Santa Biblia

After the release of the first Latter-day Saint edition of the Bible in 1979 and a new edition of the Triple Combination containing the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price in 1981, Elder Boyd K. Packer declared:

With the passing of years, these scriptures will produce successive generations of faithful Christians who know the Lord Jesus Christ and are disposed to obey His will. . . . The revelations will be opened to them as to no other in the history of the world. . . . They will develop a gospel scholarship beyond that which their forebears could achieve. They will have the testimony that Jesus is the Christ and be competent to proclaim Him and to defend Him.

Decades of experience have proven the value of those scripture editions for millions of Latter-day Saints, and yet, as Elder Packer went on to relate, “even all of this is but a beginning, for we have it only in English.”¹ Although the Triple Combination has been translated into forty-four languages, for many years only English-speaking Saints could enjoy the advantages of reading the Old and New Testaments in a Church-sponsored edition. That changed in September 2009 with the publication of the Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 2009, a Spanish edition of the LDS Bible and the first new language edition to be published since the English version thirty years earlier (fig. 1). The Santa Biblia² marks a significant milestone in the history of Latter-day Saint scripture both because of its contents and because of what it indicates about the internationalization of the Church. In this article, I will attempt to capture some of that significance by analyzing the Santa Biblia’s translation, textual basis, study aids, and impact.

History

The English LDS Bible published in 1979 featured the traditional King James translation with innovative formatting and study aids including interpretive chapter headings, cross-references to other LDS scripture, citations from the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, explanatory notes, a Bible dictionary, a concordance called the Topical Guide, and maps.³ (In 2013 an updated edition appeared that makes several improvements but closely follows the overall form and content of the 1979 edition.) That Bible edition set the formatting standard for a new English Triple Combination in 1981, which in turn became the template for subsequent foreign-language editions of the Triple Combination, including a new Spanish edition in 1993.⁴

In the years following, President Packer initiated the idea of having an LDS edition of the Bible in Spanish similar to what was available in English.⁵ Church leaders weighed the advantages and disadvantages of creating an entirely new translation of the Bible themselves, but after a lengthy review it was decided to use an existing translation. The question then became which version to adopt, and attention naturally turned to the translation Latter-day Saints had already been using, a traditional and acclaimed Bible called the Reina-Valera.

Like the King James Version in English, the Reina-Valera Version is very much a Protestant translation and traces its history to the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. Casiodoro de Reina, much like his English counterpart William Tyndale, spent much of his life abroad trying to avoid authorities who were none too pleased with him. In 1569, Reina published his greatest work: history’s first complete Spanish Bible based on the original biblical languages. Reina spent twelve years at his task, working from Hebrew and Greek texts while consulting previous Spanish translations, such as a 1543 New Testament translated by Francisco de Enzinas. Reina’s Bible came to be known as la Biblia del Oso, “the Bible of the Bear,” due to a distinctive picture on its title page (fig. 2). Many of the first copies were confiscated and burned. Another reformer-in-exile, Cipriano de Valera, later revised Reina’s work and republished it in 1602. The Reina-Valera Version, as it would later be called, eventually established itself as the standard Bible for Spanish-speaking Protestants.⁶ This Spanish translation of the Bible has even influenced English speakers. The translators who worked on the King James Version consulted Valera’s revision—published only two years before they began their own work—and various examples of common phrasing make it “fairly certain that in the quarry which formed the King James Bible may be heard echoes of the Reina-Valera.”⁷

The original Reina-Valera Version has been updated several times in the past four centuries in order to keep pace with changes in the Spanish language and advances in biblical scholarship. For many years the Church used the 1960 edition, which is published by the American Bible Society and remains the most popular version of the Reina-Valera today. Efforts were made to obtain copyright permission to reprint that edition with the unique LDS study aids inserted around the biblical text. Permission was denied. A search was then made through older editions that were in the public domain, and the Church decided to make its own update to the predecessor of the 1960 version.⁸ This edition was published in 1909 and is commonly known as la Versión Antigua, “the Old Version”—an allusion to its status as the traditional Bible of choice for conservative Protestants.⁹ Although copyright challenges initiated the search that led to the 1909 Reina-Valera, Elder Richard G. Scott explained that “the Spirit identified the edition that we ought to use and has guided [our] efforts in every detail.”¹⁰

