The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is an English translation of the Bible published in 1952 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. This translation is a revision of the

American Standard Version The American Standard Version (ASV), officially Revised Version, Standard American Edition, is a Bible translation into English that was completed in 1901 with the publication of the revision of the Old Testament. The revised New Testament had ...

(ASV) of 1901, and was intended to be a readable and literally accurate modern English translation which aimed to "preserve all that is best in the English

Bible The Bible is a collection of religious texts that are central to Christianity and Judaism, and esteemed in other Abrahamic religions such as Islam. The Bible is an anthology (a compilation of texts of a variety of forms) originally writt ...

as it has been known and used through the years" and "to put the message of the Bible in simple, enduring words that are worthy to stand in the great Tyndale- King James tradition." The RSV was the first translation of the Bible to make use of the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah, a development considered "revolutionary" in the

academic field An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined (in part) and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, a ...

of biblical scholarship. The New Testament was first published in 1946, the Old Testament in 1952, and the Apocrypha in 1957; the New Testament was revised in 1971. The original '' Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition'' (RSV-CE) was published in 1965–66, and the

deuterocanonical books The deuterocanonical books, meaning 'of, pertaining to, or constituting a second canon', collectively known as the Deuterocanon (DC), are certain books and passages considered to be canonical books of the Old Testament by the Catholic Chur ...

were expanded in 1977. The ''Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition'' (RSV-2CE) was published in 2006. In later years, the RSV served as the basis for two revisions—the

New Revised Standard Version The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) is a translation of the Bible in American English. It was first published in 1989 by the National Council of Churches, the NRSV was created by an ecumenical committee of scholars "comprising about thirt ...

(NRSV) of 1989, and the English Standard Version (ESV) of 2001.

Publication and promotion

The immediate predecessor to the RSV was the

(ASV), published in 1901 by Thomas Nelson & Sons. It was copyrighted to protect the ASV text from unauthorized changes, and that copyright acquired by the International Council of Religious Education, one of the predecessor organizations to the National Council of Churches, which was formed in 1950. In 1928, the Council created a committee charged with creating a new translation based on the ASV, which was considered a somewhat weak and disappointing translation. Luther A. Weigle became its chair and helped find members; the final committee began meeting in 1937 at

Yale Divinity School Yale Divinity School (YDS) is one of the twelve graduate and professional schools of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Congregationalist theological education was the motivation at the founding of Yale, and the professional school has ...

where they did their work. A number of specially bound presentation copies were given to local public officials in the days prior to the general release. One such presentation copy, the very first copy of the RSV Bible to come off the press, was presented by Weigle to an appreciative President

Harry S. Truman Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States, serving from 1945 to 1953. As the 34th vice president in 1945, he assumed the presidency upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt that year. Subsequen ...

on September 26, four days before it was released to the general public. On September 30, 1952, the RSV Bible was released to the general public. The NCC sponsored a celebratory rally in Washington D.C., with representatives of the churches affiliated with it present. A total of 3,418 interdenominational religious gatherings across

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

were held that evening to honor the new version and the translators who made it possible.

Features

There are four key differences between the RSV and its three direct predecessors (the KJV, RV and ASV): # The translators reverted to the KJV and RV's practice of translating the

Tetragrammaton The TetragrammatonPronounced ; ; also known as the Tetragram. is the four-letter Hebrew-language theonym (transliteration, transliterated as YHWH or YHVH), the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. The four Hebrew letters, written and read from ...

, or the Divine Name,

YHWH The TetragrammatonPronounced ; ; also known as the Tetragram. is the four-letter Hebrew-language theonym (transliterated as YHWH or YHVH), the name of God in the Hebrew Bible. The four Hebrew letters, written and read from right to left, a ...

. In accordance with the 1611 and 1885 versions, the RSV translated it as "" or "" (depending on whether the Hebrew of the particular verse was read "

Adonai Judaism has different names given to God in Judaism, God, which are considered sacred: (), (''Adonai'' ), (''El (deity), El'' ), ( ), (''El Shaddai, Shaddai'' ), and ( ); some also include I Am that I Am.This is the formulation of Josep ...

