Word Order and Phrase Construction

A comparison of Acts 13:25b in several translations and how LENT is different

While working on The Lifegate English New Testament, my primary goal was to present a New Testament easily grasped by a reader of the 21st century. Here’s a comparison of Acts 13:25b in several translations to show how much word order and phrase construction matter in comprehension.

First, here are several essentially literal translations that seek to preserve Greek word order:

KJV 
   But, behold, there cometh one after me, whose shoes of his feet I am not worthy to loose.

RSV 
   but after me one is coming, the sandals of whose feet I am not worthy to untie.

ESV
   but after me one is coming, the sandals of whose feet I am not even worthy to untie.

Next are two popular dynamic equivalency translations that seek less complex wording:

NLT
   But he is coming soon—and I’m not even worthy to be his slave and untie the sandals on his feet.’

NIV
   But there is one coming after me whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.

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The KJV and its successors, the Revised Standard Version and the English Standard Version, faithfully follow the Greek syntax, but that decision creates awkward sentences that no speaker of the common, straightforward English of the 2020s would ever utter. The decision to imitate the Greek construction of the sentence creates complex renderings of the sentence with multiple antecedents and pronoun references (one, whose, whose, etc. ) that introduce a series of clauses that complicate the sentence unnecessarily for a reader of the 21 st century.

The New Living Translation’s language introduces a different problem: The pronoun ‘he’ does not clearly refer to any named person or the Messiah, so grammatically it is in error, and leaves the reader confused as to who ‘he’ is.

The popular New International Version’s language violates a standard principle of clear, concise, good writing style: using a “There is” construction to create a complex sentence, when a simple subject-verb construction suffices. For example, “I like two items on the menu” is preferred over “There are two items on the menu that I like.”

The smooth, straightforward LENT version can be easily grasped by any contemporary reader, especially a reader who is a non-native-English speaker, a young person, or someone on the autism spectrum:

LENT
   But One will come after me, and I am not even worthy to untie the sandals of His feet.

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