In 2004, Jay E. Jensen and Lynn A. Mickelsen of the First Quorum of the Seventy were called to co-chair the Spanish Bible project. This project involved both modernizing the 1909 text and preparing Spanish translations of the appropriate study aids. The entire project was carried out under the direction of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. In March 2009, the Church formally announced the new Bible and its release in September of that year. The timing coincided with the centennial anniversary of the Reina-Valera Antigua, and the new edition’s tie to the traditional text was celebrated in its official title, Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 2009.¹¹

Language and Translation

The language of the 1909 Reina-Valera presented some challenges. This version of the Bible is a Spanish classic, traditionally worded and beautifully expressed. However, the vocabulary is often incomprehensibly antiquated, the syntax is sometimes awkward, and abandoned verbal forms appear alongside nouns and prepositions whose spelling or accentuation would raise eyebrows in any modern Spanish classroom. One option would have been to preserve the 1909 version as it stood, much like how English-speaking Saints read the similarly archaic language of the King James Version.¹² Instead, explained Jeffrey C. Bateson, then director of the Church’s Translation Division, the decision was made to make “very conservative changes” so that the language would be more accurate and understandable.¹³

Church translators began by updating archaic language, spelling, and accentuation until a reviewable manuscript was ready. Next, Elder Jensen and Elder Mickelsen led an intensive review process that involved a repeating cycle of feedback and revision from some two hundred Spanish-speaking priesthood leaders and their wives in nearly a dozen countries.¹⁴ Because the new translation would serve Spanish-speaking Church members from Spain to Texas to Chile, it was important that regional or dialectal differences be minimized. The wording was compared to Hebrew and Greek texts, other Spanish versions, and the King James Version in English. The challenge was to craft a reading that is textually accurate, doctrinally sound, beautiful to the ear, and understandable to modern readers.¹⁵ Achieving these several goals required more than just dictionaries and lexicons. As Elder D. Todd Christofferson explained, “It is not just a technical undertaking to translate the scriptures. It’s important that the Spirit be there, that the meaning be there, that the intent of the Spirit be reflected in the translation.”¹⁶

Some examples help demonstrate the kinds of revisions that were necessary:

Spelling and Accentuation

Archaic or Obscure Terms

Simplified Language

Certain terms were changed to avoid incorrect or potentially misleading doctrinal interpretations:

Doctrinal Vocabulary

Sometimes the 1909 Reina-Valera is a defensible translation from Hebrew or Greek (and similar phrasing will appear in other Bible translations), but does not match the meaning as translated in the King James Version in English.¹⁷ In many cases these differences were allowed to stand, as in the following examples:

Santa Biblia Passages That Read Differently Than the KJV¹⁸

In other cases, especially when the KJV contains phrases that are important in LDS discourse or that help link biblical passages to linguistic echoes in modern revelation, the 1909 Reina-Valera was modified to read more like the KJV. The following are a few examples:

Santa Biblia Passages Harmonized with the KJV

Another important decision Bible translators or editors must make is which Hebrew or Greek words to translate and which to transliterate. Translation expresses the word’s meaning in a new language while transliteration simply spells out the foreign word. For example, the revelatory device used by the Israelite high priest could be translated into English as “Lights and Perfections” or transliterated as Urim and Thummim.¹⁹ Transliterating a word can be advantageous when it is a technical term that has no exact equivalent in the target language and a translation would mask the foreign nature or specific nuance of the word. For example, the Hebrew term for the place where the dead dwell is Sheol (compare D&C 121:4), but because the KJV translates it variously as “grave” (31 times), “hell” (31), “pit” (3), and “depth” (once, Isa. 7:11), English readers miss both the specific cultural meaning and the connection between the various references. The 1909 Reina-Valera similarly uses eight different Spanish terms to represent this one Hebrew word. In contrast, the Santa Biblia changes all but one of these references to the transliterated word Seol. The disadvantage of transliterating is that it introduces a foreign word that readers may not be familiar with, but in the case of Seol, the editors helped by placing a footnote on some of the references that explains, “HEB[REW] world or dwelling of the dead, grave, hell.”