" or "

Elohim ''Elohim'' ( ) is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is plural in form, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly but not always the Go ...

" in Jewish practice), whereas the ASV had translated it "

Jehovah Jehovah () is a Romanization, Latinization of the Hebrew language, Hebrew , one Tiberian vocalization, vocalization of the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), the proper name of the God in Judaism, God of Israel in the Hebrew BibleOld Testament. The Tetr ...

". # A change was made in the usage of second-person pronouns. The KJV, RV and ASV use the pronouns ''

thou The word ''thou'' () is a second-person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in most contexts by the word '' you'', although it remains in use in parts of Northern England and in Scots (). ''Thou' ...

'', ''thee'', ''thy'' and ''thine'' to translate all instances of the second-person singular in the original languages, alongside their associated verb forms (such as ''art'', ''hast'', ''hadst'' and ''didst''). The pronoun ''you'' and its related forms are used in these translations only to translate the plural. In contrast, the RSV uses only the ''you'' forms regardless of number, retaining the older singular ''thou'' forms only in address to God (a fairly common practice for Bible translations until the 1970s). # The RSV is the first direct revision of the KJV to significantly modernize the language used; for example, the verb ending ''-eth'' is replaced by the more contemporary ''-s'' to indicate the third-person singular present, some archaic past tense forms such as ''spake'' and ''sware'' are updated to their modern counterparts (''spoke'' and ''swore''), and the original case distinction between ''ye'' and ''you'' is removed (the latter being favoured in both nominative and objective cases). # For the New Testament, the RSV followed the latest available version of Nestle's Greek text, whereas the RV and ASV had used the Westcott and Hort Greek text, and the KJV had used the ''

Textus receptus The (Latin for 'received text') is the succession of printed Greek New Testament texts starting with Erasmus' ''Novum Instrumentum omne'' (1516) and including the editions of Robert Estienne, Stephanus, Theodore Beza, Beza, the House of Elzevir ...

''.

Reception and controversy

Isaiah 7:14 dispute and impact

The RSV New Testament was well received, but reactions to the Old Testament were varied and not without controversy. Critics claimed that the RSV translators had translated the Old Testament from a non-Christian perspective. Some critics specifically referred to a Jewish viewpoint, pointing to agreements with the 1917 Jewish Publication Society of America Version

Tanakh The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. ''

Harry Orlinsky. Such critics further claimed that other views, including those regarding the New Testament, were not considered. The focus of the controversy was the RSV's translation of the Hebrew word ( ''ʿalmāh'') in Isaiah 7:14 as "young woman." ''Almah'' in Hebrew translates as a young woman of childbearing age who had not had children, and so may or may not be a virgin. The Greek language

Septuagint The Septuagint ( ), sometimes referred to as the Greek Old Testament or The Translation of the Seventy (), and abbreviated as LXX, is the earliest extant Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible from the original Biblical Hebrew. The full Greek ...

written one hundred to three hundred years before Jesus rendered almah as ''parthenos'' (παρθένος), which translates as "virgin", and this is the understanding carried over by Christians. Of the seven appearances of ''ʿalmāh'', the

translates only two of them as ''parthenos'', "virgin" (including Isaiah 7:14). By contrast, the word (''bəṯūlāh'') appears some 50 times, and the Septuagint and English translations agree in understanding the word to mean "virgin" in almost every case. The controversy stemming from this rendering helped reignite the King-James-Only Movement within the Independent Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Furthermore, many Christians have adopted what has come to be known as the "Isaiah 7:14 litmus test", which entails checking that verse to determine whether or not a new translation can be trusted.

Protest

Some opponents of the RSV took their antagonism beyond condemnation. Luther Hux, a pastor in

Rocky Mount, North Carolina Rocky Mount is a city in Nash and Edgecombe counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The city's population was 54,341 as of the 2020 census, making it the 20th-most populous city in North Carolina. The city is east of Raleigh, the st ...

