• Nathan, for relentless feedback, extensive proofreading in too many instances to itemize, as I have been translating.
• Now, how about you?

Introduction

See the following for more detail than what is discussed in this brief summary:

https://www.wiebefamily.org/Greek.htm
https://www.wiebefamily.org/Greek_Week.htm
https://www.wiebefamily.org/interest.htm (index to all articles and videos)

Many have endeavored to produce an English translation that is "faithful to the original Greek text."  In reality, they have all produced translations that are faithful to the English at the expense of the Greek, focusing on how to translate into the best English possible, with the tradeoff being how literal, or at least faithful, to the original Greek they can still remain after doing so.  Yet there is and can be no such thing as a "literal, word for word" translation.  The set of words in each language do not have a one to one correspondence to each other, nor does the grammar, nor do the composition and style rules map.  My translation will not accomplish such an impossible feat either, nor even to my own satisfaction, but it will take the additional step of being much more faithful to the Greek, sacrificing proper English grammar, punctuation, composition, and style, bringing out every word, every grammatical construct, and every possible subtlety in the original text, only endeavoring to still keep the text readable and understandable in English.  And that is the goal of what I am calling "Garth's Hyper-literal Translation," which I will abbreviate "GHT."  It is not like any translation you have seen before.  I focus on how they said it, rather than how we would say it.  As much as possible, I avoid interpretation ("it says that but means this") but instead say what it says the way it says it.  Where others have fallen short due to an English language mindset, which they impose upon the Greek, I have much more closely followed the sense and flow of the Greek language.  That is why it is so very awkward in English.  It will take some getting used to, to read it this way.  Various popular English translations target audiences ranging roughly from the the third grade level (e.g. NCV and NIrV) to fourth or fifth grade (e.g. The Message) to eighth grade (e.g. NIV) to tenth grade (e.g. ESV) to eleventh grade (e.g. NASB) reading comprehension level; I would say that my "GHT" assumes a high school graduate level of reading comprehension (by 1960's/1970's academic standards, not today's), because of the awkward and unconventional English, certainly worse than reading the KJV.  But if you don't know the Greek, this will get you the closest to it, and those who do know Greek may question the virtue of being so "hyper-literal," yet they will have to acknowledge that it brutally accomplishes that objective.

Audience

This translation provides no accommodation for sentimentality, liturgical recitation, or religious traditions of men.  It is for serious bible study for those who do not know Greek (yet), or who do know it but are not yet able to easily sight read it in the way they are able to sight read English at a glance.  Anyone quoting it for the benefit of a wider audience will, in many cases, need to adapt it to flow better in conventional English, but it provides a better starting point for doing so than going about comparing multiple conventional translations and reading commentaries.  If you want to know what the original says, as close to the original as possible, translating every original word and every original grammatical construct, at the expense of nice English, yet still reasonably understandable in English, then this is the translation for you.  However, it is still a translation, not the God-breathed original, no translation can exactly match the original, and you are still responsible as a serious student of the Bible to learn the original language.

Academic credentials

I am a retired career electrical/computer hardware design/development engineer and have no academic credentials in any language area.  I am actually promoting that as an advantage.  I have spent many years studying Greek, and during that time have become increasingly frustrated with the products of credentialed academia at all levels.  A student learns from a professor, that student becomes a professor, and then teaches students likewise.  Academic status quo traditions and dogmas develop, as the student must agree with the professor to succeed academically, and then the professors dare not deviate from the status quo that they were taught, and which other professors profess, since they must maintain that status quo to maintain their own standing.  I've found critical thinking skills lacking as each just repeats the teachings of the one before him, without questioning whether it was ever right in the first place.  Also, students are not taught the language as much as they are taught to translate the language into proper English, such that the consequence ends up being that the original language cannot be understood until it is translated into corresponding English and interpreted by an English language mindset.  Ultimately, English becomes the master language by which ancient languages like this are evaluated, even those that preceded English by a thousand years or more, before English even existed as a language.

