Early origins of the NET Bible

I was in Philly in November 1995 for the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, a professional society I have belonged to for just about my entire teaching career. It was cold and windy but without rain or snow, and I was just on my way from the convention center across the street to grab a cheesesteak sandwich for lunch at the 12th Street Deli. I was crossing the street in one direction and met Hampton and his friend crossing the street toward me. In the middle of the street I got invited to join them for dinner that night to talk about some stuff related to the Biblical Studies Foundation website.

Later that evening we met at the hotel and ended up upstairs at a nice Italian restaurant. There, over the course of a fine dinner, my colleague Dan Wallace and I were asked essentially what it would take to do an entirely new translation of the Bible to be placed on the Internet for free access, to solve the problem Biblical Studies Foundation had of posting lots of Bible study materials online which quoted lots of Bible verses from several different English translations, none of which wanted to grant permission to be quoted online (this was 1995 and many publishers were afraid of losing control of copyrighted material if they allowed it to be posted online). So Dan and I got a piece of paper (I think it was the back of an envelope, the restaurant was good enough to have cloth napkins rather than paper ones) and started listing out requirements and who we would get to do what parts, etc. By the time we were done at the restaurant and back in our hotel lobby it was close to midnight, but we actually went and got another colleague out of bed to help us in our planning. Several other Dallas Seminary faculty who were in the same hotel saw us sitting around the lobby and got involved in the discussions. From the very beginning of the project, it was very natural to involve people from Dallas Seminary because they were close by (Biblical Studies Foundation was located in Dallas too) and because they were experts in the biblical languages. We decided to keep the team small because it would be possible to work so much faster with a smaller group, yet from the beginning the idea was that the draft of a particular Old or New Testament book would be prepared by one or sometimes two people, and then reviewed and edited by a few others (normally a minimum of two individuals, but sometimes more). Major issues of concept and design would be handled by an Executive Steering Committee of initially seven people (three OT scholars and three NT scholars plus me as Project Director, later expanded to nine people total).

By the time the meetings in Philadelphia were over and we had all returned home to the Dallas area, we had a pretty good working concept and had also decided (and this was a monumental decision looking back) at the suggestion of the President of Biblical Studies Foundation that all the translators would include a lengthy set of notes documenting their linguistic and exegetical reasoning behind the translation. This seemed natural because the Internet put no limits on length, and all of us felt it would be good to be able to go back and see why and how certain decisions were made, and that this information would be helpful too for biblical scholars and translators as well as seminary students, pastors, and general users. By the time we reached the First Edition (2005) the amount of material in the notes would be approximately five times the length of the Bible translation itself, in places almost a running commentary on the text. It was like having one volume of Bible translation and five additional volumes of notes and commentary, all in one. [to be continued]