Translation of the Bible

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Jerome's Vulgate was the basis for the fourteenth-century Bibles associated with Wycliffe, but as Protestantism began to break out in the early sixteenth century, Tyndale initiated a turn toward direct work with the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament. It was in 1522, just five years into the Protestant Reformation, that Luther's New Testament appeared in German -- it would be another twelve years before the full Bible appeared. In 1523, Tyndale took up translating the New Testament, which he published in 1525. Tyndale also worked up quite a bit of the Old Testament, but was interrupted by his execution for heresy.

Taking Tyndale's work on and filling up what was missing from various sources, Myles Coverdale published a full Bible in 1535. This was followed by an edition drawing on Tyndale and Coverdale, as well as one John Rogers, known as the Matthew Bible, in 1537. Yet another edition of substantially the same Bible appeared in 1539, this time called the Great Bible, not for any greatness of translation but simply because it was a very large pulpit Bible.

For all three of these editions, the portions from Tyndale came from the Hebrew and Greek of the Old and New Testaments, respectively, but other portions were filled in with translations from German and Latin. This Bible, of decidedly mixed quality, became the first official English Bible of the Church of England. In 1557 (New Testament) and 1560 (whole Bible), a competitor to the official translation appeared, in the form of the Geneva Bible, which quickly became more popular.

As if it were not bad enough that the official Bible of England was taking second place to a production from overseas, the Geneva Bible also contained notes of a strongly Puritan character, which somewhat unsettled the authorities in England. And so, in 1568, the Church of England produced what is known as the Bishops Bible, the work of bishops. In 1572, in a tacit admission that the first edition of the Bishops Bible was not quite up to its task, a second edition appeared which was more closely in line with the text of the Geneva Bible. Further editions continued to modify it, until the last edition of the whole Bishops Bible appeared in 1602.

It was this 1602 edition of the Bishops Bible that was used as the base text for the next major step in the history of the English Bible. In 1604, King James I held what is known as the Hampton Court Conference, a meeting designed to settle tensions between high-church and Puritan factions within the Church of England. Perhaps its most important outcome was the king's call for a new revision of the English Bible.

This version, which eventually appeared in 1611, would come to be the undisputed champion of English Bibles for perhaps three centuries. The KJV grew in popularity until it eclipsed the Geneva Bible, which went out of print around 1644.^[1] It would not be an exaggeration to say that from 1644 to 1881, any newly printed English Bible in English-speaking countries could generally be assumed to be simply another King James Bible.

For over two centuries, the printing of full English Bibles was practically restricted to simply reproducing the same text over and over, with perhaps some small mistakes added or removed here and there, and some modernization of spelling. But the field of biblical studies was by no means standing still. Nor was the English language standing still. Over time, this resulted in the KJV becoming more and more outdated, both in style and in scholarship. Something had to give sooner or later.

The first major attempt to replace the KJV was in the late eighteenth century. I doubt historians would characterize the cause of this attempt in such narrow terms, but the words of C. J. Ellicott, Bishop of Gloucester, writing in 1901 are interesting:^[2]

The true, though remote fountain-head of revision, and, more particularly, of the revision [p. 8] of the New Testament, must be regarded as the grammar written by a young academic teacher, George Benedict Winer, as far back as 1822, bearing the title of a Grammar of the Language of the New Testament.  It was a vigorous protest against the arbitrary, and indeed monstrous licence of interpretation which prevailed in commentaries on Holy Scripture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  It met with at first the fate of all assaults on prevailing unscientific procedures, but its value and its truth were soon recognized.  The volume passed through several successively improved editions, until in 1855 the sixth edition was reached, and issued with a new and interesting preface by the then distinguished and veteran writer.  This edition formed the basis of the admirable and admirably supplemented translation of my lamented and highly esteemed friend Dr. Moulton, which was published in 1870, passed through a second edition six years afterwards, and has, since that time, continued to be a standard grammar, in an English dress, of the Greek Testament down to this day.

The claim that I have put forward for this remarkable book as the fountain-head of [p. 9] revision can easily be justified when we call to memory how very patently the volume, in one or another of its earlier editions, formed the grammatical basis of the commentaries of De Wette and Meyer, and, here in England, of the commentary of Alford, and of critical and grammatical commentaries on some of St. Paul’s Epistles with which my own name was connected.  It was to Winer that we were all indebted for that greater accuracy of interpretation of the Greek Testament which was recognized and welcomed by readers of the New Testament at the time I mention, and produced effects which had a considerable share in the gradual bringing about of important movements that almost naturally followed.