English translations today can be traced back to Tyndale, Erasmus, Wycliffe, even St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate.  Wycliffe translated from the Latin Vulgate and did not know Greek.  Later reformation-era translators, due to their Roman Catholic schooling, were likewise experts schooled in Latin, pioneers but novices at Greek.  Anything we have learned about ancient Greek since then is rarely applied to Bible translation, because of the reluctance of academics to deviate from the status quo that dates back five hundred years, and an unwavering devotion to the Protestant Reformation, which dates back to that long ago, yet is but one of many significant events in the historic timeline of Christianity.  Ironically, translation tradition among the academics today is consistent with the works of those "beginners" at Greek five hundred years ago.  Who would dare to deviate from that?  I have no academic credential, academic reputation, clerical ordination, or employment, at risk.  I cannot be fired, defrocked, decertified, or deprived of any source of income.  What is accomplished here stands on its own.  Don't like it?  Don't complain in some public forum about me, and make pooh-pooh, just so, ipse dixit declarations, ad populum, ad lapidem, ad antiquitatem, ad vericundiam, ad hominem, ad baculum, and nirvana fallacy.  If you consider yourself competent enough to critique this, then contact me and tell me what specifically I got wrong and why, and I will fix it.  My modus operandi is that of an engineer, as an innovator and problem solver.  If I am shown to be wrong, it is not a big deal.  I will simply fix it and acknowledge you by name for the correction (if not trivial or unsubstantial), even if you are a belligerent adversary.  And I have done so in the past.  Otherwise, an appeal to requirement for "academic credential" is not only argumentum ad vericundiam, but hypocritical, as one categorically dismissing this work on that basis would certainly not dismiss Jesus the carpenter, Matthew the tax collector, Luke the physician, the several fishermen, and so on, as disqualified for lack of specific academic credential, as the religious leaders of their time also similarly criticized them, yet we criticize those religious leaders for thus criticizing them.

Let us all bear in mind that we all knew our native language well enough to speak it fluently as a young child before even entering kindergarten, and were entirely competent in all the technical aspects of grammar and composition by the time we graduated from high school (or at least by 1960's/1970's academic standards and prior).  This did not require a college education!

So, why do I suppose that I am in a position to do better than all the rest?  This actually goes back again to my qualifications and mindset as a career engineer.  Where others before me have been subjective and interpretive, as those schooled in the language arts and/or religion, I impose a much more strict, precise, consistent, objective, mechanical, process and methodology to translation.  And Koine Greek is very mechanical and mundane, lending itself well to that, due to the consequence of how the dialect became Κοινη, "common," coming about so quickly, ubiquitously, and by necessity, through the rapid military conquests of Alexander the Great.  Where some others have claimed that their translation "brings out the Greek," I say they have failed, even to the point of eisegesis, reading into the Greek what they want to "bring out" of it.  Scholars will be forced to admit that I have succeeded far more than others; they will just cringe at how much of a disservice to the English language I do to achieve that, and that it would be too much of a distraction to use in any church liturgy or devotional reading of scripture, which is very true.

Many of you don't know Greek.  It is far, far more straightforward than English.  This is not rocket science.  You should learn it for yourselves and not just trust me, or, for that matter, any credentialed scholar or translation committee uncritically, or else what you read here will be "yet another translation," and you will again be left asking "which translation is the best."  Remember, it is the conviction of all mainstream Christianity that only the original manuscripts penned by the original authors are God-breathed.  There are some manuscript variations through hand-copying from then up until the time of the printing press, which thankfully are not of any significant consequence, and certainly not significant enough to affect any Christian doctrine.  Then, after that, translations of these manuscripts by men are not God-breathed.  And neither is this one.  But it will be immediately apparent that this "English" translation is much more faithful to the original than those that flow well in English.  Indeed, it will make apparent how much the popular English translations have departed from the original so as to accommodate and generate nice English.  Yet this is still not "the Bible."  You weren't reading "the Bible" before, and you still aren't now.  The Bible was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.  Unless you are reading it in the original language, you aren't reading "the Bible" but someone's translation of the Bible.

"No translation committee?"

Neither Jerome, nor Wycliffe, nor Erasmus, nor Tyndale, were committees, yet are still honored and affirmed.  The first New Testament translation by committee was the protestants' Geneva Bible of 1560, then the Anglican Catholic (Church of England) Bishops' Bible of 1568 and the King James 1611 revision of it.  Translation committees have both advantages and disadvantages.  The committee makes changes more carefully considered by collaboration, pooling the knowledge and experience of multiple contributors, and eliminates spurious opinions.  On the other hand, a status quo and traditions are established, squelching dissent and discordant views that may actually be correct.  Although I assume the responsibility for this translation and am solely the one making the final call, you are potentially part of a "committee" if you provide helpful feedback that results in changes and improvements.

At this point I want to acknowledge the contribution of my son, Nathan, another engineer, who has tirelessly reviewed my work as I have progressed in the translation, by performing consistency checks as I go.  He has developed Python scripts and a SQLite concordance database to catch simple errors and inconsistencies.  I now consider his work vital to this venture.  So, in a sense, this has now become a "committee" of two.