, announced his intention to

burn A burn is an injury to skin, or other tissues, caused by heat, electricity, chemicals, friction, or ionizing radiation (such as sunburn, caused by ultraviolet radiation). Most burns are due to heat from hot fluids (called scalding), soli ...

a copy of the RSV during a sermon on November 30, 1952. This was reported in the press and attracted shocked reactions, as well as a warning from the local fire chief. On the day in question, he delivered a two-hour sermon entitled "The National Council Bible, the Master Stroke of Satan—One of the Devil's Greatest Hoaxes". After ending the sermon, he led the congregation out of the church, gave each worshipper a small American flag and proceeded to set light to the pages containing Isaiah 7:14. Hux informed the gathered press that he did not burn the Bible, but simply the "fraud" that the Isaiah pages represented. Hux later wrote a tract against the RSV entitled ''Modernism's Unholy Bible''. The RSV translators linked these events to the life of

William Tyndale William Tyndale (; sometimes spelled ''Tynsdale'', ''Tindall'', ''Tindill'', ''Tyndall''; – October 1536) was an English Biblical scholar and linguist who became a leading figure in the Protestantism, Protestant Reformation in the year ...

, an inspiration to them, explaining in their preface: "He met bitter opposition. He was accused of willfully perverting the meaning of the Scriptures, and his New Testaments were ordered to be burned as 'untrue translations.'" But where Tyndale was strangled and then burned at the stake for his work,

Bruce Metzger Bruce Manning Metzger (February 9, 1914 – February 13, 2007) was an American biblical scholar, Bible translator and textual critic who was a longtime professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and Bible editor who served on the board of th ...

, referring to the pastor who burned the RSV and sent the ashes to Luther Weigle, commented in his book ''The Bible In Translation'': "today it is happily only a copy of the translation that meets such a fate" instead of Bible translators.

Post-1952 developments

Catholic Edition

In 1965–66, the Catholic Biblical Association adapted, under the editorship of John Archibald Henslowe Orchard O.S.B. and Reginald C. Fuller, the RSV for

Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

use with the release of the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSV-CE). A revised New Testament was published in 1965, followed by a full RSV Catholic Edition Bible in 1966. The RSV Catholic Edition included revisions up through 1962, a small number of new revisions to the New Testament, mostly to return to familiar phrases, and changes to a few footnotes. It contains the

deuterocanonical The deuterocanonical books, meaning 'of, pertaining to, or constituting a second Biblical canon, canon', collectively known as the Deuterocanon (DC), are certain books and passages considered to be Biblical canon, canonical books of the Old ...

books of the Old Testament placed in the traditional order of the

Vulgate The Vulgate () is a late-4th-century Bible translations into Latin, Latin translation of the Bible. It is largely the work of Saint Jerome who, in 382, had been commissioned by Pope Damasus I to revise the Gospels used by the Diocese of ...

Second Edition of the New Testament

Some of these changes to the RSV New Testament had already been introduced in the 1965-66 RSV Catholic Edition, and their introduction into the RSV itself was done to pave the way for the publication of the Common Bible in 1973. The Standard Bible Committee intended to prepare a second edition of the Old Testament, but those plans were scrapped in 1974, when the National Council of Churches voted to authorize a full revision of the RSV.

Common Bible

The ''Common Bible'' of 1973 ordered the books in a way that pleased both

s and

Protestant Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that emphasizes Justification (theology), justification of sinners Sola fide, through faith alone, the teaching that Salvation in Christianity, salvation comes by unmerited Grace in Christianity, divin ...

s. It was divided into four sections: # The Old Testament (39 Books) # The Catholic Deuterocanonical Books (12 Books) # The additional Eastern Orthodox Deuterocanonical Books (three Books; six Books after 1977) # The New Testament (27 Books)

Reader's Digest Bible

In 1982, ''

Reader's Digest ''Reader's Digest'' is an American general-interest family magazine, published ten times a year. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, it is now headquartered in midtown Manhattan. The magazine was founded in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace and his wi ...

