In my article about other English-language bibles in the 1600s and 1700s, I mentioned how your average King James Version fan isn’t aware there even were other bible translations back then. They think John Wycliffe translated it first; then it was followed up by a bunch of really bad translations; then King James ordered a proper translation and that’s the KJV. They know nothing about the Geneva Bible. Nor any of the other translations which followed. They just presume once the KJV was translated, absolutely everyone used it. (Except Catholics. And heretics.)
Of course there are dozens of English-language translations today. So some years ago I asked my bible class whether they knew what the next popular English-language bible after the KJV was. Most said, “Um… the NIV?” Nope, not the 1978 New International Version. But I’ve since found lots of people give the NIV as their answer.
I grew up in the ’70s, so I remember we had a lot of translations to choose from back then. Mom had a parallel bible, which came in handy whenever the KJV was hard to understand; it had the KJV in one column, the 1969 Modern Language Bible in another, the 1971 Living Bible in another, and the 1952 Revised Standard Version in another. My first bible was a KJV, but I later got a 1976 Good News Bible. And I remember coming across the 1971 New American Standard Bible, the 1966 Jerusalem Bible, and J.B. Phillips’ 1958 The New Testament in Modern English. No doubt some of you can think of others.
Some of the folks in my class remembered the NASB, and I asked them whether they recalled an old American Standard Bible. None of ’em really did. But that’s the one I’m gonna write about today—and its immediate predecessor, the 1885 Revised Version. (RV for short. Sometimes it’s called the English Revised Version, or ERV, but nah, I’m not gonna call it that.)
What’d it revise? The King James Version.
(Why didn’t they therefore call it the New King James Version? Well in the Church of England, they tend to call it the Authorized Version instead of the KJV; and it was the official bible of the church, so they simply called it the Revised Version… leaving NKJV up for grabs a century later.)
The convocation of Canterbury is one of the regular general assemblies of the Church of England. On 6 May 1870 the convocation created a committee to revise the King James Version. The goal was “to adapt King James’ version to the present state of the English language without changing the idiom and the vocabulary,” and update it to “the present standard of biblical scholarship.”
Why then? Well, archaeology had recently been invented—and by “recently” I mean in the past 25 years or so. Rather than dig through ruins and graves looking for treasures, anthropologists were looking for data, information about how people used to live. Great advances had been made in interpreting unfamiliar ancient langauges. And Christian anthropologists went looking for ancient copies of the bible—and found many.
Much more had therefore been discovered about the first century’s culture and practices, and methods of Greek translation. And when bible scholars compared the newly-discovered bible manuscripts to the the Majority Text and Textus Receptus, they immediately saw the defects of those medieval bibles: Why on earth were they using a bible translation based on a Greek New Testament that was a compliation of every textual variant its editors could find? Why wasn’t it, properly, based on the oldest copies of the scriptures there are?—which they had in their very own British Museum.
And since the Church of England listened to its scholars (heck, made bishops of them), once enough of ’em decided it was time to revise the King James Version, they did.
Updating the translation.
If you ever read the Revised Version—and you can; it’s on Bible Hub—first thing you’re gonna notice is it’s in old-timey English, same as the KJV. The Church of England didn’t want the bible to sound more like then-contemporary English. They wanted it to sound like “bible,” which to their minds was the KJV. So it reads like the KJV in an awful lot of ways. When you read it aloud in church, it still felt like the preachers were reading “bible.”
But, y’know, corrected. That was the goal—correction. Wherever the KJV got it wrong, the RV fixed it. Wherever the old-timey English was too old-timey, and could easily be misinterpreted, the RV fixed that too.
Unlike previous bible translations, the Church of England didn’t demand its translators all be loyal members of their church. Scholars recognize there are valid scholars from other denominations, so the committee was authorized to speak with them, and even put ’em on their committees. American scholars even organized their own translation committee, and the English and American committees each divided themselves into different companies to work on the Old Testament and New Testament separately. These committees met regularly in London and New York, and communicated by mail.
Over time, their 101 scholars pored through the King James Version and compared it to the original text. Made about 30,000 changes to the New Testament—more than 5,000 of them based on the better Greek manuscripts. The New Testament was completed in 1879; the Old Testament in 1885; and the Apocrypha in 1894.
Unlike the other English-language bibles that’d been published in the previous centuries, this one was widely printed and used. Mostly because it’d been commissioned by the Church of England, so the church encouraged their preachers to use it. Scholars appreciated its corrections—and how the text was now formatted into paragraphs and poetic verses, and how there were now footnotes to tell people about textual variants and alternative translations.