If you are hunting for some heresy or doctrinal schism, you won't find it here.  Nor any profound revelation hidden from men and only now revealed.  Just more clarity and transparency to the original language at the expense of good English, making the English very awkward to read.  I am simply fed up with overly loose and interpretive translating and paraphrasing, as well as with the traditions of the status quo and corresponding lack of due diligence to the original text, especially where they could have easily been more faithful to the original even without being "hyper-literal," and still rendering it in good English.  I have not discovered anything that would deviate from mainstream Christian orthodoxy in any substantial or consequential way.  Nor am I on some agenda to hunt for and vindicate some doctrinal position.  So, for example, when you see that παρουσια, hyper-literally "being-aside," which I thought would be a bit too hyper-literal, is translated as "presence" in Matt 24, that doesn't mean I am jumping into the laps of Jehovah's Witnesses, their NWT, and their notion of Jesus having already returned, being "invisibly" present since 1914, which is totally ridiculous (both the notion itself and the notion that I would accommodate that). Rather, "coming," as an aorist participle, would be ελθων, and "arrive" would be some inflection of ηκω.  My translation translates; it does not make eschatological accommodations or implicate any kind of doctrinal statement about anything.

Which manuscripts?

I am examining Scrivener's Textus Receptus 1894, the Byzantine GNT (Robinson), and the NA28 with Critical Apparatus, checking every instance of every manuscript variation.  I don't categorically affirm one manuscript tradition and disregard the other.  I check each variation in each instance and decide for myself in each instance.  That's what textual critics (including Scrivener, and anyone who promotes a so-called "Textus Receptus") do.  Yet most tend to fall into political camps such that they swear by one and vilify the other, as if Democrats vs. Republicans in today's American political arena.  So, I suppose that makes me a nonpartisan "Independent," as I don't align myself with either political platform of textual criticism (and, yes, even you who may be KJV/TR advocates are inherently textual critics).  In general (i.e. as a generalization, not categorically) I have concluded that the 𝔐/Byzantine/Majority/TR manuscripts are, in general, superior, and, in general, closer to the original, than the Alexandrian/WH/NA/UBS/SBL basis.  In general, but not always.  My selections correspond to the former maybe something like 95% of the time (anecdotally speaking).  Among the latter tradition, I reckon Codex ℵ/Aleph/Sinaiticus to be a nineteenth century manuscript, so I don't give any weight to it.  Yet I also agree that there are some obvious, blaring defects within the various 𝔐/Byzantine/Majority/TR manuscripts.  And there are multiple variants of TR editions from 1516 all the way to 1894, and those are at variance with the multiple variants of Byzantine/Majority texts.  Again, thankfully, these manuscript variations hardly ever matter to the meaning and, when they do, it is of little to no significance or consequence.  My faith in the scriptures is thus reinforced, not compromised, to the point that I am not considering it worthwhile to note each individual instance where I have chosen one reading over another, as I think it would be a distraction.  But in general I choose primarily based on which variation is represented by a more diverse and larger number of manuscripts/families, and secondarily whether the reading taken by itself obviously makes more sense and is more likely authentic, rather than claim, as the WH/NA/UBS/SBL political camp does, that a particular few (even two, ℵ and B) manuscripts are oldest, or, as some in the KJV/TR political camp do, that Church of England Anglican Catholic clergy in the early 1600's were so godly and correspondingly divinely inspired as to have providentially utilized that which corresponded to the original autographs.

Yet I cannot let my personal biases get in the way.  For example, on one hand, I personally question whether Matt 17:21 "this kind does not go out without prayer and fasting" is original but, in applying a consistent standard for inclusion, it is in my translation.  Yet even that doesn't affect any doctrine, because, as I have said in my articles, it would have to be referring to "this kind" of "unbelief" (the last thing Jesus mentioned), not "this kind" of demon, and that should be obvious, since Jesus didn't "fast and pray" the demon out of the boy.  Furthermore, "kind" isn't even the best translation of γενος, which hyper-literally means "become[noun]," a very general word with a very wide semantic range that refers to something that has become.  But you won't find some comment or footnote embedded in the translation to either point.  On the other hand, KJV/TR-only conspiracy theorists will be disappointed when they do not find their precious Johannine Comma in 1 John 5:7-9, also without further comment or footnote.

After all that I have extensively compared of manuscript variations, the one and only place that might be considered to possibly affect Christian doctrine and practice would be the "snakes" and "poison" references at the end of Mark 16, where some extremists in the WH/NA/UBS/SBL camp suggest that the Mark 16 ending may not be original (while nevertheless always including it, not daring to omit it).  This view, however, is untenable for many reasons, but particularly because early church fathers referenced/quoted the ending hundreds of years before the WH/NA/UBS/SBL camp's so-called "earliest and most reliable manuscripts" omitted it.  The notion was thoroughly critiqued by Scrivener in 1894 and should no longer even be a controversy.  Other teachings of the Mark 16 ending are confirmed elsewhere in scripture and are not unique.

I repeat again, that other than the aforementioned instance, any other variation that may possibly present an ambiguity of some meaningful consequence -- and these are very rare -- is resolved by a preponderance of other scriptures for which there is no ambiguity.  Even in the case of the "Johannine Comma," the witness for the deity of Jesus Christ and the deity and personality of the Holy Spirit are so well extensively attested by scripture without it, that the conclusions of the councils of Nicea and Constantinople would not be affected, nor any subsequent.

