Launched in 1981, the Living Bible was the first Brazilian edition of the Holy Bible to feature simplified, easy-to-understand language.
It was conceived according to the principles of translation that served as the basis for the pioneering Living Bible (USA, 1971).
The appeal of the Living Bible was immediate, especially among young people and recent converts to Christianity who were unfamiliar with the scholarly terms and formal syntactic constructions of older biblical versions.
For many readers, opening the Living Bible has been like breathing the fresh air of understanding for the first time.
Two reasons motivated this revision, undertaken in common agreement between Sociedade Bíblica Internacional and Editora Mundo Cristiano. Firstly, the Portuguese language in Brazil is dynamic, like all modern languages, and it changes incrementally and constantly according to the usage habits of the public that speaks, reads, listens and writes.
We realized that in the Living Bible there were elements of language that were already outdated. What was modern and communicative in the early 1980s was no longer necessarily as expressive.
There was a need to bring the Bible effectively into the 21st century. Second, we determined the need to bring some semantic and syntactic choices of the first edition into greater alignment with the original languages ​​of Scripture.
As a result, the New Living Bible is as simple and easy to understand as ever, and is now even more faithful to the originals written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
There were other changes. In the first edition, the indication of verses followed the logic of the unit of thought. Instead of indicating individual verses, blocks of verses were indicated (eg 1-4, 12-15).
In the New Living Bible, the division into proper paragraphs has been maintained, but verse numbers have been inserted according to the traditional division.
There was also a new text layout, with a sans serif font to maximize the amount of text per page and at the same time make the reading experience more pleasant.
What the reader now receives, therefore, is a Bible that is pleasant to read and easy to understand, as was the 1981 edition, now reconfigured for the present day.
The Word of God is much more than a historical record of ancient documents. It contains nothing less than God's revealed will for all his children. In the New Living Bible, his word becomes clearer than ever.