The King James Version, the 1909 Reina-Valera, and the Santa Biblia take different approaches in transliterating other words as well. The chart below displays several examples of the choices made in each version, with translated words highlighted in gray and transliterated words in white:

Differences in Translation/Transliteration

These differences mean that Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints may become more familiar with certain Hebrew or Greek terms than their English-speaking counterparts (and conversely, certain other terms will be more familiar to English speakers). Consider the final example in the chart, yahweh/Jehovah, the name of God.²⁰ The KJV usually replaces the name with the euphemistic title “the LORD,” while the Reina-Valera line of Bibles preserves it as a proper name. Spanish speakers thus interact with the name Jehovah much more often than English speakers and will more readily recognize Jesus Christ as “the Great Jehovah of the Old Testament.”²¹

Considering all the reasons why the 1909 Reina-Valera may have been modified in particular cases—outdated spelling, vocabulary, or grammar; doctrinal concerns; linguistic disharmony with other LDS scripture; and transliteration—how extensive are the revisions? The chart below displays a sampling of twenty chapters totaling 546 verses for which I compared the 1909 and 2009 versions word for word.²² It turns out that only 17 verses in the sample, or 3.11 percent, remain exactly the same in both versions; the rest feature at least one change in spelling/accentuation (11.90 percent of the verses), at least one change in vocabulary (13.00 percent), or at least one change to both spelling and vocabulary (71.98 percent).

These data suggest that the “very conservative changes” made to the 1909 edition must be understood as conservative in kind, but not number. While the editors rarely made changes that substantially alter the basic meaning of the 1909 Reina-Valera, the changes are bounteous, and the result is a Bible that is considerably more readable. The Santa Biblia is by no means colloquial and certainly retains the dignity of language that Latter-day Saints expect from their scriptures, but the modernization of its grammar, syntax, spelling, and vocabulary make a profound difference in reading comprehension.²³

Textual Makeup

The wording of any particular verse in the Santa Biblia depends not only on how it was translated from Hebrew or Greek into Spanish but also on which particular Hebrew and Greek manuscripts were utilized as the basis for translation. Because multiple manuscript copies of the scriptures exist and most do not read exactly the same way in every instance, Bible translators and editors must employ textual criticism, the process of comparing variant readings and deciding, based on all the evidence, which reading is to be preferred.

Both the King James and Reina-Valera Old Testaments are based on a medieval manuscript family called the Masoretic Text, and thus their textual base is very similar. The English and Spanish LDS Bibles occasionally contain footnotes suggesting alternate readings based on the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and other non-Masoretic sources.²⁴

Both the King James and Reina-Valera New Testaments are based on a printed Greek text from the sixteenth century known as the Textus Receptus (TR), which itself is based on a few late Greek manuscripts.²⁵ While the King James Version follows the TR very closely, the Reina-Valera New Testament has always included some passages that incorporate other textual traditions. Reina himself included some variant readings from other sources such as the Latin Vulgate. During the nineteenth century, scholars began publishing new editions of the Greek New Testament that incorporated evidence from Greek manuscripts that are much older than those used for the TR. These “critical editions” of the Greek New Testament are based not on any single manuscript but review all available data and decide on a case-by-case basis which variant reading is the best for any given passage.²⁶ Different editions of the Reina-Valera have varied in how much they follow these newer editions and deviate from the TR.