Notation, punctuation, capitalization, diacritical markings

I use square brackets to denote something I have added for clarity that is not in the original text.  An [ing] on a participle means it is an aorist or future participle, not a present partciple.  As noted in more detail below, I use curly brackets to denote dative and genitive cases and a colon to denote third-person imperatives.  I liberally use hyphens to bring out etymological morphemes, compound words, and single words from the original that do not have a single English correspondence but can be expressed using multiple English words and/or English morphemes, and underscore to insert separate original words into a hyphenated sequence (usually "_not_").  I use the slash character where I need to convey that a word could be either one or the other English word, or a sense of both or something in between.  Since interrogatives are not punctuated in the Greek, and are not even explicit, I let the text flow as in the original and insert question mark characters in square brackets.  Beyond that, punctuation is simply a best-effort attempt to follow English convention.  There is little to no punctuation in the original Greek text, and not in the English sense or English convention.  I capitalize proper names as in English, but there is no capitalization scheme in Greek. 

Conversely, I do not feel compelled to honor diacritical marks in the NA28 and various other Greek texts, as the earliest manuscripts did not have them.  This means that they were added later.  Consequently, for example, τις could either be "who" as an interrogative pronoun or an indefinite pronoun, but I will not let manuscript diacritics compel that distinction.

Important points in lexicality and grammar, issues

I avoid religiously loaded words.  For example, χριστος is "anointed," βαπτιζω is "immerse," διακονος is "servant," and αποστολος is "sent-off[one]."  See my article, List of religious terms that shouldn't be religious.  I prefer to translate, not use traditional religious transliterations, which are not translations of the words.  Be assured that in any of these instances I am not on an agenda to water down any established Christian doctrine of mainstream orthodoxy or start a schism.  My desire is for clarity with regard to original word meanings, and I don't care about religious language and traditions.  In a few cases I do keep religious words.  For example, I am currently translating αμαρτανω/αμαρτια as "sin," even though it fundamentally more generally means fail/err/failure/fault/error.  "Sin" always connotes a spiritual/moral/ethical failure, fault, or error, and the scriptures don't concern themselves with mundane things.  Similarly, I want to translate προσευχαμαι/προσευχη as "toward-vow" but have kept it the traditional "pray/prayer," figuring that anyone familiar with my work can read my article on that.  Other examples are δοξα as "glory," μακαριος as "blessed," or χαρις for "grace," words that do convey the proper meaning even though religious.

I use "of{}" and "to{}" for genitive and dative cases, respectively, but everyone should keep in mind that these are not prepositions, nor do they, without actual prepositions, create prepositional phrases in the original Greek.  The genitive case simply points from an object and the dative case to an object.  However, when I create an English prepositional phrase from it, I don't always keep prefixing every consecutive genitive or dative word accordingly.  Instead, I enclose multiple separate words in curly brackets, which are all genitive or dative, as the case may be.

For verb conjugations, I use hyphens to combine the English auxiliary/helper verbs with the main verb, when a verb conjugation must be expressed in multiple English words to construct a verb phrase, as well as the implied subject with a pronoun, where needed.  In some cases I have to use a hyphen for clarity, such as "will-ing" for the verb "will," to be sure it isn't interpreted as the English adjective "willing."  I use the underscore character in a verb phrase to underscore that the word "not" is a separate Greek word (i.e. "_not_"), or any other word that is separate.

Since the aorist tense (χρονος αοριστος) is, categorically, not marked for time or aspect/progress/completion (which is what the Greek word α-οριστος means, "without-definition, unbounded, indefinite"), I map this to the English simple present tense, which usually means the same thing in English.  For example, I can tell you that "I play the piano."  That said, I am not making a statement of when or any sense of progress (and in fact I am sitting at a computer, not a piano, right now), but just expressing the verb "play" as fact.  Indeed, most of the verbs in the text of this Introduction are English simple present, expressing fact, not time or progress/completion.  Parse this English text and see!  For written historical narratives, we use the English past tense but Greek has no past tense.  Rather, historical narratives were told from the perspective of the speaker putting himself in the frame of reference of being in the past observing the events happen as they occurred.  We do that in English colloquially and informally, usually in oral speech, using the English simple present tense.  Where you see square brackets in the form "[ing]" on a participle, that is to mark and distinguish an aorist participle from a present participle, as English has no aorist participle form, but I have to somehow get an "-ing" in there to make it recognizable in English as a participle, if it is in the active voice.  I also do the same for future participles, since English has no such thing.

