For about two hundred and fifty years after 1611, English-speaking Protestants had, in practice, one Bible: the King James Version (see The King James Version). English-speaking Catholics had another, the Douay-Rheims, as revised by Bishop Richard Challoner in the 1740s and 1750s. Private translations appeared, but none came close to replacing them.

Today there are dozens of complete English Bibles in common use and hundreds of translations of the whole or parts. This article explains how that happened, and describes the main translations fairly, by what each set out to do. It does not quote them, because most are under copyright.

Why revise the King James?

By the nineteenth century three pressures were building.

The first was the text. The King James New Testament was translated from the Greek printed text of the sixteenth century, later called the Received Text, which rested on a few late manuscripts. Since then, scholars had found much older manuscripts, including Codex Sinaiticus, published by Tischendorf in 1862, and Codex Vaticanus (see Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus). A new translation would need a new Greek text.

The second was knowledge of the languages. Hebrew and Greek scholarship had advanced, and some passages the 1611 translators had misunderstood could now be translated more accurately.

The third was English itself. Some words had changed meaning. “Prevent” in 1611 meant “go before,” and “let” could mean “hinder.”

The Revised Version and the American Standard

In 1870 the Convocation of Canterbury authorised a revision of the King James Version. British scholars, including B. F. Westcott and F. J. A. Hort, worked with an American committee. The Revised Version New Testament appeared in 1881 and the Old Testament in 1885. The New Testament sold in vast numbers on publication, and newspapers in Chicago printed it in full.

The revisers were told to make as few changes as possible, but their Greek text, close to Westcott and Hort’s, differed from the Received Text in thousands of places, mostly small. Their English was also very literal; they tried to render the same Greek word with the same English word wherever possible. Many readers found the result accurate but stiff, and the King James Version remained the Bible of most churches.

The American committee’s preferences, which the British had not adopted, were incorporated in the American Standard Version of 1901. Among other changes, it rendered the divine name in the Old Testament as “Jehovah.” The ASV was admired by scholars for its precision, and is now in the public domain.

New discoveries

The decades after 1881 changed biblical scholarship again. Thousands of papyrus documents found in Egypt, many at Oxyrhynchus, showed that New Testament Greek was largely the ordinary spoken Greek of its day, not a special “Holy Ghost Greek,” as some had thought. Scholars such as Adolf Deissmann argued that the New Testament should therefore be translated into ordinary modern speech. Early New Testament papyri, the Chester Beatty papyri in the 1930s and the Bodmer papyri in the 1950s, pushed the manuscript evidence back further (see The earliest New Testament papyri). In 1947 the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

Individual translators responded. James Moffatt, Edgar Goodspeed and others produced lively modern-language translations in the early twentieth century, preparing the way for the committee translations that followed.

The Revised Standard Version and its critics

The Revised Standard Version, a revision of the ASV sponsored by what became the National Council of Churches in the United States, appeared in 1946 (New Testament) and 1952 (complete Bible). It aimed to keep the King James tradition while using modern scholarship and clearer English.

It provoked fierce controversy. The best-known dispute concerned Isaiah 7:14. The King James Version, followed by Matthew 1:23, reads “a virgin shall conceive.” The RSV translated the Hebrew almah as “young woman,” on the grounds that the Hebrew word means a young woman of marriageable age and does not in itself specify virginity, while keeping “virgin” in Matthew, where the Greek word does. Many conservative Protestants saw this as an attack on the virgin birth, and in 1952 a Baptist pastor in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, burned a copy of the RSV at a Sunday evening service. Defenders replied that the translation followed the Hebrew and that Matthew’s use of the verse was untouched. The World English Bible, by contrast, reads:

Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)

The debate shows how a single translation decision can carry great weight, and why it helps to show readers the reasons for it.

The RSV nevertheless became the standard Bible of many mainline churches, and a Catholic edition (1965–66) and an ecumenical “Common Bible” (1973) followed. Its successor, the New Revised Standard Version (1989), adopted “inclusive language” for references to people where the original meant men and women, a decision welcomed by some and criticised by others. An updated edition appeared in 2021.

New translations, not revisions

Meanwhile, others decided to start afresh rather than revise the King James.

  • The New English Bible (New Testament 1961, complete 1970) was sponsored by the major British churches and aimed at fresh, contemporary British English. It was revised as the Revised English Bible in 1989.
  • After Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) encouraged translation from the original languages, Catholic scholars produced the Jerusalem Bible (1966), based on the French Bible de Jérusalem, and the American New American Bible (1970). Both have since been revised.
  • The Good News Bible, whose New Testament appeared in 1966 as Good News for Modern Man and the whole Bible in 1976, was made by the American Bible Society on Eugene Nida’s principles of meaning-based translation, in simple English for a wide readership.

Evangelical translations

Evangelical Protestants, many of them uneasy about the RSV, produced their own translations. The New American Standard Bible (complete 1971) revised the ASV in a very literal direction. The New International Version (New Testament 1973, complete 1978), made by an international committee of evangelical scholars, aimed at a balance between accuracy and readability, and became the best-selling English Bible for many years. Its revision of 2011 adopted some gender-inclusive language, after a heated debate over an earlier revision.

The New King James Version (1982) updated the King James wording while keeping its Received Text, for readers who preferred that text. Kenneth Taylor’s popular paraphrase, the Living Bible (1971), was reworked by a large team of scholars into a true translation, the New Living Translation (1996). The English Standard Version (2001), a revision of the RSV, describes itself as “essentially literal.” The Christian Standard Bible (2017) revised the Holman Christian Standard Bible of 2004, aiming at what its makers call “optimal equivalence.”

A minority of churches hold that only the King James Version should be used, for reasons ranging from its Greek text to its place in their tradition. That conviction, too, is part of the modern landscape.

Free and open translations

Almost all of these translations are under copyright, which limits how much of them can be quoted or reused. Some modern translations take a different course:

  • The World English Bible, an update of the ASV prepared from the 1990s onward by volunteers, has been placed in the public domain. Articles on this site quote it for that reason.
  • The NET Bible (first full edition 2005) is free to read online and is known for its many thousands of translators’ notes explaining choices, though it remains under copyright.
  • The Berean Standard Bible was released into the public domain in 2023.

The ladder of approaches

English readers now have translations at nearly every point between very literal and very free. That variety can confuse, but it also helps: comparing translations is one of the best ways for a reader without Greek or Hebrew to see where a text is difficult. The principles behind these choices are explored in Word for word or meaning for meaning?.

Open Word Bible takes a different approach to the same problem. Instead of choosing one point on the ladder, it gives each sentence at three levels, Literal, Balanced and Readable, all sharing one set of meaning decisions. It is released under CC0, so that it can be quoted and reused without permission. And it shows the reasoning for each choice, so that a reader can see why it says what it says, as the debate over Isaiah 7:14 shows readers need. Its drafts are AI-assisted and not yet reviewed, and it uses the existing translations described here only for comparison, never as the basis for its wording.

Sources

  • Metzger, Bruce M. The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001.
  • Lewis, Jack P. The English Bible from KJV to NIV: A History and Evaluation. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991.
  • Thuesen, Peter J. In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Norton, David. A History of the English Bible as Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Deissmann, Adolf. Light from the Ancient East. Translated by Lionel R. M. Strachan. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910.
  • Fee, Gordon D., and Mark L. Strauss. How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007.
  • Pius XII. Divino Afflante Spiritu. Encyclical, 30 September 1943.
  • “Preface to the Revised Version” (New Testament, 1881).
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.