What Bible Do Baptists Use? There Is No Official Baptist Bible

There is no official Baptist Bible. Each congregation chooses its own translation, and the best-known Baptist confessions name none. In a 2004 survey, most US Baptist pastors used the King James Version (KJV), New King James Version (NKJV), New International Version (NIV) or New American Standard Bible (NASB). In Spanish, the most widely used evangelical Bible is the Reina-Valera 1960.

The choice often tells you which kind of Baptist church you are in. Many independent fundamental Baptist churches read only the King James Version. Southern Baptist churches read several translations, and since 2017 their publisher, Lifeway, has had its own: the Christian Standard Bible (CSB). Under the argument lies a promise every side holds dear. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away,” Jesus said (Matthew 24:35). Every Baptist church confesses that God keeps his word. Where it is best kept, and how it should be carried into the language people speak, is where they part.

Churches	Bibles most read	Evidence
Southern Baptist	NIV, NKJV, KJV and NASB, about equally, in 2004; Lifeway’s own translation, the CSB, since 2017	2004 survey of pastors; Lifeway holds the CSB
Other US Baptist churches	KJV (51% of pastors), NIV (24%) in 2004	2004 survey of pastors
Independent fundamental Baptist	KJV only, in many churches	Statements such as Ambassador Baptist College’s
Spanish-speaking Baptist	Reina-Valera 1960 most common; some use the Reina-Valera-Gómez	Publishers and Baptist missionaries

In 2004 Southern Baptist pastors split almost evenly: 26% used the NIV, 25% the NKJV, 23% the KJV and 22% the NASB. Baptist pastors outside the Southern Baptist Convention leaned to the King James: 51% used it, and 24% the NIV. Asked why they chose a Bible, 40% of the pastors across all denominations said mainly for its accuracy, and 16% for its readability. The figures come from a survey of 700 pastors that Ellison Research ran for Lifeway’s Facts & Trends magazine, reported by Baptist Press in May 2004.

The CSB did not exist yet. Its forerunner, the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB), had just come out, and 65% of the pastors said they did not know it.

Most Spanish-speaking Baptist churches appear to read the Reina-Valera 1960, as most Spanish-speaking evangelical churches do. Its publisher, the American Bible Society, calls it, in its notes on Bible Gateway, “the basic text most used by the evangelical Spanish-speaking church.” Its roots go back four centuries. Casiodoro de Reina translated the Spanish Bible in 1569, Cipriano de Valera revised it in 1602, and the 1960 text is a revision of theirs. The Bible Societies in Latin America issued it, and the United Bible Societies (Sociedades Bíblicas Unidas) have held its copyright since 1988. The Southern Baptist publisher uses it too: B&H Español, part of Lifeway’s publishing house, issues children’s and study Bibles in the Reina-Valera 1960.

Newer Spanish translations are in print as well, such as the Nueva Versión Internacional (NVI), the Nueva Traducción Viviente (NTV) and La Biblia de las Américas (LBLA). No published survey shows how many Baptist churches read them.

Spanish-speaking churches that hold the King James view are divided. Some keep the 1960. Others use the Reina-Valera-Gómez, a revision of the 1909 Spanish Bible made to agree with the King James Version, which first appeared around 2004. Its reviser, Humberto Gómez, is a missionary and the pastor of a Baptist church in Matamoros, Mexico. Calvin George, a Baptist missionary who reads only the King James in English, has declined to endorse it.

Because Baptists give no body above the local church the power to choose one. The Southern Baptist Convention’s confession, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, describes a church as “an autonomous local congregation of baptized believers.” Each congregation decides for itself which Bible it reads from the pulpit, and members read what they like at home. Churches outside any denomination decide the same way, congregation by congregation: nondenominational churches choose their own Bibles too.

What the confessions guard is Scripture itself, and they leave the translation open. Article I of the Baptist Faith and Message says that the Bible “has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter,” and calls it “the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried.” It names no version.

The older Second London Baptist Confession of 1689 expects translation. It says the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek were “immediately inspired by God, and by His singular care and providence kept pure in all ages.” Then it adds that “because these original tongues are not known to all the people of God,” the Scriptures “are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come.” “Vulgar” here means the common language of a people, the words they speak at home.

The nearest thing to one is the Christian Standard Bible. It is published by Holman Bible Publishers, a division of Lifeway Christian Resources, the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing agency, and its copyright is dated 2017. Lifeway released the full text in January 2017 and print editions that March. The convention does not require its churches to use it.

The CSB is a revision of the Holman Christian Standard Bible. Before the HCSB, Lifeway had printed Southern Baptist materials in other publishers’ Bibles. In 1998 its book publisher, then called Broadman & Holman, took up an unfinished translation project led by the scholar Arthur Farstad. It required a new translation of the New Testament from the Nestle-Aland Greek text, the edition most modern translations use, and the first printed edition of the complete HCSB appeared in the spring of 2004. Most of the translation team were Baptists, and all of its New Testament translators were, but more than 100 scholars from 17 denominations took part. The 2017 revision committee, co-chaired by professors at two Southern Baptist seminaries, also included Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican and non-denominational scholars.