The imperfect tense (χρονος παρατατικος) conveys something that has not completed.  I consistently represent that as "has-been-[verb]ing," the English present perfect progressive/continuous tense.  That is awkward but can be important.  For example, in John 1:1 ...και θεος ην ο λογος "...and God has-been-being the word" makes for an even more powerful statement of the deity of Christ, since using past tense does not inherently imply that whatever was in the past still is the case.  And now you don't even have to swap the words around.

The Greek present tense (χρονος ενεστως) describes something happening in the present, so I consistently map that with the English present progressive/continuous tense, "is-[verb]ing." 

The other tenses are intuitive and straightforward to map.

The Greek language has both second and third person imperative verbs, whereas English only has second person imperatives.  To translate the third person, I construct the phrase using a colon.  For example, Matt 5:16, "the light of you: shine," such that it is the light that is being given the imperative, the command, not the person being addressed.  This eliminates the traditional use of "let" (e.g. "let your light shine"), where "let" is a verb that only means "allow," still in the second person, and does not bring out the imperative sense of the actual verb (i.e. "allow your light to shine" has "allow" as an imperative in the second person and "shine" as an infinitive). 

See https://www.wiebefamily.org/English-Greek_verbcharts.htm for a comparison of English and Greek verb conjugation. 

The concept of "deponent verbs" has been sufficiently debunked in recent times.  I do my best to search for a corresponding English word that maps to the middle/passive voice of any word traditionally marked "deponent."  For example, σεβομαι would be to religiously devote oneself such as to be religiously devoted to the object in question (middle voice), whereas προσκυνεω would either be "worship" in the active voice or "be worshipped" in the passive voice.  For middle voice of other verbs that are not traditionally tagged as so-called "deponent," since English has no middle voice, I try to choose a word that can be conceptualized as acting such as to be acted upon.  For example, I translate απολλυμι as "destroy-off/away" in the active or passive voice, but "perish-off/away" in the middle voice. I considered, but found it too tedious, to systematically and mechanically express each instance as "[verb]-such-as-to-be-[verb]ed" or "[verbs]-himself," but do explicitly express reflexivity in some cases where needed, when the verb does not inherently express it semantically.

The Greek language has no third person personal pronouns.  They used αυτος, from which we get the English prefix that also means "same."  We may say, "If a man diligently studies the scriptures, he will be blessed."  They would say, "If a man diligently studies the scriptures, [the] same will be blessed."  However, in just translating it "same" I do lose the number and gender, which in some cases I have to note in square brackets. 

I keep things like definite articles in places that they are traditionally or systematically omitted.  For example, "Jesus" was a common name, there also being a Jesus bar-Abbas (Jesus son of Abbas), the criminal released by Pilate, and "Jesus called Justus" of Col 4:10.  So, they wrote "the Jesus" to signify the particular Jesus already specified.  We just don't do that in English with proper nouns, but that is what the definite article is for, in both Greek and English.  Likewise, ο θεος is "the god," employing the common noun "god."  That definite article distinguishes the "god" of Israel, whose name is not "God" but יהוה, the "tetragrammaton" YHWH, usually pronounced "Yahweh," or the more customary English pronunciation, "Jehovah."  The reason I keep the capitalization of "God" is to avoid being viewed as sacrilegious and causing offense to some.  It should not be capitalized.  The same goes for Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Lord, as applicable to deity, which I also capitalize.  I do not capitalize "son of man."  (That does not mean I believe that Jesus was ever not fully God, however, so don't read anything into that.)

Altogether I find a way to translate every original word, where the rest of the translations may omit words that they consider insignificant or that do not suit the English translation.  On the other hand, if the original Greek word is already a transliteration, then I keep the transliteration and do not translate, such as "amen," "raka," and "mammon," for example, or currency, units of measure, and so on.  So, this translation is "literal, word for word" in that it translates every word, but it isn't "literal, word for word" in that I have to add words (such as "of{}" to denote genitive and "to{}" to denote dative, for example), and that I routinely change the word order, wherever English requires it to make sense of it (such as English subject-verb-object order, for example), add punctuation, and so on.  But you will see that every word is translated and never omitted or lumped into an equivalence.  For example ει μη is "if not," not "except" (the common rendering), and there are some cases where it is not wise to jump to that English equivalence, such as in Mark 6:8, resolving a supposed Bible contradiction about whether Jesus allowed the disciples to take a staff or not.  Another example is ου μη which, as a two-word phrase, is neither redundant, nor emphatic, nor a double negative, as the former is objective/absolute/denies whereas the latter is subjective/relative/rejects/prohibits.  Each of these words needs to be translated appropriately, either individually, or when used together, or when part of contractions.  Why do the popular translations smooth over the distinctions?  Do they think that the word of God is unnecessarily overly specific?  If I do need to note an equivalence to a multi-word phrase, I do so in square brackets, such as, for κατ' ιδιαν, "with self [i.e. in private]."

