If you open a Bible in a university lecture on the Old or New Testament, there is a good chance it is the New Revised Standard Version. For more than thirty years the NRSV has been the standard English Bible of biblical scholarship, of many mainline Protestant churches, and of a good deal of ecumenical work between churches. In 2021 it was revised again as the NRSV Updated Edition (NRSVue).

This article explains where the NRSV came from, what its translators set out to do, the controversies it provoked, and how the updated edition differs. Because the NRSV is under copyright, it describes the translation’s wording rather than quoting it at length.

The heir of the RSV

The NRSV is the latest member of a family that runs back through the Revised Standard Version (1946–52) and the American Standard Version (1901) to the King James Version (see From the RSV to the ESV and English translations since the King James). The copyright in the RSV and its successors is held by the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, an ecumenical body of mainline Protestant and Orthodox churches. Its standing committee of scholars has the right to keep revising the text.

By the 1970s the committee had two reasons to revise again. The first was evidence. The RSV Old Testament had appeared in 1952, only a few years after the first Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and the scrolls had since been published and studied (see What the Dead Sea Scrolls show). The Greek New Testament had also been re-edited, in the editions of the United Bible Societies. The second was English. Readers had grown uncomfortable with the RSV’s “thee” and “thou” in prayers addressed to God, and many no longer heard “man” and “brethren” as including women.

Metzger’s committee

Work began in the mid-1970s, and the full Bible was published in 1990, with a copyright date of 1989. The committee was chaired by Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the best-known New Testament textual critics of the century, and numbered about thirty scholars. It was deliberately broad: Protestant, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox scholars took part, together with a Jewish scholar for the Old Testament. The Hebrew scholar Harry Orlinsky, who had worked on the RSV and on the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of 1985, was among them.

Metzger wrote the preface, “To the Reader,” which summarised the committee’s mandate. A phrase associated with the committee sums up its approach: it aimed to be “as literal as possible, as free as necessary,” and it described its work as a revision in the line of the King James Version, keeping familiar wording wherever accuracy and clarity allowed. In practice the NRSV is a fairly close translation, usually placed a little nearer the literal end of the scale than the NIV and a little freer than the RSV (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?).

The preface also stated plainly that the NRSV had no doctrinal agenda of its own, and that the Bible was to be translated as an ancient text, not as the property of one church.

The text behind the translation

For the Old Testament the committee used Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the standard edition of the Masoretic Text based on the Leningrad Codex (see The Aleppo and Leningrad codices). But it was more willing than many translations to depart from that text where the Dead Sea Scrolls or ancient versions seemed to preserve a better reading, and it said so in footnotes.

The best-known example is at the end of 1 Samuel 10. The King James Version, following the Masoretic Text, ends the chapter with Saul’s critics:

But the children of Belial said, How shall this man save us? And they despised him, and brought him no presents. But he held his peace. (1 Samuel 10:27, KJV)

Chapter 11 then begins abruptly with Nahash the Ammonite besieging Jabesh-gilead. One of the Samuel scrolls from Qumran, known as 4QSam-a, contains a further paragraph explaining that Nahash had been oppressing the tribes of Gad and Reuben, gouging out their right eyes, and that some had escaped to Jabesh. The historian Josephus seems to have known the same story. The NRSV added this paragraph to its text, with a note giving the source. Critics thought it unwise to put a reading from one fragmentary scroll into the text; supporters argued that the paragraph explains what otherwise makes little sense. The question of when a translation should leave the Masoretic Text is discussed further in The Hebrew text behind Old Testaments.

For the New Testament the committee used the third edition of the United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament, a text Metzger had helped to edit (see How textual criticism works).

Inclusive language

The NRSV’s most discussed feature was its policy on gender. The preface spoke of the danger of “linguistic sexism” in English and explained that the committee had been directed to remove masculine-oriented language about people where the original refers to men and women alike, so far as this could be done without distorting passages that reflect the patriarchal culture of the ancient world.

In practice this meant several things:

  • Brothers and sisters. Where Paul addresses a whole congregation as adelphoi, literally “brothers,” the NRSV usually has “brothers and sisters,” with a note giving the literal word.
  • Plurals for generic singulars. Where a proverb or psalm speaks of “the man who” does something, meaning any person, the NRSV often turned the sentence into a plural.
  • No change for God. Language for God was left as it was. The NRSV calls God “Father” and “he,” as the original does.

Psalm 1:1 shows the second change. The King James Version reads:

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. (Psalm 1:1, KJV)

The NRSV begins “Happy are those who,” turning the single man into a group and “blessed” into “happy.”

Supporters said this simply reflected what the Hebrew and Greek meant, in the English that many readers now spoke. A word that originally included women should be translated by a word that still does. Critics replied that the change from singular to plural sometimes lost something real. Psalm 8:4 is the example most often given:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? (Psalm 8:4, KJV)

The NRSV renders the two lines with “human beings” and “mortals.” That is a fair reading of the Hebrew, but the letter to the Hebrews (2:6–8) quotes this psalm and applies “son of man” to Jesus, and readers of the NRSV can no longer see the link without a footnote. Conservative critics also argued that turning “he” into “they” can blur the individual responsibility that some passages stress. The wider debate, which involved the NIV, ESV and CSB as well, is traced in Gender language in Bible translation.

Other notable choices

A few other renderings drew attention:

  • Genesis 1:1 begins with a dependent clause, “In the beginning when God created,” with the traditional rendering in a note. Both readings are possible Hebrew; the question is explained in In the beginning.
  • Isaiah 7:14 keeps the RSV’s “young woman,” which had caused such controversy in 1952.
  • Romans 16:7 names Junia, a woman, as “prominent among the apostles,” where the RSV had the masculine name Junias.
  • The divine name YHWH is rendered “LORD” in small capitals, following the RSV and Jewish custom, rather than the ASV’s “Jehovah” (see The divine name in translation).

