Preface · A Word from the Editor

I. First, A Word of Deep Gratitude

That the Bible rests in our hands today is not something to be taken for granted. From the early Church through the Middle Ages and into the modern era, countless men and women of faith labored with extraordinary devotion — and sometimes at the cost of their lives — to render the Scriptures into the languages of their people. Jerome's Latin Vulgate, Luther's German Bible, Tyndale's English New Testament, the missionaries and devoted believers who first brought the Word to English-speaking peoples and to every corner of the earth: each one of them gave their life's work, and in many cases their life itself, so that others might read and hear.

This translation stands on the shoulders of all who came before. We have no desire to diminish their labor or to sit in judgment over their work. Every translation in history was accomplished within the limits of the tools, the knowledge, and the linguistic resources available to its translators. What they achieved within those limits was, in every generation, an act of faithful devotion. We honor them deeply.

What we do here is take the torch they passed to us and carry it further — as far as the linguistic sciences and the computational tools of our generation allow. This translation goes to the source with the most precise instruments available today, rendering the text more faithfully than ever before. This is not the end of the labor, but a firm starting point that the next generation will carry forward.

II. The Old Testament — Following the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Original

Though this translation began with the New Testament, the Old Testament is being rendered in the same spirit of direct translation. The Old Testament is a complete, direct translation of the Masoretic Leningrad Codex, while the principle of Dead Sea Scrolls priority is applied wherever the Scrolls differ — drawing nearer to the original that long lay hidden beneath the layers of tradition.

The clearest example is Psalm 22:17 (verse 16 in traditional versions). The Masoretic text reads "like a lion are my hands and feet," but the Dead Sea Scrolls testify "they pierced (ka'aru, כָּאֲרוּ) my hands and feet." This translation follows the reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls: "they pierced my hands and feet." It is the moment when the gospel of the cross of Messiah Yeshua — written by David a thousand years earlier — emerges with precision, exactly as the text itself declares.

Furthermore, because the Old Testament here follows the verse divisions of the original, the verse numbers differ in a few places from traditional versions. This is not an error, but the result of following the original text as it stands.

III. The Internal Coherence of Scripture — Genesis to Revelation

The ultimate aim of direct translation is to allow the internal coherence of Scripture to emerge before the reader's eyes. The concept of Mo'edim — the appointed times of God — begins in Genesis 1:14, shows the fulfillment of the covenant in Genesis 17:21, 18:14, and 21:2 (the mo'ed, the appointed time), runs through the Torah and Daniel 7:25 (Aramaic: idan, idanin) and Daniel 12:7 (Hebrew: mo'ed, mo'edim), and arrives at Revelation 12:14 (Greek: kairon, kairous). It is a single conceptual thread woven through the entire canon. That thread can only be seen when the vocabulary is rendered with consistent precision across every book.

Likewise, the origin of the word ekklesia (ἐκκλησία, called-out community) is not the Greek civic assembly alone. It is rooted in the Miqra Kodesh of Leviticus 23 — the holy convocation — as rendered in the Septuagint. In Luke 1:6, Zechariah and Elizabeth are described as walking blamelessly in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord. Direct translation holds these connections intact, allowing the reader to trace the unbroken line of God's covenant across both Testaments.

IV. The Spirit of Direct Translation — Closer to the Source

The history of Bible translation has always been shaped by a productive tension between two goals: faithfulness to the source text, and accessibility for the reader. The desire to place Scripture in the hands of ordinary people, in language they can understand, has always been a noble and right impulse. At the same time, it is honest to acknowledge that in the process of making the text accessible, certain layers of meaning that the original Greek carries have sometimes not been fully transmitted.

This translation takes the Greek New Testament Byzantine RP2018 as its sole authoritative source and seeks to render the vocabulary, grammar, and syntactical structure of the original into English as closely as possible. We call this approach Direct Translation. It is not merely a word-for-word mechanical rendering; it is a scholarly attempt to preserve the theological depth and the internal coherence of the text across the whole of Scripture.

V. Dual Notation — Bringing the Depth of the Original to the Reader

The Greek source text contains a number of words that cannot be fully captured by any single English equivalent. Kardia (καρδία), for example, refers in different contexts to the heart, the mind, and the inner soulish realm — dimensions that no single English word adequately holds. Epignosis (ἐπίγνωσις) is a richer and more complete form of knowing than the simpler gnosis (γνῶσις), a distinction that collapses when both are rendered as 'knowledge.' Biblos (βίβλος) may be a scroll, a book, or a document depending on context. Logos (λόγος) carries the weight of personal title (John 1:1), gospel message, reasoned argument, or ordinary speech — all in different places.

To address this, the translation adopts a dual notation principle: key terms are rendered as Greek-transliteration(English-meaning). This allows the reader to hear the original word and receive its meaning simultaneously, making accessible the conceptual depth that translation alone cannot fully carry. It is a methodology that serves both scholarly study and general reading.

VI. What Direct Translation Reveals — A Few Illustrations

The value of direct translation becomes most tangible in specific passages. In Galatians 4:10, the Greek verb paratereō (παρατηρέω) appears. Across every other occurrence in the New Testament, this verb consistently carries the meaning of hostile surveillance — watching with intent to harm or eliminate. In Mark 3:2 and Luke 6:7, the scribes paratereō Yeshua(Jesus) in order to find grounds to accuse him. In Acts 9:24, the enemies of Paul paratereō the city gates day and night with intent to kill him. Direct translation carries this consistent meaning faithfully into the text.

In John 21:15–17, Yeshua(Jesus) asks Simon Peter the same question three times — but not with the same word. The first two times He uses agape (ἀγάπη, unconditional love); the third time He descends to phileo (φιλέω, love as a friend). Peter responds each time with phileo. The shift in the third exchange is the very heart of the scene. Direct translation preserves that movement.

Similarly, the preposition kata (κατά) in 1 Corinthians 16:2 carries the sense of 'according to' or 'per,' not simply 'on.' And the phrase in Acts 20:7, τῇ μιᾷ τῶν σαββάτων, translates as 'on one of the Sabbaths' — a rendering that opens the passage to its connection with the appointed times of Leviticus 23. These are the kinds of precision that direct translation makes available.

VII. The Advancement of Technology — Keeping Pace with Our Tools

We live in a remarkable age. The development of linguistic science and computational technology has elevated the precision of textual analysis and translation to a level that previous generations could not have imagined. We believe that those of us living in this era bear at least the responsibility of keeping pace with the tools now available to us. A translation closer to the source, more precise in its rendering of the original — that is what this generation's tools make possible, and what this generation's translators are called to pursue.

This translation is not an end but a beginning. Built upon this direct translation, may faithful direct renderings continue to rise — in English and in every language, in each generation. That is the vision behind this work.

VIII. An Invitation to a Noble Commission

John the Baptist described himself as 'a voice crying in the wilderness' — one who prepares the way. This translation goes out into the world in that same spirit: a voice that opens a direct path to the truth of the original text. We offer it not as a monument, but as a firm milestone on that road.

We invite you — reader, scholar, pastor, student — to join this commission: to read more deeply, to study the source text, and to carry this work forward with your own devotion and insight.

Translation is never a solitary act. It is the accumulated labor of prayer, scholarship, and devotion across generations. We are grateful beyond words to every faithful soul who carried the Scripture forward before us. And we gladly pass this small beginning on to every translator who will come after — trusting that the Word itself will continue to find its way, more clearly and more fully, into every language and every heart.

Byzantine RP2018 Greek New Testament · Yeshua Literal Version — YLV