Success in project to revise Romanian New Testament

Tyndale House reader Dr Emanuel Contac celebrates the successful printing of a new translation of the Bible in Romanian.

The Cornilescu translation of the Bible, first published in 1921, remains to this day the most popular version among Romanian evangelicals. Although it aged well, the version needed a revision, so in 2015 the British and Foreign Bible Society, together with its Romanian partner, the Interconfessional Romanian Bible Society, commissioned a panel of nine Romanian scholars to carefully revise the text.

The supervision of this project was entrusted to Dr Emanuel Contac, who teaches full time at the Pentecostal Theological Institute of Bucharest. During the past two years, Dr Contac has stayed at Tyndale House, making use of the library to review the Pauline epistles, and to check revisions to the text of the Gospels which were being made by his colleagues.

The new Romanian New Testament was printed in mid-April and is now being distributed. The OT text is still a work in progress: most books have been revised at least once, but a second revision is still necessary in order to make sure that the text is not only faithful to the original, but also accessible for modern readers.