I try to keep lexical concordance, meaning using a concordant method of translation, giving each Greek word a unique and consistent English equivalent, as much as possible, instead of taking liberties with the wider semantic range of various words.  It is almost to the point that you can predict what Greek word is being translated by the English word that I use.  For example, τεκνον is always "offspring" (not necessarily young "child") and παις is always "child" (not necessarily "offspring"), and then παιδιον, the diminutive, is always "childling."  But, on the other hand, I have to be flexible with words that have too great a semantic range or mean different things in different declensions, conjugations, and contexts.  For example, περι, "around/about," figuratively "concerning/regarding," which I let the reader get from translating it "about," but for which "around" won't work.  Or κατα, "down/against/with," with figurative "according to."  Or, for example, ωδε can be of manner ("thus" or "in this way") or of place ("here").  See Matt 16:28, where the grammar, as well as the immediate context, compels it to be the former, resolving an oft-cited Bible "contradiction" dilemma.  Yet δια is always good enough as "through" and εις is always good enough as "into," for example.  Altogether I am exhaustively and painstakingly scrutinizing my resources, aiming to find an English word with the greatest semantic range that characterizes what the greatest semantic range, or least peculiar, least context-dependent meaning of a Greek word is, to limit my reading into the text, as much as possible. Yet I want to clearly distinguish different words where they are indeed different.  It is beyond me why so many translators claim to believe in verbal, plenary inspiration, yet will, even in the very same verse, translate two different Greek words with the same English word, as if it didn't matter that they were different words.  The well-known "Peter do you love me" discourse at the end of John would immediately come to mind, but there are many more places where I have made sure to make a distinction where the original text makes a distinction, and that goes for every grammatical feature as well.  Believe me when I say that I am examining and reexamining everything.

With grammatical constructs, I am very rigid, consistent, and I do not make any exceptions, or take such broad liberties with the grammar as most do to make for nice English prose.  And I do not honor all the modern concoctions of interpretive subcategories.  It is not "this kind of aorist."  It is "aorist."  It is not "dative of such and such."  It is "dative."  And so on.  So many scholars and textbooks unnecessarily complicate things, which is just reading an English language mindset back into the Greek, as if these subcategories were part of the original Greek grammar, whereas I just render the grammar, as parsed, consistently and in a concordant fashion.  I consider all this lexical and grammatical rigidity a feature, severely limiting my ability to interpret rather than translate, and honoring the verbal, grammatical, plenary inspiration of the original text, that every original word and every original grammatical construct is God-breathed, that every word and every grammatical construct ought to be specifically and consistently translated.

Accordingly, 99.9% of the time (anecdotally speaking), I am in harmony with standard, existing parsing (except for so-called "deponency"), as this is mostly mechanical and mostly not subject to interpretation anyway.  But not always.  For example, while people debate about whether to translate John 4:24 "God is spirit" or "God is a spirit," I conclude neither.  Noting that πνευμα is the spelling for both the nominative and accusative case, that there is no verb "is," and that αυτον means "same" in the accusative, I translate it "...for also the Father, the God, is-seeking the-which-the-same, the worshiping same spirit, and is-necessitating the worshiping same to-be-worshiping in to{spirit} and to{truth}" with πνευμα as accusative, the object of the verb "worship," not nominative as always parsed, and αυτον modifies πνευμα, "same spirit."  This makes contextual sense after the fact as well, in that Jesus is answering the woman's question about worshipping here ("this mountain") or there ("Jerusalem").

I try to bring out prefixes, suffixes, and etymological constructions as much as possible.  For example χαρισμα is grace-effect, based on the -μα suffix ("spiritual gift" would be δομα πνευματικος, which is not in the Bible), εκκλησια is "out-calling" ("church" would more properly be συναγωγη), and μετανοεω is change-mind/thinking.  Or, for example, when you see "girlie" in translation, I am not trying to be cute.  That is a diminutive ending, παιδ-ισκη, so I translate it as such.  On the other hand, there is a point where I need not be pedantic.  For example, I still translate σωμα, "whole-effect," as "body," σπερμα, "sow-effect" as "seed," and for εκκλησια, "out-call-ia" I settle for "out-calling."  And in some cases I just can't bring out the meaning even to my own satisfaction.  For example, the verb/noun αποκρινομαι/αποκρισις breaks down to "judged/judgment-off/away-from," too cryptic to hyper-literally render, yet there is no way to emphasize in the text that this is not fundamentally just a verbal reply/answer but has to do with an assessment made, a response in principle, somewhat akin to what we have with a "respondent" in a court case, a legal term in English.  I just translate as "respond" or "response," but every time I see the word in the Greek I wish I could do better.

