The Bible we use as the Jesus Moment Devotional Bible is the American Standard Version (1901). This version of the Bible provides a way for us to incorporate large chunks of scripture into the website and into a series of devotional books we provide on the website. Rather than try and pursue and purchase permission to incorporate Bible verses from the most well known translations, we decided to turn to the Public Domain to see what was available. There in the Public Domain was an excellent and very well respected translation known as the American Standard Version (ASV). One of the drawbacks to the ASV was that it was not punctuated very well. Fortunately, the World English Bible (WEB) had taken the ASV and used a computer program to add punctuation. The resulting WEB Bible was also available in the Public Domain. The British version of the WEB Bible was almost perfect for my purposes. What we have done in the Jesus Moment Devotional Bible is simply change some of the British spellings for more American spellings (i.e. colour became color, learnt became learned, etc.). We have not knowingly changed any text to say something other than what it already said. With that said, we still consider the Jesus Moment Devotional Bible to be useful only as a devotional aid. It is not intended by me to be used as a source for theological study, practice, or debate. What follows is information about the work of the WEB copied from their website at ebible.org.
The World English Bible is an update of the American Standard Version of 1901, which is in the Public Domain. It has been edited to conform to the Greek Majority Text New Testament. This revision is also in the Public Domain, which sets it apart from other revisions of the American Standard Version, like the New American Standard Bible and the Revised Standard Version. The first pass of the translation, which has already been done, was to convert archaic words and word forms to modern equivalents using a custom computer program. The manual editing is then done to add quotation marks (the ASV of 1901 had none), update other punctuation, update usage, and spot check the translation against the original languages in places where the meaning is unclear or significant textual variants exist. Many people proofread the work and send typo reports and suggestions in. These are reviewed, and if they are found to have merit, edits are made. Sometimes reviewing a suggestion brings to light a better option. As this is going on, the draft at the WEB web page is updated.
Many people have been involved in the production and editing of the World English Bible from a variety of backgrounds. Because this is a revision of the American Standard Version of the Revised Bible, we start with the over 50 Evangelical scholars who worked on that project. They, in turn, relied on the work of those who had gone before them. We also rely on the work of many scholars who have found, compiled, combined, and published the excellent and highly accurate Hebrew and Greek texts from which we work. We also rely on the excellent lexicons of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Greek that are available to us.
In addition to these excellent references that represent literally hundreds of years of combined labor by many committed Christian men and women, we have access to the United Bible Society’s handbooks on Bible translation and a large number of other English translations to compare and consult.
Among the volunteers who have contributed to this project, we have people who attend various churches, including Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, non-denominational, and many more. This broad representation helps guard against introducing sectarian bias into the work. In addition, the novel technique of publishing draft copies of the World English Bible on the Internet provides additional protection against bias, because all serious comments are carefully considered and the wording compared to the original language.