What came home to a large and increasing number of earnest and truth-seeking readers of the New Testament was this—that there were inaccuracies and errors in the current version of the Holy Scriptures, and especially of the New Testament, which plainly called for consideration and correction, and further brought home to very many of us that this could never be brought about except by an authoritative revision.

This general impression spread somewhat [p. 10] rapidly; and soon after the middle of the last century it began to take definite shape.  The subject of the revision of the Authorised Version of the New Testament found a place in the religious and other periodicals of the day, and as the time went on was the subject of numerous pamphlets, and was alluded to even in Convocation and Parliament.  As yet however there had been no indication of the sort of revision that was desired by its numerous advocates, and fears were not unnaturally [p. 11] entertained as to the form that a revision might ultimately take.  It was feared by many that any authoritative revision might seriously impair the acceptance and influence of the existing and deeply reverenced version of Holy Scripture, and, to use language which expressed apprehensions that were prevailing at the time, might seriously endanger the cause of sound religion in our Church and in our nation.

In 1870, Ellicott informs us, the Convocation of Canterbury resolved,^[3]

That a committee of both Houses be appointed, with power to confer with any committee that may be appointed by the Convocation of the Northern Province, to report upon the desirableness of a revision of the Authorised Version of the [later added: Old and] New Testament, [p. 18] whether by marginal notes or otherwise, in those passages where plain and clear errors, whether in the Hebrew or Greek text originally adopted by the translators, or in the translations made from the same, shall on due investigation be found to exist.

The various wheels were set in motion, and what became known as the Revised Version appeared: New Testament in 1881, Old Testament in 1885, Apocrypha in 1895. And this was not the end of matters: the Revised Version had been to some extent a cooperative endeavor between the Church of England's revisers and various revisers living in the United States. There were difficulties in the two sides coming to an agreement on some features of the text, however, and the result was that eventually the American revisers produced their own text, eventually to become known as the American Standard Version, in 1901.

The cover-sheets of both Bibles shows some interestingly defensive language. Consider the Revised Version:

(Image taken from https://archive.org/details/holybiblebeingve00camb/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater.)

If one didn't read carefully, one would think this was a KJV, "being the version set forth A.D. 1611", but then comes "compared with the most ancient authorities and revised" -- the wording that gives away that this is a new version. Even that new wording apes the wording of the 1611 translation, which says, "with the former translations diligently compared and revised".

Slightly more straightforward is the wording on the American Standard Version:

(Image taken from https://archive.org/details/holybible00newy/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater.)

This defensiveness was perhaps the result of the publishers' correct anticipation that the translation would be met with skepticism by churches which had enjoyed two or three centuries of a uniform text. If that is what the publishers anticipated, they were correct.

Consider the following note from the Expository Times (Volume III, 1891-1892), p. 128, by the Rev. Professor Alex Roberts:

There is reason to fear that, during the decade which has elapsed since the Revised Version of the New Testament was published, it has not risen in public estimation. This is very much to be regretted, as it undoubtedly contains many important improvements on the Authorised Version. But the sad fact exists, that probably no lamentable failure of a literary kind is to be found in the annals of this century as is presented in the history and fate of the Revised Version. When we call to mind the years of patient labour which were spent over the work, and the names of those illustrious scholars (many of them now departed) who took part in it, language almost fails to express the sorrow which is felt on account of the little practical fruit which has resulted from so much learned and protracted toil

Yes; it must be sorrowfully owned that the Revised New Testament is, to all intents and purposes, dead, if not buried.

The same general fate met the ASV. As Bruce Metzger put it, "The fate of the Revised Version in Great Britain was disappointing. ... the American Standard Version, in the United States ... was somewhat more widely adopted ... But in both countries the revision failed to supplant the King James Version in popular favor."

Though it is little known today, Oxford University -- or at least its American Branch -- opted for an even more timid revision of the KJV, which it marketed as the "1911 Bible", 1911 being the third centenary of the publication of the KJV:

(Image from https://archive.org/details/1911bibleholybib00nyox/page/1/mode/1up.)

No mention in the Preface is made of the recent flops of the RV and ASV, but their failure as commercial endeavors hangs in the background of the careful wording. This is, Oxford UP assures us, "neither a new translation, nor a revision, but a scholarly and carefully Corrected Text". The implied message is that, although the KJV contains some errors in need of fixing, perhaps the RV and ASV have gone too far, and a more cautious revision is needed.

