About the New Ground English Translation
The whole Bible in everyday English, with more than 43,000 notes on what its first readers already knew.
Status: all 66 books translated, review in progressLicense: CC BY 4.0
Why it exists
Read it the way the first audience heard it
The people who first heard these books knew the customs, places, laws and word pictures behind them. Most readers today don’t, and a translation can only change the words on the page. NGET puts the rest in notes beside the verse, so you get the background without leaving the passage.
The translation itself uses everyday English, for readers who didn’t grow up with church vocabulary and for those who did but stopped hearing it. Every idea in the Hebrew and Greek stays in.
Guiding principle
“Make ancient truth accessible without dumbing it down.”
Readers can follow a hard idea when it’s explained clearly.
Word notes
In the text
Words with a dotted underline have a note. Tap one to see the Hebrew or Greek, what it means literally, what a first reader would have known, and why NGET chose its wording.
Without leaving the page
That’s the detail you’d otherwise look up in a commentary, study software or an AI chat, set next to the verse you’re reading. Your questions get answered where they come up, so you can stay with the passage and pray through it.
Background only
A note explains what a first reader would have known and then gets out of the way. It doesn’t tell you how to apply the passage; that’s left to you.
How the wording is decided
NGET is translated from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek rather than revised from an earlier English Bible. Four principles decide each wording:
- 01
Historically accurate
Say what the writer meant to the people who first heard it.
- 02
Easy to read
Use the words people use in ordinary conversation.
- 03
Nothing left out
Keep every idea in the original, including ones no single English word can hold.
- 04
Natural
Read like English written by a native speaker, without the stiffness translations are known for.
Words we translate differently
Some traditional Bible words are used almost only in church. NGET says what they meant.
| Traditional word | NGET says |
|---|---|
| Christ / Messiah | The One |
| Holy Spirit | The Breath of God |
| LORD | Yahweh |
| baptize | submerge |
| cross | execution stake |
| church | the gathering |
| eternal life | limitless life |
| grace | undeserved kindness |
| sin | failure, or corruption |
| holy | belongs to God |
| repent | rethink everything |
How it’s made
Drafted with AI, checked by people
Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, drafted each chapter from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, following guidelines written and revised by people. The same pass wrote the word notes. People are reviewing the chapters one at a time, and each chapter shows whether its review is done.
Open to checking
The guidelines are public, and every changed word has a note explaining the choice, so anyone can check the work.
Free to use
The New Ground English Translation is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
You are free to:
- Share: copy and redistribute it in any medium or format
- Adapt: remix, transform and build on it for any purpose, including commercially
The only condition is credit: name the New Ground English Translation and say if you changed anything.