(BA) HCSB

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24 July 2022

The Holman Christian Standard Bible was produced in 2004 by Holman Bible Publishers, a now-defunct arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Rare among conservative Protestant translations, it uses "Yahweh" for the name of God in the Old Testament, although its successor, the CSB, discontinued the practice.

Interestingly the Holman Christian Standard Bible was started at the initiative of Arthur Farstad, who also oversaw the NKJV project. One could, in a way, see the new project as a move from "right to left". While the NKJV worked very hard to stay as close to the KJV as possible, the Holman Christian Standard Bible in the end came to be much more willing to leave the confines of close fidelity to the KJV. Some of this move -- I'm not sure how much -- surely came as a result of the death of Farstad partway through the project. Farstad was a partisan of the Textus Receptus, a form of the Greek New Testament that has been abandoned by scholars in favor of the critical standard Nestle-Aland / UBS text. After Farstad's death, the project moved over toward using the scholarly standard texts as its basis.

The HCSB appeared one year before the TNIV, a revision of the NIV which caused quite a stir in conservative circles with its increased use of gender-neutral language. Like the TNIV, the HCSB also represented a move in the direction of gender-neutral language.

An intense backlash followed, and the TNIV's gender changes were walked back in a 2011 revision that is, once again, simply called NIV. Likewise, the HCSB was succeeded by the CSB in 2017, which also moved away from gender-neutrality. The CSB also restored the traditional practice of replacing the name "Yahweh" with the euphemism "the Lord" throughout its Old Testament.