I try to keep prepositions and prepositional prefixes as literal/geometric as possible (δια=through, επι=upon, υπο=under, etc.), as the figurative uses are usually apparent from the literal/geometric sense anyway.  But it is best not to habitually jump to figurative uses.  For example, Peter told them to be immersed "into" (εις) forgiveness of sins in Acts 2:38, where water (υδωρ) is not even mentioned, making moot all the debates about what the English word "for" means.  Or, for example, Paul brought out the irony of the Corinthians immersing people literally "over" (υπερ) dead people in 1 Cor 15:29, where the dead people would obviously be buried under the ground, all in the context of some in Corinth saying there was no resurrection.  So, now the Mormon "baptize for the dead" (baptism of dead people by proxy baptisms) contention is rendered moot. Or, for example, in Matt 6:19-20 we traditionally have "where moth and rust destroy," but the basis for "rust" is the root word for "food" and the basis for "destroy" is the root word for "reveal" negated ("destroy" would have been ολλυμι).  But food has nothing to do with metal and it doesn't actually say "destroy"!  The solution to the problem is that it is more accurately "food-sis" (βρω-σις) i.e. the state of food, which moths would affect if they get into closed food storage containers to lay eggs, and that this is hidden from view.  So, my "hyper-literal" rendering is "which-where moth and food-sis[i.e. state of food] are-unreveal-izing," leveraging the equivalence of the Greek suffix -σις to the English suffix -sis (and -ιζ to -ize in α-φαν-ιζ-ει), tying the moths to the hidden, and implicit ruin, of the condition of food, analogous to, in the second part of the verse, the thieves being associated with breaking in and stealing (an operation that is also not immediately apparent, as well).  Evidently nobody before me figured this out, as "rust" and "destroy" is now etched into all the translations and, consequently, dictionary entries, all based on a mistranslation by St. Jerome into Latin ("aerugo" and "demolitur"/demolish) in 405 AD, which Erasmus (who only changed "demolitur" to "corrumpit"/corrupts) and Reformation-era English translators, fluent in Latin, pioneers but novices in Greek, copied and translated, after which everyone after that just followed suit and parroted out what they were taught and were accustomed to through the generations without checking to see whether it was ever right in the first place.  This is why a careful examination of each word -- indeed, reexamination -- is called for to do diligence to any translation.

In reducing words, and often breaking up compound words into etymological/morphological root meanings and constructions, I have to be careful not to commit the etymological fallacy, such as, in the classic English example, a "butterfly" has nothing to do with butter and is not a fly, or that we park in the "driveway" and drive on the "parkway," but I have yet to encounter such blaring examples in Greek, although I have had to go with composite meanings in many cases where an etymological hyphenated compound construct would not cause the reader to jump to the accepted composite meaning.  For example, there's συκο-φαντησητε in Luke 3:14, being a "fig-revealer," one of the things John the Baptist told the soldiers not to do.  That etymology is vindicated by ancient Greek history, and it most certainly does have to do with figs; however, few would know that, so I have to indicate in translation that this is an informant who would extort or blackmail someone.  Or, for example, the compound παραβολη is "aside-cast," but I feel compelled to stick with the transliteration "parable," as it would otherwise be too much of a leap from the morphological construction.  Even so, the reader will at times find awkward how I stubbornly insist on hyper-translating so many words and constructs instead of interpreting them, leaving the reader to jump from the "hyper-literal" rendering to the semantic sense, where it would have just been easier to interpret into a more common, more natural English word or phrase.  For example, in Matt 18:6, yes, that is a "donkey millstone" to be hung around someone's neck, a millstone that is so weighty that a donkey is used to turn it in a grain mill; I don't say "large millstone," because "large" (e.g. μεγας) isn't the word used.  For example, notable and frequent is my translation of the contraction ουτος as "the-same" instead of "this," and εκεινος as "the-there" instead of "that."  Although awkward and perhaps appearing unnecessary to the point of annoyance, it makes for a distinction between the contraction and the definite article, ο, which can also be translated "this," and the embedded sense of "there" may potentially be semantically meaningful.  So, for example, in Matt 10:22, we have "the-same will-be-saved" as opposed to "this will-be-saved," requiring inserting a word, i.e. "this [one]," or, of course, taking liberties with "dynamic equivalence," as it is called, to make for nice English, "he who endures to the end will be saved."  This example is not semantically significant.  But, for example, significant in Matt 9:38 and Luke 10:2 is breaking up the contraction οπως to "which-how," bringing out the pronoun "which," which then functions as the subject of the verb εκβαλη, "may-cast-out," with the agent of cause being δεηθητε, which is "be-necessitated," passive voice, "of the Lord of the harvest," genitive case, not "pray to the Lord of the harvest," dative case. This shifts the responsibility to those being addressed, not God.  Again, this mistranslation dates back to St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate in 405 AD, where he used "rogate" ("ask"), "Dominum" ("Lord" in the accusative case), and just "ut" ("as" or "that") for οπως.  Erasmus translated similarly, and Reformation-era English translators, fluent in Latin, pioneers but novices in Greek, propagated the error, after which everyone after that just followed suit, without ever checking to see whether it was right in the first place.  I covered this in a separate article.