Where does the Santa Biblia fit into this picture? The chart below displays a sampling of about two hundred verses I examined that I knew ahead of time read differently in the TR and modern critical editions. I looked up each of these passages in the Santa Biblia and in the editions of the Reina-Valera that preceded it to see which reading they follow in each case. For comparison, two English versions are also listed, the King James Version (1611) and the New Revised Standard Version (1989).

As shown above, the original 1602 Reina-Valera follows the Textus Receptus in nearly three-quarters of the sample. With the advancement of textual criticism in the nineteenth century, the editors of the 1862 Reina-Valera modified the text to follow additional critical text readings. The 1909 Reina-Valera preserves most of these modifications and adds a few more, and the 1960 update by the American Bible Society seems to have followed a strategy of adopting critical readings on most occasions when the opportunity presented itself. Next, the Santa Biblia appears. For the verses in this sample, the Santa Biblia’s editors switched a few critically worded passages back to the TR wording but also amended twenty-two existing TR readings to follow the critical wording instead. This means the Santa Biblia features a net gain of critical readings over its 1909 parent text (although still not as many as its 1960 sister text).

One example of a textual emendation is found in Matthew 5:22. The KJV (following the Textus Receptus) reads, “Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” The phrase “without a cause” is a late intrusion into the Greek text.²⁷ It also appears in the 1909 Reina-Valera (“locamente”), but the phrase was dropped from the Santa Biblia, bringing it into line with both critical Greek texts and, significantly, the reading in the Book of Mormon (compare 3 Ne. 12:22). Other examples of passages in which the Santa Biblia New Testament follows a different textual reading than the KJV include the following:²⁸

Textual Differences between the KJV and Santa Biblia

In other cases in which the KJV and the 1909 Reina-Valera are textually distinct, the latter was altered to read like the KJV. These emendations do more than simply translate Greek into Spanish a little differently: they reflect a change in which Greek texts underlie the translation in the first place. For example:

Santa Biblia Passages Textually Harmonized with the KJV

Many of these kinds of textual changes reflect a desire to follow the reading that maintains the most emphasis on Jesus Christ, or to preserve other important doctrinal ideas that may be reflected in one variant reading but not another.

To those unfamiliar with Bible translating, it may seem strangely eclectic to pick and choose readings from disparate textual witnesses. This is a standard practice, however. All translator-editors, be they tied to a university or a church, come to their work with certain goals and viewpoints. These determine how they prioritize evidence while engaging in textual criticism, and how they then balance that evidence with other concerns. An interesting example is how translations treat Mark 16:9–20, the final dozen verses of Mark. These verses do not appear in the earliest manuscripts, and the vocabulary varies somewhat from the rest of the book. The 1952 Revised Standard Version of the Bible does not include this passage because its editors decided that if Mark were not the original author then these verses should be treated differently. In 2001, a group of evangelical Christians published the English Standard Version, an update of the Revised Standard Version that modifies what they considered to be its more liberal editorial choices. They restored the longer ending of Mark. Both groups of editors had access to the same information, but their goals and viewpoints meant they approached this textual decision differently. For its part, an LDS Church manual acknowledges that Mark 16:9–20 “might not have been written by Mark” but concludes that “whatever the reasons for the manuscript variations, the Church accepts all of Mark 16 as inspired scripture. Its value is based not on which human being wrote it, but on its inspired testimony of truth.”²⁹ The “original” reading, then, is an important but not the only issue when determining how variant readings should be treated.

The textual editing of the Santa Biblia reflects these priorities. The Santa Biblia’s editors, as does any group that engages in biblical translation, used the results of textual criticism but did so in light of their own perspectives and priorities. For Latter-day Saints, it is only natural that textual decisions be made in light of the doctrinal and textual insights available through the restored gospel.

