The ESV is a fine translation but not ideal. The base Greek text it uses for the New Testament is a scam for raking in tons of money and I'm not a fan for that.

Even though there hasn't been any significant new manuscript evidence for the Bible in 100 years (even longer for the New Testament) the United Bible Society changes everything every few years, and then you have to buy their new edition to know what the "original" Bible actually said. Don't worry, their efforts do not go unrewarded, they're making bank off that system. It's awfully convenient for them.

Right now we're in a new revolution in New Testament scholarship where the main theory behind manuscript transmission, often called the text type theory, is being abandoned. So right now, if you believe the men behind modern Bible publishers, *every single Bible on the shelves* is antiquated, and you're about to have to pay them a whole lot of money to fix that.

It's ridiculous. It's a scam. The ESV itself is also under copyright protection, in addition to buying into the scam, which imo is an evil thing to do when there are already public domain versions available. You can't own the words of God.

This is without even getting into the problems in Biblical text criticism itself. It's unwarranted assumption after unwarranted assumption after unwarranted assumption, and after all their meddling and changes to the text, what we wind up with is worse than what we started with. All kinds of conjectural emendations, Frankenstein's monster sentences where you grab part of a sentence from one manuscript, part from another, and part from another, creating a version that no one in history has ever read. It's a disaster.