Regarding dictionary entries, keep in mind that even the secular ones we use are relatively modern works on the timeline of history, and that a dictionary summarizes all the possible meanings and ways a particular word is used.  This means that how it is translated in modern published works is referenced and cited, which would include how modern Bible translations interpret a word.  This means that in some cases an entry even in a secular dictionary will be begging the question.  The same syndrome applies to secular translations of ancient Greek secular works.  This is why sometimes my translation of a word is so deconstructive in its breaking down into fundamental morphemes that the way I translate it cannot exactly be found in any Greek dictionary.  Why?  For the same reason I have been repeatedly pointing out, which is that even the secular translations of ancient Greek secular works are made to conform to proper English, and my hyphenated constructions are not proper English!

Finally, this is not a "gender neutral" translation.  Modern translations and revisions are now bowing to the English language ideology of twentieth century radical feminism and twenty-first century LGBTQIA2S+ sexual perversion, so as to promote "gender neutrality."  In my translation, ανθρωπος translates to "man" and αδελφος to "brother," and etc., maintaining the gender specified in the grammar of the Bible, which is there for a reason, which you can read about in the first two chapters of Genesis, and corresponds to similar English language usage up through the mid-twentieth century before the time of the sexual revolution.  See my article/video for additional information.

All this points to my acceptance of the verbal, grammatical, plenary inspiration of the Bible, which is that, although written by men, every aspect of what was penned was God-breathed, words and grammar.  This drives me to the objective of minimal manipulation and minimal interpretation in translation.  And if you agree with me on this point, then you should welcome translations that are more faithful to the original language, rather than being more faithful to English grammar, punctuation, composition, and style, as long as the translation is still understandable by an English reader.  And I definitely push this to the limit.  Please let me know if you find any place where the translation is not still understandable in English.

Resources used

While translating, I have always open on my "desktop" Olive Tree platform NASB'95 Interlinear, NA28 with parsing and critical text annotation, NA28 Critical Apparatus, Byzantine (Robinson) text; Logos platform LSJ, Brill/Montanari, Brill/Beekes, Wharton (Etyma Græca), Louw-Nida dictionaries; ISA2 (Interlinear Scripture Analyzer, version 2 with Scrivener's Textus Receptus 1894).  I also reference various other works as needed.  I do not reference Christian lexicons/dictionaries (BDAG and etc.), word studies, and commentaries, except occasionally Louw-Nida's semantic domain lexicon (for the category organization), as these are predicated upon Christian tradition and doctrine that is not built into Koine Greek as a language and to which the men who penned the New Testament would not have had access.  My translation translates; it does not exegete.  That said, I am cognizant of the fact that the New Testament was written by Christians, and there are some cases, though scant, where the language used reflects that, and where I feel compelled to accommodate it.  For example, αμαρτια is "sin," not "failure/fault/error," and etc.

Scholars questioning any of my few instances of Koine Greek grammatical assertions that are contrary to the status quo, and requiring scholarly, credentialed academic verification, can refer to Grammar of the Greek New Testament in Light of Historical Research (PDF, 52 MB) by A.T. Robertson (1914), which is conveniently accessible online in digitized form and also in the public domain.  That work further references an immense collection of other scholarly works, too many for even that author to exhaustively list in his bibliography, which is 21 pages long.  The aorist problem is most thoroughly addressed in this article by Charles R. Smith in the Grace Theological Journal 2.2 (Fall 1981), p. 205-226, and this article by Frank Stagg in the Journal of Biblical Literature (1972), p.222-31.  The so-called "deponency" issue is thorougly addressed by A.T. Robertson (op. cit.) and other scholars here, here, here, here, here, and here.

File format

This translation is written in HTML/CSS/Javascript on a plain text editor in a single textfile and, since it is hand-typed, it is still readable even as a plain textfile without using a web browser.  I use only ASCII characters, except for the few unicode Greek characters in this introduction and the non-breaking space character at the end of sentences throughout, which is just to force them to be double-spaced.

Being online, it will perpetually be a work in progress.  I update/upload the latest version often multiple times daily, so that what you are reading is likely no more than an hour or so out of date in terms of my workflow.  I do make retroactive changes and improvements from time to time, so what I have already translated is subject to change.  I estimate that the file with the whole New Testament will be under 2 MB when completed.  As noted at the top and bottom, this work is granted to the public domain; I am especially opposed to commercializing and merchandising the Word of God.  If you are reading someone's copy or adaptation of this, the original source is at https://www.wiebefamily.org/GHT.htm.

Old Testament

That will be another project for another year.  One thing at a time; first the New Testament.