Formatting, Chapter Headings, and Appendices

The basic page layout in the Santa Biblia looks very familiar to those who have used other LDS scriptures (fig. 3). The text is arranged in double columns above a three-column space for footnotes. Headings run along the top of the page, and each chapter begins with a summarizing heading in italics. A few cosmetic details, which are standard in other foreign-language scripture editions, differentiate it from the English Bible, such as a horizontal line separating the text from the header space. The Spanish Bible also uses a larger font than the English edition, requiring over four hundred more pages to cover Genesis through Revelation. On rare occasions, the Reina-Valera versification differs from the KJV.³⁰ One of the most striking visual differences between the two Bibles are the poetic stanzas that appear in the Psalms and many other sections with poetry, a feature the Santa Biblia preserves from the existing Reina-Valera translation (see fig. 4 for one example).

The chapter headings in the Santa Biblia are for the most part close translations of the headings found in the LDS Bible in English. In several instances the headings differ from the original 1979 headings and more closely resemble those found in the 2013 English edition, following changes that had been incorporated into the online English scriptures years before they appeared in print. And yet even in comparison with the 2013 edition, the Spanish chapter headings sometimes feature their own unique wording that improves the description. Consider a few examples:

Improvements in Spanish Chapter Headings

In addition to the footnotes and chapter headings, other Santa Biblia study aids appear in an appendix with three sections: Bible Reference Guide, Selections from the Joseph Smith Translation, and Bible Maps and Photographs. The fourteen-page Reference Guide (“Guía de Referencias”) is a new feature not found in the English LDS Bible. It consists of lists of chapter-and-verse references under the headings of the Godhead, Gospel Topics, People, Places, and Events. It serves as a very basic concordance to substitute for the much more detailed Guide to the Scriptures, which was not included under the covers of the Santa Biblia because most readers would already have it in their copies of the Triple Combination.³¹ The Bible Maps and Photographs section updates a similar appendix that previously appeared in the Spanish Triple Combination.

The Joseph Smith Translation

The section in the appendix titled “Selections from the Joseph Smith Translation” deserves special consideration. As with the English edition, excerpts from Joseph Smith’s revision of the Bible are found in the footnotes or, if the citation is too lengthy, in the appendix. At the time the Santa Biblia was published, the 1993 edition of the Spanish Triple Combination already contained a similar section in its own appendix. The Santa Biblia’s version, however, was rewritten so that the JST changes work around the Santa Biblia’s own text, whereas the Triple Combination’s version was based on the 1960 Reina-Valera.

The text of the JST required some adjusting to account for the syntax and vocabulary differences between English and Spanish.³² As in the English LDS Bible, italicized words indicate changes made by Joseph Smith,³³ but the Santa Biblia innovates with the occasional addition of square brackets that “were added to the Spanish translation to help convey the meaning,” according to the Abbreviations page. These brackets appear thirty-seven times in the footnotes and JST Appendix, and their most common function is to mark phrases that are identical in the KJV and JST but that read differently in the Santa Biblia and the Spanish JST. This helps indicate to Spanish readers that the bracketed phrase in the Spanish JST, while different from the wording in the Santa Biblia, does not represent a change made by Joseph Smith.³⁴

In addition to differences in language, sometimes rendering the Joseph Smith Translation into Spanish is a challenge because the JST was created using a specific English translation, the King James Version, as a base text. JST revisions often respond to issues that are not inherent in the Bible but are rather tied to the unique phrasing of the KJV.³⁵ A common example is the way the JST updates archaic English words to modern English words (such as wot to know or which to who). Because of this, the JST sometimes solves difficulties that are nonexistent in other translations of the Bible, including the Reina-Valera in Spanish. In cases where a JST revision contributes little or nothing to the Spanish text, the editors of the Santa Biblia sometimes left out the JST reference and sometimes included it anyway.³⁶

When the Santa Biblia was released in 2009, it contained twenty-four JST citations that were not included in the 1979 English Bible, and thus Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints actually had access to more of the JST than English speakers. The 2013 English edition caught up with the Spanish edition and includes some new JST citations the Spanish edition does not have. The chart below compares the number of verses from the JST cited in whole or in part in the 1979 English Bible, the 1993 Spanish Triple Combination appendix, the 2009 Spanish Bible, and the 2013 English Bible:³⁷

When comparing these numbers, it is important to keep in mind that some JST references were deliberately left out of the Santa Biblia either because the JST change is not relevant in Spanish or because the Santa Biblia already reads like the JST anyway. This exclusion explains why the Spanish edition cites only a few more total verses than the 1979 English edition (895 compared to 887) even though it introduced twenty-four new JST citations. Similarly, even though the 2013 English edition quotes many more JST verses than the Spanish edition (918 compared to 895), all but a handful of the additional verses would not be relevant in Spanish anyway.