This very cautious approach to describing the 1911 Bible was apparently abandoned in a March 1912 ad taken out in Publisher's Weekly

(Image from https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Publishers_Weekly/NBoDAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22the+1911+Bible%22&pg=PA981&printsec=frontcover.)

The verb best Bible is now available! Preachers, publishers, and average people are all united is recognizing the finest Bible ever produced!

This thrashing about from one rhetorical side to another didn't work, and the 1911 Bible sank, leaving barely a trace. At around the same time, Oxford UP did hit on a tremendous cash cow -- the traditional text of the KJV alongside the dispensationalist notes of Cyrus I. Scofield, published in 1909 and again in 1917.

The RV and ASV had limited themselves, as far as style went, only to updating some of the KJV's most obscure expressions. Its archaic language and grammar were mostly kept intact. Here and there, through the early twentieth century, there were some single-author attempts to produce Bibles or (more commonly) New Testaments in more contemporary language.

In 1923, Edgar Goodspeed produced The New Testament: An American Translation, published by the University of Chicago Press, which followed up with a multi-author The Old Testament: An American Translation in 1927. The two were bound together in 1931 was The Bible: An American Translation, bringing to the world a scholarly and full Bible in modern English. It wasn't necessarily casual English, but the great majority of the thees and thous had been disposed of. It stayed in print at least until 1951, but as far as I can tell made no major inroads as far as being used in churches.

It is at this point that it is probably worth bringing up an important part of the religious background of the early twentieth century. In the 1920's and 1930's the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was at its height. Each of the major denominations, either during this time, or a bit before or after, was undergoing a major internal struggle between two sides: one called "liberal" or "modernist" or "progressive", and the other "conservative" or "fundamentalist". For the moment, I'll use the convenient terms "modernist" and "fundamentalist".

As of 1901, when the ASV appeared, the parties had not quite split so distinctly, and while there was certainly a spectrim of modernist to fundamentalist tendencies, people across the spectrum could be found in each of the major denominations. What happened, in general, is that the modernists got control of the mainline denominations, while the fundamentalists exited and formed new institutions. Once this occurred, and the two sides had gone their separate ways, it became much more difficult to find common ground on anything like producing a new consensus translation of the Bible.

Perhaps a quote from the KJV, ASV, and from Goodspeed's New Testament will serve as an illustration. Here is Isaiah 7:14 as given in the KJV:

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

For much of Christian history, starting with the gospel of Matthew, this has been taken as a reference to the birth of Jesus of a virgin. This requires a somewhat creative interpretation of a particular Hebrew word as "virgin", and a violent wrenching of this verse from its surrounding passage. Now, KJV's vary from one to another, so I can't guarantee that no KJV with "modernist" footnotes exists, but I can tell you that as I pull up a facsimile of an 1860 Oxford University Press KJV, I find Isaiah 7:14 standing there in that very Christianized form, with no doubt-inducing footnotes of any kind.

Here is Isaiah 7:14 as given in the ASV -- and this is similar to how it is given in the RV and KJV before it:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

But now there footnotes on three consecutive words in the verse. Perhaps instead of a virgin, we should read the. And perhaps instead of virgin we should read maiden. And perhaps instead of shall conceive, and bear, we really ought to read, is with child, and beareth. The cumulative effect of all these alternate readings is to suggest that perhaps Isaiah is not speaking of a miraculous future virgin birth, but of a normal birth quite close at hand to his own time.

One can almost sense the march of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy in the biblical texts themselves. In the KJV in 1860, the modernists do not exist yet; a way of thinking that will later be called "fundamentalist" is taken for granted. In 1901, the traditionalists get their way in the public reading of the text (if they had accepted the 1901 text, which they didn't). But the modernists get their views in the margin. The ASV is rather like one of those churches a couple of decades before the fighting broke out -- straining to accomodate everybody, in an effort that will ultimately prove futile.

And finally, here is Isaiah 7:14 in the 1927 translation by the University of Chicago:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a son: Behold! a young woman is with child, and is about to bear a son; and she will call him 'God is with us'.

Here at last the modernists at the U of Chicago have thrown off all restraint and are simply translating the passage in its obvious sense, without any worry that fundamentalists will be offended.

From this time forward, Christian Bibles will come in two distinct types: the type favored by the modernist, and the type favored by the fundamentalists or, as they later preferred to be called, conservatives or evangelicals. This is not just a matter of Isaiah 7:14, but of scores of passages where the progressives and conservatives do not see eye to eye. This division continues to the present, but more recently I've seen at least some reason for optimism that the conservative/liberal divide may not be so permanent.

