The New Testament is now available

We sold all the copies of the New Testament that we printed. We will be publishing the whole of the Sacred Scriptures (Old and New Testaments together) soon.

The following advertisement appeared in the November 2002 issue of New Church Life.

A NEW CHURCH TRANSLATION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Over the past ten years, a group of clergy and laity, have been revising a New Church translation of the Word. The translation of the four Gospels that we revised was done by Rev. John Clowes in England about two hundred years ago, from the original Greek in the light of the Writings. We have also revised Rev. John Whitehead's translation of the book of Revelation from the Apocalypse Revealed. In doing this revision we used the vocabulary study done by Rev. Louis Tafel one hundred years ago, which shows how the Writings render each Greek word into Latin. Building on these previous studies, with the aid of computer tools developed specifically for this work, we have recently completed, and modernized to some extent, a consistent New Church revision of the New Testament.

It is our hope that in the near future the whole of the Sacred Scripture will be available. But rather than wait several more years, we thought it best to publish the New Testament at this time. This will serve a current need in the church, and allow us to gather valuable comments and suggestions from readers for a translation of the whole Word. Like the Sacred Scripture itself, the work of translation is not static but living. Our principal aim is to show the English reader what the Lord actually says in His Word, recognizing that any translation will fall short of this to some extent. With this version of the New Testament we are also including a companion work explaining the principles from the Writings we used in this translation and the reasons behind the choices we made for particular verses and vocabulary.

The volume we now offer to the New Church is printed in very readable 13 point type, in a red, hardback volume of 240 pages. We hope to have the book back from the printers by the end of November and available as a Christmas gift.

The cost is $12.00 US, plus shipping; and for $2.00 more we will gift wrap it and send it with a card. If you would like to order this book, please contact

(The contact information that was in the article is no longer valid.)

If you have questions about the translation itself please contact Rev. Andrew Heilman at the Kempton New Church, 610-756-6140, or e-mail andrewj@entermail.net.