About this Plain English Version Bible
This is a translation of the Holy Bible for Indigenous Australians that grew up talking their own language, and then later they learned to talk English. We wanted to make the message of the Holy Bible clear for them, so we used the plain sort of English that they use and understand. That is why we call it the Plain English Version.
We want to thank all the Indigenous people that helped us with this translation.
About the Plain English Version (PEV)
Thousands of years ago God got men to write his message for people. Those men did not write it in English. Most of them wrote it in their own language, or in a language that lots of people knew at that time.
The 1st part of the Bible is called the Old Testament, and most of it was in the Hebrew language. The writing in the Hebrew language looked like this,
בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ
That is the Hebrew for,
First of all, a long time ago, God made everything.
The 2nd part of the Bible is called the New Testament, and it was in the Greek language. The writing in the Greek language at that time looked like this,
ΑΡΧΗΤΟΥΕΥΑΓΓΕΛΙΟΥΙΗΣΟΥΧΡΙΣΤΟΥΥΙΟΥΘΕΟΥ
That is the Greek for,
This story is good news. It is all about Jesus Christ, God’s son. The story starts like this.
Over the years a lot of people studied those languages and found out how to understand them properly, and they wrote books about it. So we used those books to help us with this translation.
We took 2 steps when translating the PEV.
1. We tried to properly understand the message that the writers wrote.
2. Then we tried to write that same message in plain English.
We know we can’t always find a word in plain English that means the same thing as a word in the writer’s language, so we often used more English words to make the passage mean the right thing. We reckon it does not matter how many words we use, so long as it has the same message that the writer wrote. We explain this a lot more on page 491 to page 495 at the back of this Bible.
Pictures and maps
Everything in this book happened a long time ago, so today nobody properly knows what those people or places looked like, but we put some pictures in this book to help the people reading it get some idea about how things looked.
We also put in some maps for people to see where the different places are.
We got the pictures and maps from other people, and they said we can put them in this Bible. We have a list of all those people on page 496.
Sorry, this is only some parts of the Holy Bible
We know that all of the Holy Bible is important, because it is God’s Word. It has his messages to everybody in the world. But it will take us a long time to translate all of it into plain English. It has taken us years to translate this much of the Holy Bible, and it will probably take us a lot more years to translate the rest. So we are printing this much now, so that people can read this much of it, and they can learn what God has to say to them. We don’t want to make everyone wait until we translate all the rest of the Holy Bible.
There are 24 books here in this Bible. Some of them have some parts missing because we have not yet translated those parts. Wherever there is a bit missing, we put a note in brackets (like this) to explain why it is missing. For example, at the end of Matthew chapter 18, you will see this note,
(We have not yet translated chapter 19. You can read those stories and messages in Mark 10:1-31.)
In the New Testament there are 4 books that tell us about Jesus when he was here on the earth. They tell us about the things that he did and the important things that he said. The men that wrote those books were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. None of those men wrote about all the things that Jesus did and said, but sometimes they wrote about the same things. This Bible has each of those books, but there are some parts of Matthew’s book and Luke’s book that we have not yet translated. We translated the stories in Matthew’s book and Luke’s book that are not in Mark’s book or John’s book, so this Bible has most of the stories that those 4 men wrote about Jesus and the important things he said.
Most English Bibles write the names of books in a short way. For example, they call one of the books The Acts of the Apostles, or sometimes just Acts. But a lot of those names are not very clear, so we have given them names that are more easy to understand. For example, instead of Acts we called that book The followers of Jesus did great things. Then we put in something to show the name that other Bibles have for that book. So at the start of that book, under its name, we put (The book in the Holy Bible called Acts).
In each book we use normal letters, that stand up straight, for the bits that the writer wrote. But we have also put other words into each book, that the writer did not write. So, as much as possible, we use sloping letters, like these letters, for the words that we put in. Those words are the headings, and parts called About this book, and that sort of thing. And in some places we use those sloping letters for names, and for the meanings of names, in the bit that the writer wrote. The sloping letters are there to help people understand what they read in this book.
We hope God teaches you a lot as you read this Bible.
PEV Translation Team