The NET Bible off and running

After returning from Philadelphia it was not long until a formal proposal was ready for the new translation (which at this time had the working title The Internet Study Bible – the name NET Bible came along a number of months later), with the NT books of 1, 2, 3 John (with the full set of notes) done on my Mac PowerBook 165c as a proof of concept. This proposal was accepted by the sponsor in January 1996 and we were off and running. By the following November, one year from the date of the initial discussions, we would have working drafts of seven OT and NT books, and these along with their notes were posted online as soon as they were submitted. By 1998 we would have a completed draft of the entire NT and by 2001 a completed draft of the entire Bible, which we published online and then managed to print in one volume as the “First Beta Edition,” borrowing software terminology to indicate there was still more editing and revision to do. It would take four more years (2005) to get to the First Edition, but with revisions and updates planned already for five-year intervals, this would be only the beginning. In a later blog I’ll tell the story of the New English Translation – Novum Testamentum Graece Greek-English diglot edition, because that story is interesting enough to get its own discussion.