The Santa Biblia’s JST appendix includes a few other modifications. The chart below compares various features in the “Selections from the Joseph Smith Translation” section in the appendices of the 1979 English Bible, the 1993 Spanish Triple Combination, the 2009 Spanish Bible, and the 2013 English Bible:

The Santa Biblia’s JST footnotes and appendix mark a historic development in how Latter-day Saints use the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible. Although selections from the JST had previously been included in the appendices of foreign-language editions of the Triple Combination, a complete foreign-language translation of all the verses available in the English LDS Bible “is something we [previously] had never had in the Church.”³⁸

Explanatory Footnotes

The footnotes in the Santa Biblia are, like the chapter headings, based on those found in the English LDS Bible. They include cross-references to the Bible and other LDS scripture, alternate translations of Hebrew and Greek words, explanations of difficult idioms, alternate meanings of archaic expressions, citations from the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, and other miscellaneous notes. The Santa Biblia’s explanatory notes, however, are not all exact copies of the English originals. They occasionally innovate by adding more detail to existing English notes and by correcting mistakes in them, including mistakes that remain in the English version up through the 2013 edition.³⁹

Individuals who look through the Santa Biblia often notice, sometimes with some surprise, how few footnotes there appear to be in comparison with the English edition.⁴⁰ This observation may lead to the assumption that because the Spanish notes are fewer, they must represent an abbreviated or “lite” version of the English notes—and thus are inferior. It is a fact that the explanatory footnotes⁴¹ number about 40 percent fewer in the Spanish Bible. That figure does not tell the whole story, however. While there are indeed helpful English notes that did not make it into the Santa Biblia, often an English note did not need to be included in the Spanish edition because the Spanish translation already read clearly without it. In other cases, as shown in the examples below, the 1909 Reina-Valera originally read like the KJV but the editors of the Santa Biblia, instead of simply translating the English footnote, took the footnote’s wording and inserted it directly into the biblical text (strikeouts below show the original wording, bolding compares the English footnote and the Spanish textual revision):

English Footnotes Incorporated Directly into the Spanish Text

Because some explanatory notes would be helpful in both the English and Spanish editions, while some notes would be helpful in only one or the other, the number of notes in each edition must be compared with those differences in mind. The charts on page 70 compare the number of explanatory notes of various kinds that appear in the 2013 English edition and the Santa Biblia.⁴² (Numbers for the 1979 English edition differ significantly from the 2013 edition only in the case of JST references, so those are displayed separately.) Whether or not a footnote is language-specific or more universally applicable is distinguished according to the key below:

When the numbers in each category are added up, we find that the English edition contains a total of 5,207 explanatory notes. The Spanish edition borrows 2,419 of these, or 46.46 percent. The Spanish edition then adds 908 new explanatory notes, creating a total of 3,327. The Spanish total is 36.12 percent smaller than the English total.

Moving past the raw totals, distinguishing between notes that are edition-specific or that would be helpful in both editions leads to two important observations. First, the data provided in these charts show that although thousands of explanatory notes from the English Bible do not appear in the Santa Biblia, the vast majority—2,474 out of 2,788 missing notes—did not carry over simply because they are not needed in Spanish. The fact that the Santa Biblia borrowed fewer than half of the English explanatory notes does not signify that its notes are inferior to the English version’s as much as it suggests how much more lucid the Spanish translation is in comparison with the KJV.

