The stated aim of the RV's translators was "to adapt King James' version to the present state of the English language without changing the idiom and vocabulary," and "to adapt it to the present standard of Biblical scholarship." Further, it was to be "the best version possible in the nineteenth century, as King James' version was the best which could be made in the seventeenth century." To those ends, the Greek text used to translate the New Testament was of higher reliability than the Textus Receptus used for the KJV.
While the text of the translation itself is widely regarded as excessively literal and flat, the Revised Version is significant in the history of English Bible translation for many reasons. At the time of the RV's publication, the nearly 300-year old King James Version was still the only viable English Bible in VictorianEngland, and its text was becoming increasingly obsolete. The RV, therefore, is regarded as the forerunner of the entire modern translation tradition. Other important enhancements introduced in the RV include arrangement of the text into paragraphs, printing Old Testament poetry in indented poetic lines (rather than as prose), and the inclusion of marginal notes to alert the reader to variations in wording in ancient manuscripts.
The American Standard Version of 1901, while begun as an American revision of the RV, is largely identical to it, with the most readily noticeable difference being the use of the word Jehovah rather than the traditional "the LORD" to represent the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton.
Nor was there a printed Englishversion, even of the New Testament, for close on half a century after Caxton's death, a circumstance largely due to the energy of the Tudor dictatorship and the severity of the Arundelian Constitutions enacted by Convocation at Oxford in the year 1408:against Wycliffe and his work.
A further revision of this version was carried out by Coverdale for a second edition which appeared in April, 1540, and is known as Cranmer's Bible, mainly from the judicious and earnest preface which the archbishop wrote for it.
The history of the Englishrevision is given at length in the preface to the EnglishRevisedVersion of the New Testament.
The EnglishRevisedVersion of the Bible was published in 1881-1885; and the American Standard Version, its variant embodying the preferences of the American scholars associated in the work, was published in 1901.
The publication of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, was authorized by vote of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. in 1951.
The present revision is based on the consonantal Hebrew and Aramaic text as fixed early in the Christian era and revised by Jewish scholars (the "Masoretes") of the sixth to ninth centuries.
Feeds |
Contact