The RSV and the ESV · Open Word Bible

Few translations have been as loved and as attacked as the Revised Standard Version. Few have had as surprising an afterlife. Fifty years after conservative Protestants denounced it, a revision of its text by conservative Protestants became the English Standard Version, now one of the most widely used English Bibles among evangelicals. This article traces that line, and describes what the ESV kept, what it changed back, and how its own text has continued to change.

The Revised Standard Version

The RSV’s ancestry runs from the King James Version through the Revised Version of 1881–85 and the American Standard Version of 1901 (see English translations since the King James). In 1928 the copyright of the ASV passed to the International Council of Religious Education, a body of American Protestant churches that later became part of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. In 1937 the council authorised a revision.

The committee was chaired by Luther A. Weigle, dean of Yale Divinity School. Its brief was to revise the ASV in the light of modern scholarship while preserving the qualities that had given the King James Version its place in English literature. It was to be accurate, but also suitable for public and private worship.

The New Testament appeared in 1946 and the complete Bible on 30 September 1952, launched with great publicity across the United States. The Apocrypha followed in 1957. A second edition of the New Testament in 1971 made some changes, among them restoring the longer ending of Mark (16:9–20) and the story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) to the main text, set apart from it, after the first edition had moved them to footnotes.

The RSV’s style was conservative. It kept “thee” and “thou” in addresses to God, and much of the rhythm of the King James Version. But its Greek text was a modern critical one, and in the Old Testament the committee was willing to correct the Hebrew from the ancient versions, or by conjecture, more often than translators today usually are.

The controversy

The RSV was attacked almost at once. The best-known dispute concerned Isaiah 7:14, where the RSV put “a young woman shall conceive” in place of the King James Version’s “a virgin shall conceive.” The committee argued that the Hebrew almah means a young woman of marriageable age without specifying virginity, and kept “virgin” in Matthew 1:23, where the Greek word does say it. Critics took the change as an attack on the virgin birth. Copies were burned, and a pamphlet circulated alleging that some committee members had communist sympathies, a charge repeated in a United States Air Force training manual in 1960 and then withdrawn.

There were other objections:

In Psalm 2:11–12 the RSV, adopting a conjectural correction of a difficult Hebrew text, read “kiss his feet” where the King James Version had “Kiss the Son,” a phrase Christians had long read as a reference to Christ.

Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him. (Psalm 2:12, KJV)

In Psalm 45:6 the RSV said “Your divine throne endures for ever,” where older translations addressed the king as “God,” a verse quoted of Christ in Hebrews 1:8.
In Romans 3:25 the RSV used “expiation” (the removal of sin) where the King James Version had “propitiation” (the turning aside of God’s wrath), a choice critics saw as theological.

Defenders replied that each decision followed the best philological evidence of the day, that the committee included respected scholars, and that the New Testament’s interpretation of Old Testament passages was not affected by translating the Old Testament on its own terms.

Despite the controversy, the RSV became the standard Bible of mainline American Protestantism and was widely used in colleges and seminaries. A Catholic edition followed in 1965–66, and an ecumenical “Common Bible” with the Apocrypha in 1973. In 1989 it was succeeded by the New Revised Standard Version (see The NRSV and the NRSVue).

From the RSV to the ESV

Evangelical Protestants largely went elsewhere in the decades after 1952: to the NASB, the NIV and later the NKJV. By the 1990s, however, some evangelical leaders were looking for a translation that would be more literal than the NIV, more readable than the NASB, and free of the gender-inclusive language then being introduced in the NRSV and proposed for the NIV.

The publisher Crossway, a not-for-profit ministry led by Lane T. Dennis, obtained permission from the National Council of Churches to use the 1971 text of the RSV as the starting point. The theologian J. I. Packer served as general editor. A fourteen-member Translation Oversight Committee made the final decisions, assisted by about fifty Translation Review Scholars and an Advisory Council of similar size. The English Standard Version was published in 2001.

The ESV describes itself as ”essentially literal.” Its preface says it seeks “as far as possible” to capture the precise wording of the original and the personal style of each biblical writer, while taking account of differences of grammar and idiom between the languages. The phrase was given wider currency by the literary scholar Leland Ryken, who served on the project, in his book The Word of God in English (2002).

What the ESV changed

By most estimates the ESV changed about six per cent of the RSV’s text. Many changes modernised the English: “thee” and “thou” were dropped, and many of the RSV’s older word orders were made more current. But the changes that attracted most attention reversed the RSV’s controversial decisions.