Lifeway calls the CSB’s method “optimal equivalence”: as literal as possible, but freer wherever a word-for-word rendering would hide the meaning from a modern reader. Its own sales notes place the CSB between the English Standard Version (ESV) and the NIV, “more readable than the ESV, more literal than the NIV,” and call its Greek source text “the standard used by scholars and seminaries today.”

Do Southern Baptists use the NIV?

Many did. In the 2004 survey, about a quarter of Southern Baptist pastors used it. Then the NIV was revised in 2011, and that June the messengers, the delegates that churches send to the convention’s annual meeting, met in Phoenix and passed a resolution against the new edition. It noted that “many Southern Baptist pastors and laypeople have trusted and used the 1984 New International Version,” objected to the 2011 revision’s “gender neutral methods of translation,” and ended: “we cannot commend the 2011 NIV to Southern Baptists or the larger Christian community.” A resolution states the view of the messengers who vote on it. It binds no church.

Because they hold that God preserved the original words of the New Testament in one Greek text, the Textus Receptus or Received Text, the printed Greek text on which the King James Version of 1611 was based. Both sides translate the Old Testament from the same Hebrew Masoretic Text; the ESV’s preface, for example, says the ESV “is based on the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible.” So the quarrel is mainly about the Greek New Testament. Most modern translations follow critical editions of the Greek, compiled by comparing the surviving manuscripts.

The King James-only position is common among independent fundamental Baptist churches, which belong to no convention, and they hold it in different degrees. Ambassador Baptist College, a fundamentalist Baptist college in North Carolina, puts a moderate form of it in its doctrinal statement:

We believe … that God has preserved His Word in the Masoretic Hebrew Text of the Old Testament and the Textus Receptus Greek Text of the New Testament … that the King James Version of the Bible is the best English translation available, not only because it is an excellent translation, but because it is a translation of the best Hebrew and Greek texts.

Ambassador Baptist College, doctrinal statement

The college rests the doctrine of preservation on promises such as the one Jesus made in Matthew 24:35, that his words “shall not pass away.” It also states that “inspiration applied only to the autographs,” the original writings, so it treats the King James as a faithful translation, not a new revelation. Its teachers “teach and preach exclusively from it.” Others go further and call the English text itself perfect. Humberto Gómez, the reviser of the Spanish Bible above, has written: “We believe that the 1611 is the perfect word of God.”

Southern Baptists, who read modern translations, confess that God preserves his word too. Their 1997 resolution on Bible translation begins by saying that Southern Baptists “believe that the Bible is truth without any mixture of error and are deeply committed to the preservation of the Scriptures.” It welcomes “translating the Scriptures into the current language of the people” and says the convention is “anxious to support the most accurate translations.” The 1689 confession had already held both concerns in one breath: the original texts were “kept pure in all ages,” and they must be translated into “the vulgar language of every nation.” Baptist churches on both sides confess the same Bible as the word of God. They disagree over which Greek text best preserves it.

Baptist missionaries made translations, and a quarrel over one word in them split the Bible work American Christians had shared. Adoniram Judson, whose station in Burma became the first mission of American Baptists, completed his Burmese Bible in 1834; the New Testament was printed at Moulmein in 1832 and the Old Testament two years later. Judson translated the Greek word baptizo, and the words formed from it, with a Burmese word meaning to immerse or dip. The interdenominational American Bible Society helped pay for the printing.

The trouble came in 1835, when the society was asked to help print a Bengali version made on the same principle. Its managers refused. They adopted a rule to support only versions conformed “to the common English version, at least, so far that all the religious denominations represented in this Society can consistently use and circulate said versions,” and the society’s annual meeting approved the rule in May 1836. In April 1837, Baptist delegates from twenty-three states met in Philadelphia and formed their own American and Foreign Bible Society.

Then Baptists divided among themselves over whether English needed a new version too. In May 1850 the American and Foreign Bible Society voted to circulate only the received English versions, and in June supporters of a new translation founded the American Bible Union, “to procure and circulate the most faithful versions of the Scriptures in all languages throughout the world.” The Union published an English New Testament in 1865. The rival societies never reunited, and in 1883 a Baptist Bible convention at Saratoga recommended that both practically disband and hand their work to the denomination’s publication and mission bodies.

Most Baptists went on reading the King James. Even Henry Vedder, the Baptist historian who praised the Union’s New Testament in 1907, granted that the King James might commend itself “for use in public and private devotions.” More than a century later, the HCSB and CSB gave a Baptist publisher an English translation of its own.

Judson’s Burmese Bible, the Reina-Valera in Spanish, the King James and the CSB in English: each was made so that a people could hear, in their own tongue, the words that would not pass away.

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