The second important observation is that 641 of the 908 new explanatory notes added to the Spanish edition (more than two-thirds) are not uniquely tied to the Spanish text but provide information that would be useful in English as well. Consider, for example, how helpful it might be for the English notes to elaborate on terms like covenant, Sela, Leviathan, or the technical terms that appear at the beginning of many Psalms—all of which the English notes routinely ignore and the Spanish notes routinely comment on. Furthermore, in contrast to these 641 notes that the English edition is missing out on, there are only 314 notes in the English edition that the Spanish edition does not have but would benefit from. In other words, it turns out that between the two versions, it is the English edition that is missing out on most of the information that is found in one edition but not the other.

The footnotes, then, follow the pattern of the other features of the Santa Biblia: they take what is already good in the English edition and find ways to improve it when possible.

Impact

Just as the English LDS Bible did in 1979, the Santa Biblia marks a milestone in the history of Latter-day Saint scripture. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now has over fifteen million members around the world, more than half of whom live outside of the United States. Church materials have been published in more than 170 languages, and Church members who do not speak English outnumber those who do. The publication of its first foreign-language edition of the Old and New Testaments, then, marks an important if natural development in the international growth of the Church.

At the same time, the Santa Biblia reflects more than changes in Mormon demographics. It is important to remember that the Santa Biblia is not only the Church’s first Spanish Bible, it was the first Bible translation the Church had published in any language. The English edition inherited the King James translation whole, which, even considering the enormous effort that went into the study aids, limited the kinds of questions that needed to be asked of the text. In contrast, although the 1909 Reina-Valera provided the Church with a base text (saving it the difficult task of starting a translation from scratch), the decision to revise the biblical text itself required interacting with the Bible to an extent and level of detail perhaps unmatched since Joseph Smith completed his own revision in 1833. In addition to hundreds of new footnotes, this interaction is reflected in how the translators and editors approached the respected yet archaic language of the 1909 Reina-Valera. They set out to achieve the challenging goal of updating and modernizing in a way that still preserved the sacred flavor of the original, and in my opinion they succeeded. This translational approach represents a different strategy than what has been done with the English Bible, where the perceived benefits of exactly preserving a historically significant translation have, thus far, outweighed any benefits of linguistic modernization, even if this means people must struggle more to understand Hosea or Paul. The Santa Biblia is also relatively progressive in its attitude toward New Testament textual criticism. By allowing several passages inherited from the Reina-Valera to remain textually distinct from the KJV (and ultimately the Greek of the Textus Receptus) and especially by freshly altering existing TR readings to follow other textual readings, the Santa Biblia’s editors implicitly acknowledged that multiple textual witnesses exist and that no single one of them is the best in every case.⁴³

The Santa Biblia is also notable for the ways in which it was allowed to appropriately diverge from the English edition. While the Spanish edition is formatted to look like its English predecessor and its study aids follow the English version as much as possible, its editors did not see the English edition as completely sacrosanct. In appropriate situations, the English chapter headings were modified and the footnotes were deleted, refined, or supplemented. Even though the King James translation was consulted and some passages in the Santa Biblia were modified to read like the KJV, there was no overriding concern that every verse sound the same or even mean the same thing. Even chapters with parallel translations in the Book of Mormon were not harmonized to strictly match that rendition. This independence means that the Spanish biblical text is in many instances more readable and more accurate than the King James translation.