Isaiah 7:14 reads “the virgin shall conceive,” with a footnote giving “young woman” as an alternative.
Psalm 2:12 returns to “Kiss the Son.”
Psalm 45:6 addresses the king as God: “Your throne, O God.”
Romans 3:25 and 1 John 2:2 use “propitiation,” as the King James Version does.

Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; (Romans 3:25, KJV)

More generally, the ESV follows the Masoretic Hebrew text more closely than the RSV did, and corrects it from other evidence less often.

On gender language, the ESV took a traditional line. It uses “brothers” for adelphoi, with a footnote explaining that the word can refer to brothers and sisters, and generally keeps “man” and “he” in generic statements. Its supporters saw this as faithfulness to the original’s own language; critics saw it as needlessly obscuring who is meant (see Gender language in translation).

Revisions, and a “permanent text”

Like most modern translations, the ESV has been revised in small steps.

2007. A few hundred small changes, mainly to grammar, consistency and clarity.
2011. Changes in about 275 verses, by Crossway’s count fewer than 500 words.
2016. Changes to 52 words in 29 verses.

In August 2016 Crossway announced that the 2016 text would be its ”permanent text,” unchanged for the life of the copyright. The announcement coincided with a contentious change. In Genesis 3:16, where God tells the woman that her desire shall be “for” (2011) her husband, the 2016 edition read “contrary to your husband,” moving into the text a rendering previously given in a footnote. The translators connected it with the very similar wording of Genesis 4:7, where sin’s desire is against Cain. Critics, including several Old Testament scholars, argued that the Hebrew preposition does not usually carry that sense, and that the change read a particular view of the relationship between men and women into the text.

The permanence decision itself was also criticised, on the grounds that no translation can claim to be final. In September 2016, weeks after the announcement, Crossway’s president Lane Dennis issued a statement saying that the decision had been “a mistake” and that the text would remain open to revision.

In 2025 Crossway announced the next revision, by its count 68 changed words in 42 verses, with further changes to footnotes and punctuation. It restored “for your husband” in Genesis 3:16, with “toward” and “against” among the alternatives in a footnote, and changed “but” to “and” in Genesis 3:16 and 4:7 so as not to impose a contrast the Hebrew does not state. It also revised John 1:18, where the Greek combines “God” and monogenes, replacing “the only God” with a rendering that brings out the sense “only Son” (see The one and only Son). Crossway said the new text would be introduced across its editions between 2025 and 2026.

Reach and reception

The ESV has become one of the most widely read English translations, especially among Reformed and other conservative evangelical churches, and is the basis of the ESV Study Bible (2008). An edition with the Apocrypha was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, and a Catholic Edition (ESV-CE), already in use in India, became the text of the new Catholic lectionary for England, Wales and Scotland from Advent 2024.

It has also had its critics. The New Testament scholar Mark Strauss, in a paper given in 2008, argued that the ESV too often keeps awkward or archaic English and that “essentially literal” can obscure meaning instead of preserving it. Others have noted that, as a revision of the RSV, it keeps some of the RSV’s older vocabulary and syntax. Supporters answer that a measure of formality suits public reading and memorisation, and that the ESV’s closeness to the original’s wording is the point.

One text, two traditions

The RSV and the ESV show how much a translation’s base text can survive a change of hands. For most of their length the two read alike; their differences are concentrated in a small number of passages where theology, philology and tradition meet. In those passages a single word can define a translation’s reputation.

That is why Open Word Bible publishes the reasoning behind each sentence, not only the result. Where a verse such as Isaiah 7:14 or Genesis 3:16 has more than one defensible rendering, its record states the options and the grounds for its choice (see Showing the work), so readers need not take any committee’s decision on trust. Its New Testament is translated from the SBL Greek New Testament and its Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. It uses the RSV, ESV and other translations only for comparison, its drafts are AI-assisted and await review by named human reviewers, and it is released under CC0.

Sources

Thuesen, Peter J. In Discordance with the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles over Translating the Bible. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Weigle, Luther A., ed. An Introduction to the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament. International Council of Religious Education, 1946.
“Preface to the Revised Standard Version.” The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version. New York: Thomas Nelson, 1952.
“Preface.” The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton: Crossway, 2001.
Ryken, Leland. The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation. Wheaton: Crossway, 2002.
Strauss, Mark L. “Why the English Standard Version (ESV) Should Not Become the Standard English Version: How to Make a Good Translation Much Better.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2008.
Crossway. “ESV Bible Translation Update.” Crossway, 2025.
Metzger, Bruce M. The Bible in Translation: Ancient and English Versions. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001.
Bible quotations are from the King James Version (public domain); the RSV and ESV are quoted only in short phrases.