Audio Bible - New English Translation, NET: Complete Bible

By: Thomas Nelson

Narrated by: Stephen Johnston

Length: 76 hrs and 20 mins

Publisher's Summary

Ever feel lost in translation?

With the NET Full-notes Edition of the Holy Bible, you don’t need to be. Modern listeners can find it challenging to connect with the ancient words and cultural contexts of the biblical writers. The NET offers a completely new solution: pairing a listenable, everyday English translation with the largest set of translators’ notes ever created for a Bible. The NET’s 60,000 notes bring complete transparency to every major translation decision and invite you to look over the translators’ shoulders, allowing you to come to your own understanding of the Scriptures. It is an indispensable resource for every Bible listener.

Public Domain (P)2019 Thomas Nelson

Poor Format

The book is read great however there are no book titles, only part 1 thru 23 so you can not just go to a book like Mark or Luke you just have to guess, Would not have brought if I knew you could not select a book, Very disappointed, would not recommend.

All good!

Good chapter divisions. The Chapters and books are properly divided in the index.

Good voice. Quite comforting and not Hip or High pitched. No background music, which is nice to me.

Good translation. A translation which is a good balance of literal, and easy to understand.

All good.

One thing would make it great

Love the NET Bible translation.

ONE WORD OF WARNING. This recording is complied like a book and not like the Bible. It is sectioned into “parts” so it can be difficult to find certain books of the Bible. You have to guess. The only way this works if you are planning to only listen to the Bible straight through.

I use an audio Bible for my daily devotions where I look at that days text and listen to it for optimal effectiveness.

The layout of this makes my journey a little more challenging.

If the editors could fix this I would gladly buy it all over again to finally have an audio version of this great translation.

Love NET Bible, Voice acting and editing need work

I love the translation in print. The cadence with which the voice actor reads makes it feel stiff and unnatural to me. That is clearly an opinion, but it really makes it sound stiff to me.

Fact however: they didn’t seem to do much quality checking on the editing. Ephesians 5 for example, toward the end has several places in a row where the words cut out then resume further along. It’s not like it’s any book, it’s the Bible, you need all the words.

Example: “this is a sentence I am reading as it should be”
What’s there: “this is a sent reading as ould be”

For a reason that makes no sense to me they broke the entire bible into 23 parts…and that are called “part 1”, “part 2”, etc

Within the parts you can see the books and chapters, but you have to guess what part the book is in. I would MUCH rather have one big book with the books and chapters in it, or better yet, two parts, Old and New Testament.

Missing verses

I have been really enjoying going through the Bible listing to this recording.

As I was listening to 1 Kings 13 verse 1-10 was missing the recording for this chapter started at 1 King 13:11.

The sound

This audio book of the Bible is clear(sound) and concise. I plan to listen to it daily.

Excellent Audio Bible

I find the NET Bible an excellent bible translation. It is not a word-for-word translation nor paraphrase, but is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum - a translation which accurately conveys the meaning of the original text.

The translation is fresh, in modern English (but not informal/colloquial), accurate, transparent (the book or online version with more than 60,000 footnotes offers explanations for translation choices made; alternative renderings etc.).

There is this cliché about the NET Bible among some Bible lovers that its best selling point are the notes and the text itself is not so interesting. I disagree with the latter. It is a very decent text - listen and you will see (or hear).

Stephen Johnston is my favorite bible narrator. Beautifully read, beautiful voice. He reads at a correct pace and in a way which is the opposite of what one would call monotonous. So, you stay focused when listening.

The audio bible has no distracting background music. The chapters are properly labeled (I have downloaded the audio bible as a whole). Also, chapter names are read out loud (e.g. Romans Chapter 9). So, the navigation is simple and you always know what book and chapter of the Bible you are listening to.

Overall an excellent product, my favorite audio bible on Audible.

Update: Regarding "missed out" chapters mentioned by another reviewer - they are not missing but very rarely (I have come across three such instances from among almost 1200 chapters) it happens that three or four chapters are included both as individual tracks (i.e. correctly) and then immediately followed by one track containing all 3-4 chapters together again. Nothing serious I think.

Very good but sadly lots of editing mistakes

Really good reading and performance, unfortunately several chapters are missed out because of editing errors. Eg Jeremiah ch, 3is Jeremiah ch 1 (so ch 3 is missing) and ch 18 is again ch 15. Unfortunately this happens a quite few times throughout the audio book. Hence the loss of two stars.

Otherwise very good.