The Santa Biblia also transcends its identity as a “Spanish Bible” by making at least two important contributions that benefit even Latter-day Saints who are not native Spanish speakers. First, in the Church at large the Santa Biblia is leading to an increased recognition of heroes from history whose dedication and faith helped further God’s purposes, but whose stories are often overlooked. General conference addresses and Church manuals have frequently highlighted the sacrifices of reformer-translators like John Wycliffe and William Tyndale of England and Martin Luther of Germany.⁴⁴ Where are the heroes Spanish-speaking Saints can claim? The release of the Spanish LDS Bible began to draw more attention to Spanish history through a special half-hour orientation video about the new Bible that aired, in Spanish and English, in between general conference sessions in October 2009.⁴⁵ More recently, the 2014 edition of the Institute manual for the New Testament took a significant step forward in an introductory section that covers the history of the Bible as a book. The new manual presents a broader view of that history by describing not only the stories of Luther, Wycliffe, and Tyndale, but also the Spanish reformers Francisco de Enzinas, Casiodoro de Reina, and Cipriano de Valera. The manual’s description of Enzinas’s imprisonment, Reina’s persecution and exile, and Valera’s twenty-year translation effort provides the first English retelling of their stories in a Church print publication in more than forty years.⁴⁶ As proportionally fewer and fewer Latter-day Saints speak English, it will become increasingly important that our Church narratives include the contributions of inspired and inspiring individuals in the histories of other cultures, and the Santa Biblia has positively drawn attention to some of those stories.

The Santa Biblia also benefits those beyond its target audience when it is studied by those who can read Spanish but are not native speakers (this might include the tens of thousands of missionaries who have served in Spain and Latin America). Although the King James Version is wonderful in many ways, one disadvantage of reading it (or any version) exclusively is that readers may come to see its particular translational interpretations, its unique expressions, and even its specific typesetting format as being synonymous with “the Bible” itself. Interaction with other versions of the Bible improves our understanding of scripture by helping us see which features are idiosyncratic to our particular version and which are truly “biblical.” For example, while teaching Spanish at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, I saw the surprise several new missionaries experienced when they opened up their Reina-Valera Bible and wondered why the name Jehová—for them a relatively rare word—appeared on almost every page. The Spanish Bible taught them that the small-capitals “LORD” they grew up with was code for Jehovah all along. On one occasion, an English speaker asked me why the new Santa Biblia text was spaced so “weirdly” in several places, with sentences chopped up into twos and threes and placed in different lines. It turned out that because the KJV typesets poetry and prose the same way, he had never in his life known that the Bible even has poetry! Comparing how various translations express ideas differently can also help us understand gospel concepts in new ways. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland once taught an implicit lesson on the value of multiple translations when he described the greater appreciation he had for Jesus’s invitation, “Abide in me” (John 15:4), after reading the Spanish rendering, permaneced en mí. “‘Abide’ is not a word we use much anymore,” he explained, “but [in Spanish] even gringos like me can hear the root cognate there of ‘permanence.’ The sense of this then is ‘stay—but stay forever.’”⁴⁷ Bilingual readers who study both editions of the LDS Bible will inevitably find insights that they could not have gained from one alone.

Of course, the greatest benefits of the Santa Biblia have come to the millions of Spanish-speaking Saints it was designed to bless. President Thomas S. Monson declared, “This new Latter-day Saint edition is the finest Spanish Bible in all the world. . . . My heart is filled with gratitude as I ponder the blessing this new edition of the Bible will be in your lives.”⁴⁸ One Church member described how after obtaining her copy of the Santa Biblia, “I could hardly wait to get home and start studying—I stayed up until two in the morning. . . . I had tears in my eyes because I had been waiting for it for so long.”⁴⁹ Another said, “Sunday when we received word that it came . . . I was very happy! . . . One can really see the promises of the Lord being accomplished.”⁵⁰

One final feature to note about the Spanish Bible is a unique introduction that explains the history, content, and features of the new edition. The final paragraph promises, “El lector que con oración sincera estudie esta edición de la Santa Biblia llegará a adquirir, mediante la inspiración del Espíritu Santo, una mayor comprensión y un testimonio más firme de Dios, el Eterno Padre, y de Su Hijo Jesucristo, nuestro Señor y Redentor, así como de la plenitud del Evangelio de Jesucristo.” [The reader who prayerfully studies this edition of the Holy Bible will gain, through the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, a greater understanding and a stronger testimony of God the Eternal Father and His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord and Redeemer, as well as the fulness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.] Many Spanish-speaking Latter-day Saints testify that this has been their experience.