The Apocrypha and the ecumenical Bible

The NRSV was designed from the start to serve several churches. It is published in editions without the Apocrypha, in a Catholic Edition with the deuterocanonical books in their Catholic order, and in editions with the full Apocrypha. That last set includes not only the books Catholics accept, such as Tobit, Judith and the Wisdom of Solomon, but also books found in Greek and Slavonic Orthodox Bibles: 1 and 2 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and 3 and 4 Maccabees. Few translations offer as complete a set (see Canon and Apocrypha in translations).

This breadth explains much of the NRSV’s success. Mainline Protestant denominations in North America adopted it widely, an Anglicised edition was published for British and Commonwealth readers, and it was used in lectionaries and ecumenical worship. Its place in Catholic liturgy was more contested. Catholic editions were approved for reading and study, and Canadian Catholics began hearing the NRSV at Mass in 1992. In 1994, however, the Vatican withdrew approval of the NRSV for liturgical use, and the Canadian lectionary received final Vatican approval only in 2007, after years of consultation and revision. Accounts differ on how far the objections concerned inclusive language and how far other questions of accuracy (see Catholic English Bibles).

The Bible of the academy

The NRSV’s place in universities owes a good deal to the qualities scholars value: a careful text, frank footnotes about textual problems and alternative renderings, no denominational study notes in the text itself, and a full Apocrypha. Standard reference works were built on it, among them the New Oxford Annotated Bible and the HarperCollins Study Bible, and many textbooks and commentaries quote it by default. The NRSV has also been criticised from the other direction: some scholars regarded it as a cautious revision that kept too much of the King James cadence and did not go far enough in either literal precision or natural English.

Evangelical churches mostly preferred other translations, partly because of the inclusive language and partly because of its association with the National Council of Churches. The NRSV never sold on the scale of the NIV or KJV.

The Updated Edition of 2021

In 2017 the National Council of Churches commissioned the Society of Biblical Literature, the largest professional society of biblical scholars, to review and update the NRSV. The SBL organised the work with general editors for each Testament and the Apocrypha, book editors for individual books, and an editorial process in which proposals were reviewed before being sent to the National Council of Churches for approval. The council’s governing board approved the NRSV Updated Edition in October 2021; it appeared as an e-book in November 2021 and in print in 2022.

The preface reports about 12,000 substantive changes and about 20,000 changes in all, counting punctuation and grammar. John Kutsko, then the SBL’s executive director, said the team had not expected so many substantive changes. The publishers insist that it is an update, not a new translation, and most verses read as they did in 1989. The main areas of change were:

  • Textual criticism. Readings were reconsidered in the light of fuller publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of newer editions of the Hebrew and Greek texts, and many footnotes were revised.
  • Philology. Advances in the understanding of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words led to changed renderings, especially in poetry and rare vocabulary.
  • Style and clarity. Awkward or ambiguous sentences were smoothed, and the notes were made more consistent.
  • Language about people. The update describes people by their condition rather than defining them by it. Where the NRSV had “slave-girl,” for example, the update often has “enslaved woman,” and descriptions of illness and disability use phrasing such as “having epilepsy” rather than “epileptics.”

The SBL has since published the SBL Study Bible (2023) on the NRSVue, as a successor to the HarperCollins Study Bible, and other study editions have moved to the new text.

Reactions to the update

Reactions divided along familiar lines. Many scholars welcomed the update as a careful piece of maintenance that brought a standard text up to date with the evidence. Some readers, including some reviewers sympathetic to the NRSV, thought the new person-first phrasing sometimes read awkwardly, and that “enslaved person” carries a modern argument about slavery into an ancient text that used a single plain word. Conservative critics saw the update as a continuation of the NRSV’s original direction. As before, much of the disagreement concerns how far translation should follow the conventions of present-day English, and who decides what those conventions are.

What the NRSV shows

The NRSV is a reminder that a translation is shaped by its sponsors and its readers as well as by its scholars. It was made by an ecumenical council, for churches of several traditions and for scholars of every background, and its choices about the canon, about footnotes and about gender all follow from that purpose.

Open Word Bible shares some of the NRSV’s habits: it states its textual decisions openly, it works from scholarly editions of the original texts (the SBL Greek New Testament, which the SBL also sponsored, and the Westminster Leningrad Codex), and it treats questions such as how to render adelphoi as decisions to be explained, not hidden. It handles them differently. Its meaning decisions are recorded once for each sentence, and its three levels, Literal, Balanced and Readable, share them (see Literal, Balanced, Readable). Where the same meaning can be worded in more than one acceptable way, a reader setting may switch the wording without changing the meaning (see Settings change wording, never meaning). Its text is dedicated to the public domain under CC0, its drafts are AI-assisted and remain unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them, and it uses translations such as the NRSV only for comparison, never as the basis for its wording.

Sources

  • Metzger, Bruce M. “To the Reader.” Preface to The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. New York: National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, 1989.
  • Metzger, Bruce M., Robert C. Dentan, and Walter Harrelson. The Making of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001.
  • “Preface.” The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, 2021.
  • Friendship Press. “About the NRSVue.” friendshippress.org.
  • Coogan, Michael D., ed. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
  • The SBL Study Bible. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2023.
  • Thuesen, Peter J. In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
  • Bible quotations are from the King James Version (public domain).