What Makes A Dream Bible Translation
| ATTRIBUTE | description | translations that qualify |
|---|---|---|
| Screenplay Style | Hot, visual nouns and verbs that pop movies into your head, not words that lull you into a religious sleep. A good bible translation is not the droll editorial gruel of a religious publishing house, but a riveting screenplay for which a major motion picture studio would pay 5 million dollars for 120 double-spaced pages. The bible's original texts read like action screenplays, not sermons. | YHVH.NAME |
| pronoun-object clarity | slippery pronouns like "he, she, it, they, them, that", become clear visual concrete nouns: David, Bathsheba, sword, Israelites, prophets, temple | YHVH.NAME, NiRV, GNT, TLB |
| modern language | archaic language updated: thee/thou becomes you, you all, etc. | YHVH.NAME, NIV, NLT, NASB, NRSV, NKJV, etc. |
| Protagonist central | As any screenwriter knows, your central character and His central desire must stay front and center throughout the entire story, or your audience falls asleep. The Bible is a book about Yahweh and one thing that Yahweh passionately wants: for the people who claim to follow him to choose to stop being such devil-deceived idiots. | YHVH.NAME |
| Protagonist's name consistent | The protagonist's name (YHVH) needs to stay constant, not changing unnecessarily into vague titles and pseudonyms. We agree with the initial American revisers of the ASV: "[we hold] the unanimous conviction that a Jewish superstition (which regarded the Divine Name as too sacred to be uttered) ought no longer to dominate in the English or any other version of the Old Testament." | YHVH.NAME |
| antagonist present | We need to know who is the antagonist (the devil and his henchmen) and see them in the story throughout. | YHVH.NAME |
| central conflict obvious | To keep readers awake and aware, the translation must keep front-and-center the conflict between YAH's desire to grow a race of willing obedient children who follow YAH (out of love, not force), conflicting with the devil's mad obsession to control and exterminate the human race, using his greatest weapon: false religion. | YHVH.NAME |
| great commentary | hard-hitting, unique, non-religious | YHVH.NAME |
| not churchy | appeals to the non-religious audience, not preaching to the choir. | YHVH.NAME, The Message, GNT |
| Hebraistic | Retains the Hebrew, non-Greek character of YAH's thoughts without turning into a copy of all things Jewish. | CJB, YHVH.NAME |
| Strong voice | Retains the power of YAH's voice, both his strong love for humble people AND his strong hatred of false religion. | The Message, YHVH.NAME |
| Thematically organized | Verses tagged by literary/spiritual theme for quick in-depth drill-down. | YHVH.NAME |
| Jesus' and YAH's words in red | For quick scope-in. | NIV red letter |
| Personalizable | 'For God so loved JULIE...' | custom |
| Sacred Name | restores, to a sane basic level, 5 to 10 actual names of deities and words for which there is no English translation, without making people learn hundreds of Hebrew words (as in the Complete Jewish Bible.) | YHVH.NAME |
| Story order | Puts the books in the exact chronological order of the events, like any story would be written, not the goofy traditional longest-books-first order that makes the bible read like a broken jigsaw puzzle, a shaken up box of rocks. | YHVH.NAME, Divine Romance |
| Apocryphal books available for reference | unique Non-canonical books of great historical and interpretational value, such as the Maccabees, included as bonus references, in their proper place in the story. | YHVH.NAME |
| Harmonized/streamlined | Verses that duplicate other verses are put together so that the reader flows through the story, rather than reading the same basic story multiple times. The gospels appear as one story, for instance. | YHVH.NAME, Divine Romance |
| Font sizes change to indicate importance | Verses are assigned a rating so that more important verses appear in bold, critical verses are highlighted, and less important verses recede into the background, the way people write handwritten letters, stressing certain sentences more than others. | YHVH.NAME |
| Compact writing style | as few words as possible. | |
| Amish insights | Includes clarifying insights from minority groups who have clung to unpopular, yet crucial doctrines, such as forbidding divorce and refusing to swear oaths. (Matt 5, James 5:12.) | YHVH.NAME |
| interdenominational | preserves the unique insights of the various denominations, without tolerating any denomination's errors. | YHVH.NAME |
| accurate | renders every word of the original texts, not dropping words and adding words as does the NIV. | YHVH.NAME, NKJV (kind of) |
| no adverbs and adjectives | Adverbs and adjectives integrated with their verbs. | YHVH.NAME |
| Action | Action, action, action. Who is doing what, where, how. | YHVH.NAME |
| Kills passive voice. | Active voice, every sentence. βDog bites cat.β Not βIt is bitten.β | YHVH.NAME |
| Respects other good translations | Not replacing the great visual images of the original text with faddy idiomatic figures of speech, as does Peterson's cutesy but lacking paraphrase: The Message. | YHVH.NAME, NIV |
| Added words obvious | puts added clarifying words in brackets, and uses added words as sparingly as possible. | YHVH.NAME |
| restores dropped words | Stops the annoying habit of modern translators to drop words they don't understand, like Ho in Ho Theos. | YHVH.NAME |
| clear sentence structure | Dispenses with the horribly awkward sentence structure of the original New Testament Greek. | YHVH.NAME, NLT |
| Cool title | Something catchy, to signify how this dream translation is unique. | Cinematic Bible,The Message, GNT |
| Complete | Not just the New Testament. | |
| retains verse and chapter numbers | Ignores the idiotic fad of removing the verse and chapter numbers. | most all |
| book introductions | Uses short narrative connecting transitions to flow the reader unhindered through the story from book to book | |
| Hebrew maintains present tense | Renders the Hebrew Old Testament in its intended shockingly-visual and immediate screenplay-like present tense (using historical present and future present aka "Aorist" aspect), thus nixing the annoying added words and flipping tenses that hamper all commercial translations. | Cinematic Bible. |
