Barclay M. Newman, ed., Holy Bible: Contemporary English Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1995. The New Testament appeared in 1991.
The Contemporary English Version is a simplified version of the Bible designed for children and uneducated adults (at a fourth grade reading level). It is similar to the Good News Bible previously published by the American Bible Society, though at a lower reading level. It was produced by employees of the American Bible Society (ABS) working under the direction of one of the Society's officers, Dr. Barclay M. Newman. Newman explained in an interview that he and his assistants "did a lot of research with children. We did a lot of research with persons who were not familiar with traditional biblical jargon, persons who are almost street people as a matter of fact, and then we tried to simply listen to the way that people speak ... We got it by their language, the way they speak, and do our translating accordingly." (1) In the Forward to the book Creating and Crafting the Contemporary English Version (1996), ABS President Eugene B. Habecker describes the origin of the version thus:
Work on the CEV began in 1984 when Dr. Barclay Newman, Ph.D., a distinguished biblical scholar who had provided several decades of service as a translations consultant in the Asia Pacific Region of the United Bible Societies, first began to apply his considerable knowledge to his own first language—English. He meticulously studied the language that people, and especially children, used and were exposed to on a daily basis through books, magazines, newspapers, the movies, and television. This eclectic and careful study helped him to understand what terms and sentence sructures were most understandable to people who used English in their day to day communication. He learned what sorts of constructions confused readers, and even more significantly, he learned which terms and grammatical constructions were likely to be misunderstood by people who heard texts being read aloud.
All of this knowledge guided Dr. Newman as he developed translation principles for the Contemporary English Version and as he prepared the draft of the first "test" publication in this translation. That book, published in 1986, was a collection of Scripture passages on the life of Jesus and was published as an illustrated edition for children. Response to this initial publication was warm, as expected. Children loved it. Teachers and parents loved it, too — many confessing that they enjoyed it for themselves. People asked when further publications would be available in this same translation. "When will you have the whole Bible? This is something I can understand!" (p. i.)
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