Since this translator supposes that the Holy Spirit also inspired the word order and grammar of the New Testament, this translator strives to maintain the same inspired sentence structure as the original, wherever possible.

   A seemingly necessary exception arises since Greek employs case endings which help Greek readers identify what function a particular noun has in sentence.  The result is that such words can be placed almost anywhere in a Greek sentence without confusion on the part of the Greek reader.  English does not have this advantage.  An English reader typically identifies the function of a noun in a sentence by word order.  A typical English sentence will have: subject, verb, indirect object (if any), and direct object.  To avoid confusion this translation presents this word order in most cases.

  That being said, English does use participles, and this translation translates participles as participles whenever possible to differentiate them from main verbs.

  This translation translates present tense verbs as ongoing present action.

  This translation translates imperfect verbs as verbs of ongoing past action.

  This translation translates perfect verbs with the addition of “lastingly” to indicate that this past action has ongoing results.

  This translation pays close attention to EVERY word, including the little words.

  Particular attention is paid to translating conjunctions and prepositions, according to their standard range of usage in the Greek language of that context.

  Greek prepositions themselves may have multiple meanings, depending on the context.  Furthermore, prepositions are followed by nouns which may be in one or more cases.  Depending on the case of the following noun, each preposition typically has a range of meanings, depending also on context.  This translation strives to translate each preposition as accurately as possible, given the context of the prepositional phrase.

  While some languages have no definite articles (i.e. Chinese), both Greek and English do use them; and, they do convey meaning in both languages.  The Holy Spirit chose to use a language for the New Testament that used definite articles.  A principle of this translation is to pay attention to such details.

  Often a Greek noun will be preceded by a definite article and followed by an adjective or a possessive pronoun.  Many translations simply put the adjective or possessive pronoun before the noun and ignore the definite article.  This translator includes the definite article before the noun and appends either a relative clause or an appositive after the noun to include the adjective.  Thus, ὁ υἱός μου (literally, ‘the son my’) is translated not as ‘my son’ but, rather, as ‘the son that is mine’; and τὴν παραβολὴν ταύτην (literally, ‘the parable this’), is translated ‘the parable – namely, this one’.

  Occasionally, Greek will use definite articles as abbreviations for nouns previously identified.  In these instances, the definite article appears with the noun in italics behind it.

  Greek has a versatile particle transliterated as ‘de’.  When it appears alone (typically after the first word of the sentence) it is usually translated as ‘now’.  Although not a perfect fit. ‘now’ has a range of meanings similar to that of ‘de’.

  When contrasting things in English, we often use a couple of prepositional phrases – “On the one hand, . . . On the other hand, . . .”  Greek has two particles (‘μὲν …, δὲ …’) which accomplish the same thing more elegantly.  They are translated with our English equivalents.

   In this translation, if there is an English word which precisely captures the gist of the Greek word, even though this English word might be somewhat obscure to the present generation, it is used.  It is deemed better to let the reader learn a new word than to use an inferior word in the translation.

   A deliberate effort has been made to translate a Greek word and its cognates consistently with the same English word and its cognates, whenever possible, especially if the various meanings of an English word overlap with the meanings of the Greek word.

   This translation uses as many words as necessary to precisely capture the sense of the original language.

  To make a historical account more vivid, sometimes the writer used what is called a ‘historic present verb’.  Mark, for example, often employs this literary device.  Such verbs are translated as ‘historic present verbs’.

  When relating historical events, New Testament writers will often connect one event to another with the conjunction ‘And,”.  For example, Mark’s style was to begin many sentences with the word ‘And,’, seemingly imitating the Hebrew method of relating successive historical events.  This translation seeks to translate this style.

  You will find that the transliteration of some names are spelled differently than you are used to seeing.  For example, in several places the Greek name is Ἰάκωβον.  Clearly it should be transliterated as ‘Jacob’ instead of ‘James’.

  In other cases, the transliteration of a Greek name is different because the best manuscripts have a different spelling.  For example, in the Gospels 98% of the Greek manuscripts, including the best line of transmission (f35) have the spelling ‘Capernaum’ whereas the NU has ‘Capharnaum’.