Holy Bible with Apocrypha (CEB: Common English Bible)

I went ahead and read the whole thing, including Apocrypha. I also preached from it weekly for around a year. It is great in English read aloud, clear for public worship, well-written for private devotion. But it's just not a good translation, constantly choosing ease in English over accuracy, driving me insane when preaching and comparing it to original languages week-by-week.

As far as personal reading, I continue to recommend it alongside basically any other translation someone will actually read.

The Bible and the full Apocrypha in the Common English Bible translation.

As a volume this includes the full Apocrypha, including 3/4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalam 151, etc., and not just the Catholic apocrypha; in the actual ordering on the Kindle edition the deuterocanonical works are placed at the end of the New Testament (although, somewhat confusingly, in the "Go To" menu they are listed between the Testaments).

As a translation the CEB opts for a dynamic equivalence, thought-for-thought, philosophy, with much thought also given to common epithets and phrases more fully fleshed out in meaning. This means that the text does not provide a word-for-word translation more suitable for deriving inferences based on how the text show more reads; the translation exists to convey the primary meaning of the text. In my reading I did not notice many glaringly bizarre or misguided moments in translation, although, as is common in dynamic equivalence translations, certain texts become rather flattened or one-dimensional in the process.

For its purposes, facilitating an understanding of the primary meaning of the text, the CEB does well. As a primary or study Bible it, as all dynamic equivalence translations, falls short; one is better off using a KJV, NASB, or ESV for such purposes. show less