The Revised Version or English Revised Version of the Bible is a late 19th-century British revision of the King James Version. It was the first and remains the only officially authorised and recognised revision of the King James Version in Britain. The work was entrusted to over 50 scholars from various denominations in Britain. American scholars were invited to co-operate, by correspondence. The New Testament was published in 1881, the Old Testament in 1885, and the Apocrypha in 1894. The best known of the translation committee members were Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort; their fiercest critic of that period was John William Burgon.
Features
The New Testament revision company was commissioned in 1870 by the convocation of Canterbury. Their stated aim 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." To those ends, the Greek text that was used to translate the New Testament was believed by most to be of higher reliability than the Textus Receptus. The readings used were compiled from a different text of the Greek Testament by Edwin Palmer. While the text of the translation itself is widely regarded as excessively literal and flat, the Revised Version is significant in the history of EnglishBible translation for many reasons. At the time of the RV's publication, the nearly 300-year-old King James Version was the main Protestant English Bible in Victorian England. The RV, therefore, is regarded as the forerunner of the entire modern translation tradition. It was also considered more accurate than the King James Version in a number of verses.
New version
The revisers were charged with introducing alterations only if they were deemed necessary to be more accurate and faithful to the Original Greek and Hebrew texts. In the New Testament alone more than 30,000 changes were made, over 5,000 on the basis of what were considered better Greek manuscripts. The work was begun in 1879, with the entire work completed in 1885. The Revised Version of 1885 was the first post-King James Version modern EnglishBible at the time to gain popular acceptance; and it was used and quoted favorably by ministers, authors, and theologians in the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s, such as Andrew Murray, T. Austin-Sparks, Watchman Nee, H.L. Ellison, F.F. Bruce, and Clarence Larkin, in their works. Other important enhancements introduced in the RV include arrangement of the text into paragraphs, printing Old Testament poetry in indented poetic lines, and the inclusion of marginal notes to alert the reader to variations in wording in ancient manuscripts. In its Apocrypha, the Revised Version became the first printed edition in English to offer the complete text of Second Esdras, inasmuch as damage to one 9th-century manuscript had caused 70 verses to be omitted from previous editions and printed versions, including the King James Version. In the United States, the Revised Version was adapted and revised as the "Revised Version, Standard American Edition" in 1901. The American Standard Version is largely identical to the Revised Version of 1885, with minor variations in wording considered to be slightly more accurate. One noticeable difference is the much more frequent use of the form "Jehovah" in the Old Testament of the American Standard Version, rather than "the " that is used more so in the Revised Version of 1885, to represent the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton. The Revised Version are some of the Bible versions that are authorized to be used in services of the Episcopal Church and also of the Church of England.
Later history
The American Standard Version was the basis for many revisions in the first hundred years after it was released. The RV itself has never been the basis for any revision except for the American Standard Version and the Apocrypha in the Revised Standard Version. As the Revised Version is out of copyright worldwide, it is widely available online and in digital and e-reader formats although it is significantly less popular than the KJV or the ASV in this manner. However, interest in the Revised Version 1885 has grown in recent years due to the internet, for general research and reference, and study of history of English Bible translations. It is sparsely available in printed published form today, with only Cambridge University Press publishing it in the form of a KJV/RV interlinear.
