We do have many translations available, but how many can you buy that were not made for profit? Bibles is big business.  (Answer: only the ones without a current binding copyright and the MLV when finished.₁)

Almost all new bible translations are based on paraphrasing the original language into English. (They read like the newspaper.)  With any form of paraphrasing, someone else's opinion becomes your word of God! 

NO translation has ever attempted to render Greek words uniformly and consistently into English.  This task would have been about impossible before the computer age. For an example, it takes 2 seconds to display every verse that contains the word "bondservant" in the MLV.  Let's face it, this is a extremely hard task, not one that many would ever take the time to do. Probably the worst word in the Greek New Testament, ginomai, Strong's number 1096, is in the King James Version 42 different English words, in the American Standard about 15 and in the MLV it is rendered into 7 different English words.

Prepositions in all translations are extremely inconstant. An example is the word "for," that comes from Greek words that means "in behalf of"  "because of"  "because" "to" " toward" "of."  The MLV rendered all "because" and "because of" just that and used "in behalf of." Showed other meanings by use of ALL CAPITALS or asterisks *. 

Most modern translations are made up of committees that oversee only some books of the Bible, not the New Testament as a whole. So naturally one committee might render verb tenses or words differently than another would. 

A challenge to all who think that another translation is better to the Greek then the MLV: show us the correction needed!  Please remember "thus saith the Greek" not ... Version says.  Email the Editors

Butch Walker, Secretary / Computer Servant for the Modern Literal Version
Oct. 1, 2000.