As for the American scholars, they adapted the Revised Version for an American audience, with American spellings of course. But they also made corrections to the first edition of the RV, and used “Jehovah” a lot more often to translate
יְהוָֹה/YHWH
instead of the customary “the LORD.” The American edition of the RV became the 1901 American Standard Version. They’re pretty much the same translation.
Of course it had its critics. Like those who insist only the KJV is the bible, and all other translations are wrong. But it also had people who felt the translation was too literal, or too wooden; it wasn’t good English, or wasn’t poetic like they felt the bible oughta be. Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon complained, “To translate well, the knowledge of two languages is needed; the men of the New Testament company are strong in Greek, but weak in English.” Which is fair. The translators acknowledged it may not have been the best English—but it was accurate, and that’s really all they cared about.
My concern about the RV is the same as my concern about the KJV: If you can’t understand it—if you lack the vocabulary, don’t know old-timey grammar, and need something more contemporary lest you’ll misinterpret it—use something more contemporary! And unfortunately, lots of contemporary English-speakers can’t follow a KJV. They need something which sounds more like the English they speak. They need current bibles. Making people learn 17th-century English before they can read a bible, is a lot like making gentiles get circumcised before they could become Christian Ac 15.1 —it’s unnecessary, wrong, and kinda dumb.
Bibles which descended from the RV.
The English scholars who worked on the New Testament used a bunch of different Greek texts to translate the NT. Dr. Edwin Palmer, one of the NT translators and Archdeacon of Oxford, compiled those texts into a Greek NT, and published it in 1881 as The Greek Testament with the Readings Adopted by the Revisers of the Authorised Version. Meanwhile two of the other NT translators, Cambridge professors Drs. Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort, published the Greek NT they had already been working on, The New Testament in the Original Greek, in the same year—and no doubt they based the NT passages they worked on, on their Greek NT.
Recent bibles usually have updated editions. The committees which translate them, continue to translate them, and make corrections, or update the language ’cause English continues to evolve. That’s why the 1978 NIV doesn’t always match the 2011 NIV, and the 1971 NASB doesn’t always match the 2020 NASB. If you weren’t aware bibles get updated… well, now you are.
But the Revised Version’s committee didn’t stick around to update the RV. They left that to the American committee; the American Standard Version is the updated RV. And then that committee stopped updating it, and left it as-is.
Well, till the RV and ASV were succeeded by the 1951 Revised Standard Version. And then that version was succeeded by the 1989 New Revised Standard Version. And then that version was succeeded by the 2021 New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition.
Meanwhile Kenneth N. Taylor, who used the ASV to tell bible stories to his kids, decided to paraphrase it to make it more understandable. He published his paraphrase in 1971 as The Living Bible. Its publishers later decided to update it, but this time felt it should be a proper translation, not a paraphrase, and hired scholars to create the 1996 New Living Translation. It’s been updated in 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2015.
Meanwhile meanwhile, certain conservative Evangelicals who didn’t care for how the RSV took all the wooden literalness out of the ASV, plus all the “thee” and “thou” pronouns, came out with their own update, the 1971 New American Standard Bible, which they still advertise as being the most literal bible translation. It’s been updated in 1977, 1995, and 2020—and yes, the updates dropped the “thees” and “thous.”
Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, certain other conservative Evangelicals who absolutely hated how the NRSV updated the RSV with gender-inclusive language, came out with their own update, the 2001 English Standard Version, which deliberately isn’t gender-inclusive; phooey on women. It’s been updated in 2007, 2011, and 2016. For a while there after the 2016 update, the translation committee declared they’d never update it again; they quickly realized that’s not how bible scholarship and how English works, and took it back.
Meanwhile × 4, Michael Paul Johnson, who wanted a public-domain bible in present-day English but didn’t have the language skills to translate one himself, decided to take the now-public-domain ASV and update it. With help from volunteers, this became the 1997 World English Bible, which would still be updated for the next 12 years before being declared complete in 2020. And J.A. Brown updated the WEB further, changing the names in the text into transliterations of the Hebrew and Greek originals, and using a lot more original-language words instead of English translations (like “Torah” instead of “Law,” or “shofar” instead of “trumpet”), to produce the 2014 Literal English Version.
Didn’t know all these translations stemmed from the Revised Version, didya? Me either, when I first started looking into the history of English bibles. Lots of Christians standing on other Christians’ shoulders. Which is as it should be.
