About this translation, and this recording

The English you are reading and hearing was made for this recording, from the public-domain Greek of Robertson's 1893 critical edition. It is not the 1892 Robertson English that most readers meet. That translation is faithful and freely available, but it was made for the eye — single paragraphs running for thousands of words — and read aloud it puts the pauses in the wrong places. This one was built the other way round: one complete thought to a paragraph, one paragraph to a recorded passage.

The reading is synthetic speech, not a human narrator. That is disclosed on every page and it is not hidden anywhere. Each part was listened to in full and approved before publication, and where the voice misread a word the passage was recorded again rather than accepted.

The text on the page is checksummed against the exact words sent to the narrator, passage by passage. That is why the classroom track never retypes a quotation: every excerpt below is resolved from the same record the recording was made from, so what you read here cannot drift from what you hear.

Two places where this English will differ from a familiar one, both deliberate, and both worth knowing before you trip over them.

First, at section 40 this translation says Moses where Robertson prints Jacob. The words quoted are from Genesis 49 and were spoken by Jacob; the Greek attributes them to Moses. Montfaucon set that reading aside on the authority of two manuscripts and Robertson followed him. This translation keeps Moses: it is the reading of the other manuscripts and of every printed edition, and it is the harder reading, since a copyist corrects Moses to Jacob and never the other way about.

Second, part 8 carries two departures from the literal — "a saving counsel" at section 56, and "the hearts of men" at section 57, which differs from the phrasing of 1 Corinthians 2:9 that most readers will have in their ear.