability associated with the historic
English Bible tradition represented by the KJV and RSV.
Accuracy
- Every verse has been checked
for accuracy to the original languages by evangelical scholars with
special expertise in each book.
- Inerrantist evangelicals make up the translation team.
- The ESV is a conservative revision of the RSV that fixes
the theological problems associated with the latter.
- Theological vocabulary and complexity of thought follow the
original, rather than being artificially limited in order to make it
easy for beginning readers.
- Where more than one reasonable interpretive option exists,
the ESV has tried to preserve the options by an English rendering that
allows for them all; or, where this is not possible, has put the more
probable option in the text and included the other option(s) in a
footnote.
- ESV endeavors to represent the autographic text as
accurately as can be determined by textual criticism. It usually
follows the MT in the OT and the standard Greek text of UBS in the NT,
but there are a few exceptions in difficult cases.
- Footnotes are added in cases where textual variations
create significant uncertainty and affect meaning.
- Key thematic words that reoccur throughout a book or a
number of books have, where feasible, been translated consistently, so
that concordant relations and thematic relations between passages are
more evident in English. NT quotations from the OT have been checked to
make sure that the correspondence is as clear in English as in the
original.
Literary excellence
- The ESV preserves cadences and
poetic diction of poetic portions, such as characterized the KJV and
the RSV.
- It preserves where feasible the familiarity of the historic
English Bible tradition from Tyndale, Geneva, KJV, RV, ASV, and RSV.
Contemporary English
- Obsolete English has been
replaced (for example, no "thee" or "thou" is left).
- English words that have changed meaning over time have been
inspected to see whether they need replacement.
- Male meanings in the original have been preserved in
translation, but the expression "any man" has been replaced by "anyone"
when the latter is the meaning of the original. The ESV is not
"gender-neutral," but conforms to the Colorado Springs Guidelines on
the issue of gender in English.
Copyright (c) 2002 by Vern Sheridan Poythress.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A
copy of the license can be found at the Free
Software Foundation website.