And so we come to the RSV, or Revised Standard Version, in 1946 (NT), 1952 (OT), and 1957 (Apocrypha). This next major attempt at an ecumenical Bible was in the hands not of the Church of England, but of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.

Here's Isaiah 7:14, as it appears in the RSV:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Imman′u-el.

It is a "modernist" translation, though the "conservative" reading does find itself in the footnotes. The RSV did make some kind of dent in the KJV's use in liberal churches, but didn't get anywhere with conservatives. Incidentally, the same Goodspeed who produced the 1923 New Testament for the University of Chicago was still with the U of C, and worked on the New Testament Committee for the RSV. For more details on why a conservative might not like the RSV, see here.

On the conservative side of the divide, real competitors against the KJV did not begin to arise until the 1960's and 1970's, when suddenly a number of viable translations began to appear, perhaps beginning with the New American Standard New Testament in 1963, followed by the full Bible in 1970. The NASB is a translation, sometimes a bit clunky, but generally regarded as pretty accurate, which attempts to faithfully transmit a theologically conservative understanding of the Bible, in language modernized beyond the ASV of 1901, but still on the literalistic side. Another update of the NASB was released in 1995.

The NASB was produced by the Lockman Foundation, which in 1965 released the Amplified Bible, a flamboyant and wordy translation, veering off to paraphrase here and there, but theologically toeing the conservative line.

In 1973 the New International Version (NIV) appeared (NT, that is. The OT appeared in 1978). It features smooth, modern language, and is translated from a conservative evangelical perspective. HarperCollins Publishers, which is currently selling titles like The Joy of Gay Sex, puts on its best anti-gay face when trying to sell the NIV to conservatives, as you can see at https://www.thenivbible.com/virginia-mollencott/:

Virginia Mollencott, a Lesbian sympathizer, was involved with the NIV development at one point.  It is important to note that she was not a translator, and never had anything to do with the translation itself. For a few months Virginia served in the capacity of working on the literary (stylistic) committee of the NIV. When her sexual views were known she was immediately asked to resign. Her work never impacted the translation of the NIV at any point. To anybody reading the NIV it is very clear that homosexuality is a sin. ... (C) 2023 HarperCollins Publishers. All Rights Reserved.

Ah, capitalism! Whether you need advice on how to make gay sex work for you, or you're looking for a Bible entirely free from the impacts of Lesbian sympathizers, HarperCollins has exactly the book for you.

The NIV has been either the best-selling Bible in the conservative world, or very close to it, for quite some time.

Some readers, however, have felt that the NASB and NIV have drifted too far from the KJV, either in language or in textual basis. For these readers, the whole New King James Version (NKJV) appeared in 1982 (NT only in 1979). This version helped to chip away further at the KJV market among those who could not quite make the leap to an NASB or NIV. The NKJV usually reads like the KJV, with just the obsolete grammar updated. Most of the word order and individual word choices remain intact, although either is changed whenever the translators thought necessary.

Back on the progressive side of the fence, in 1990 the RSV was replaced with the NRSV, which simply continued the task of revising the RSV in a scholarly direction. Since its appearance, it has been by far the most-quoted version among mainstream biblical scholars.

In 1996, the New Living Translation appeared, a translation for the evangelical crowd, tending toward paraphrase. According to a count made by an association of Christian book-sellers, the NLT is currently second only to the NIV in sales (as of 2022).

In 2001 the NET Bible (New English Translation) appeared in beta form online, followed by a "First Edition" in 2005 and a "Second Edition" in 2017. The project was carried out almost entirely by students and faculty of Dallas Theological University, although as far as I can tell neither DTS nor the NET Bible project have seen fit to publicize that fact.

Dallas Theological Seminary is well-known as a conservative evangelical institution, and the NET, according to Daniel Wallace, "is a translation done by evangelicals". (For the rest of Wallace's introductory comments on this translation, see here.) The NET has been pretty well received in evangelical circles, despite the fact that it refuses to play the ordinary game of manipulating Old Testament passages to smooth over difficulties with the New Testament's proof-texting.

Probably the greatest strength of the NET is its translation notes -- over 60,000 of them. Certainly out of major Bible versions, this must be the most heavily annotated. Perhaps one might say something like the Anchor Bible volumes comprise a "Bible" with even more notes, but of things available in the legal parts of the internet, there's nothing quite like the NET.