'' published a special edition of the RSV that was billed as a condensed edition of the text. A team of seven editors led by John Evangelist Walsh produced the manuscript. The ''Reader's Digest'' edition was intended for those who did not read the Bible or who read it infrequently; it was not intended as a replacement of the full RSV text. In this version, 55% of the Old Testament and 25% of the New Testament were cut. Familiar passages such as the Lord's Prayer, Psalm 23, and the

Ten Commandments The Ten Commandments (), or the Decalogue (from Latin , from Ancient Greek , ), are religious and ethical directives, structured as a covenant document, that, according to the Hebrew Bible, were given by YHWH to Moses. The text of the Ten ...

were retained. For those who wanted the full RSV, ''Reader's Digest'' provided a list of publishers that sold the complete RSV at that time.

Second Catholic Edition

In early 2006, Ignatius Press released the ''Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition'' (RSV-2CE). This second edition removed archaic pronouns (''thee'', ''thou''), and accompanying verb forms (''didst'', ''speakest''), revised passages used in the lectionary according to the Vatican document ''Liturgiam authenticam'', and elevated some passages out of the RSV footnotes when they favored Catholic renderings, such as replacing "young woman" with "virgin" in Isaiah 7:14.

Revisions

New Revised Standard Version

In 1989, the National Council of Churches released a full-scale revision to the RSV called the

(NRSV). It was the first major version to use

gender-neutral language Gender-neutral language or gender-inclusive language is language that avoids reference towards a particular sex or gender. In English, this includes use of nouns that are not gender-specific to refer to roles or professions, formation of phrases i ...

and thus drew more criticism and ire from conservative Christians than did its 1952 predecessor. This criticism largely stemmed from concerns that the modified language obscured phrases in the

Old Testament The Old Testament (OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew and occasionally Aramaic writings by the Isr ...

that could be read as messianic prophecies.

English Standard Version

In 2001, Crossway published the English Standard Version (ESV), its revision of the 1971 text edition of the RSV. In comparison to the RSV, the ESV reverts certain disputed passages to their prior rendering as found in the ASV. Unlike the NRSV, the ESV, depending on the context, prefers to use gender-inclusive language sparingly.

Legacy and use today

When the

(NRSV) was published in 1989, some traditional Christians — both Catholic and Protestant — criticized its wide use of gender-inclusive language. Because of its significance in the development of the English Bible tradition, many publishers and Biblical scholars continue to rely on the RSV tradition in their work, especially when writing for mixed

and

audiences: Moreover, because of its importance to

Anglican Anglicanism, also known as Episcopalianism in some countries, is a Western Christianity, Western Christian tradition which developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the ...

heritage and the English Bible tradition, the '' Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition'' (RSV-2CE) has been approved for liturgical use in Anglican Use Catholic parishes of the U.S. Pastoral Provision and Personal Ordinariates for former Anglicans around the world. The Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

has adopted the RSV-2CE as "the sole lectionary authorized for use" in its liturgies. The RSV is one of the versions authorized to be used in services of the Episcopal Church and the

Anglican Communion The Anglican Communion is a Christian Full communion, communion consisting of the Church of England and other autocephalous national and regional churches in full communion. The archbishop of Canterbury in England acts as a focus of unity, ...

. On January 20, 2017, incoming U.S. President

Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...

took his inaugural oath of office using a copy of the RSV Bible given to him by his mother in 1955 when he graduated from a

Presbyterian Presbyterianism is a historically Reformed Protestant tradition named for its form of church government by representative assemblies of elders, known as "presbyters". Though other Reformed churches are structurally similar, the word ''Pr ...

Sunday School ] A Sunday school, sometimes known as a Sabbath school, is an educational institution, usually Christianity, Christian in character and intended for children or neophytes. Sunday school classes usually precede a Sunday church service and are u ...

Documentaries

In 1999, the National Council of Churches, in association with Odyssey Productions, produced a TV documentary about the making of the RSV — ''The Bible Under Fire''. '' 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted Culture'' was released in 2022, covering how the 1946 creation of the RSV mistranslated Greek words, which resulted in prevailing cultural and religious perceptions of LGBTQ people in the United States.

Notes

References

External links

{{National Council of Churches members 1952 non-fiction books 1952 in Christianity 20th-century Christian texts Bible translations into English