Where the traditions land

Population figures are each tradition's own most recent published count. Eligibility is set against the World Christian Database, the standard reference for global denominational data.

Why the disagreement

Whether a tradition has an official answer to this question at all tracks the same thing that decides who gets to interpret the Bible in the first place: traditions with centralized teaching authority tend to have a specific, binding answer; traditions that locate authority in the individual tend not to.

LDS and Jehovah's Witness teaching sit at the strict end: each requires one specific translation and no other. The LDS Church's official Bible is the King James Version, full stop — the accompanying Joseph Smith Translation notes are supplementary, not a replacement text. Jehovah's Witnesses go further: the New World Translation, produced and owned by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society itself, is the only version members are directed to consult.

Catholic teaching sits one step looser: the NABRE and a specific NAB edition are mandated for Mass in the United States, but several other translations, including the RSV-2CE, carry the Church's formal approval for personal use — the requirement applies to the liturgy specifically, not every context a Catholic reads Scripture.

Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Methodist, and Southern Baptist teaching each have a real institutional default without anything binding behind it. That produces genuine splits even within single traditions: the LCMS's hymnal adopted the ESV while the ELCA's worship materials default to the NRSV. The Southern Baptist Convention's own publishing arm produces and promotes the CSB without ever requiring it.

Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Pentecostal, and Adventist teaching decline to endorse any single translation, treating the choice as a matter for the individual or local congregation — though for Oriental Orthodox specifically, the more consequential difference isn't which English edition to read, but which books are in the Bible at all: the Coptic Orthodox canon includes 73 books, seven more than the Protestant Old Testament, following the Septuagint rather than the later Hebrew Masoretic list.

Solving the disagreement

For LDS and Jehovah's Witness teaching, nothing needs to resolve because nothing is actually in dispute inside those traditions — each has already settled the question by institutional decision, and changing it would take a new decision from the same kind of authority that made the original one, not a better argument from outside.

For the traditions with a real default but no formal requirement, the apparent dispute is mostly not about translation accuracy at all, even though it gets argued that way. Modern English translations differ mainly in two dimensions: how literally they render the original word order and syntax, and how they handle gender language where the original is ambiguous. Real textual scholarship can inform both of those choices. But which translation a tradition ends up defaulting to has become entangled with a separate signal — the ESV's association with complementarian, Reformed-leaning churches; the NRSV's association with more academic, mainline, gender-inclusive contexts — meaning a translation choice often functions as a marker of a congregation's broader theological alignment as much as a judgment about which one renders Hebrew and Greek most accurately. Untangling those two things would take longer than any textual argument, because the second one isn't really about the text at all.

For Oriental Orthodox teaching specifically, the deeper canon question — whether the Deuterocanonical books belong in Scripture — is the same fight the Reformation had with Rome over the Old Testament's boundaries, run backward in time to the fourth and fifth centuries instead of the sixteenth, and it hasn't been any more resolvable in either direction since.

Sources

Same standing source per tradition on every post, not hunted per question.

• Catholic — Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Eastern Orthodox — Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (binding across all jurisdictions); The Longer Catechism of St. Philaret of Moscow (widely used, not binding on every jurisdiction)
• Oriental Orthodox — Catechism of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Fr. Tadros Y. Malaty (Amazon — no full free text found)
• Anglican — Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
• Lutheran — Book of Concord
• Reformed/Presbyterian — Westminster Confession of Faith
• Methodist/Wesleyan — Articles of Religion
• Southern Baptist Convention — Baptist Faith & Message 2000
• Pentecostal (Trinitarian) — Assemblies of God Statement of Fundamental Truths
• Seventh-day Adventist — 28 Fundamental Beliefs
• LDS — Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants
• Jehovah's Witnesses — What Does the Bible Really Teach?