The Bible: An American Translation (AAT) is an English version of the Bible consisting of the Old Testament translated by a group of scholars under the editorship of John Merlin Powis Smith, the Apocrypha translated by Edgar J. Goodspeed, and the New Testament translated by Edgar J. Goodspeed.

Editions

This translation has been made available in a number of editions as shown here: In the preface to the 1931 edition, Powis Smith and Goodspeed wrote, "The rapid advance of learning in recent years in the fields of history, archaeology, and language has thrown new light upon every part of the Bible. At the same time our changing English speech has carried us farther and farther from the sixteenth-century diction in which all our standard versions of it are clothed. Yet the great messages of the Old and New Testaments were never more necessary than in our present confused and hurried life. We have, therefore, sought to produce a new translation of them, based upon the assured results of modern study, and put in the familiar language of today."

Reception and legacy

The initial reaction to the use of this translation, rather than the King James Bible of the 1600s, was poor, but the idea of a 20th century Bible version was accepted over time. A similarly named Bible translated by William Beck, was published in 1976. This was a reaction against the Revised Standard Version.